I don't know how the thousands of postcards ended up there and for sale--perhaps auctioning off the estate of a deceased relative, hoping to liquidate anything of value. Today most would consider reading another's personal correspondence a brazen violation of privacy. We hide it all in deeply encrypted, password-protected, electronic vaults, and heaven knows what will become of it should we pass away.
I feel differently about personal correspondence, at least I like to think I do. Almost four months ago I sailed down the Pacific coast of Baja, California with several friends. Reaching the end of our journey in Cabo San Lucas, a friend and I went up to surf in Todos Santos, and camped out for the night. In the morning my backpack, along with everything in it, had disappeared from my side. The first thing I thought of was my journal and the nine months of daily musings in it, as well as two letters I'd written to friends during the journey but not yet had time to mail.
Oddly, I felt sick at the idea of the loss, not chiefly because my journal was gone, but because nobody was ever likely to read it, in a place where English speakers were relatively few. I imagined it in a trash can somewhere rotting, and just found myself praying it wouldn't be a total waste, that something good would come of it.
I used to think I journal daily for my own benefit, but I began to realize I write for posterity--for the unknown later generations, hopefully mine but perhaps completely unrelated to me. Yes, I write about many intensely personal things, but who am I to clutch them so tightly as my own? An intricate web of circumstance and relationship connects me inextricably to the beautiful, tragic, mysterious world around me.
Several weeks ago an artist from Canada who had a house in Baja contacted me through my photography website and asked if I had lost a journal. Someone left it on a rock in her driveway. I had given up all hope of ever finding the journal again, because I hadn't even put my own name in it, let alone any contact info. But apparently on one of the pages I had affixed a name tag from some special event I had attended, and my name not being a very common one, this woman eventually succeeded in tracking me down.
When I received the package in the mail, she had slipped between the pages an original watercolor of the glorious desert mountains in Mexico she passed by on her long drive back north. I found myself thumbing through the old familiar pages, kind of hoping this stranger had perused some of them, and maybe even resonated with something I wrote. I doubt I will ever meet her, but perhaps that anonymity lends ease to our longing to be known. Perhaps that's why blogs exist at all.
In any case, I felt little compunction looking through the postcards at the antique store in Maryland, and choosing some to take home and muse upon. A Lake Como landscape from a college student to his professor, probably at Dartmouth. Someone's first trip on a ship to Copenhagen. A daughter writing to her mother from a cabin in the mountains, discussing flowers, and worrying about something ailing her father.
I came across this wonderful article about the endangered species of handwriting. Maybe we feel safer and happier with our correspondence locked away in virtual fortresses, though even there rumors buzz over who's being allowed into them and for what reasons. I'm obviously not one to worry too terribly much about my correspondence being read either way. But I like to think about how much we have benefited from yellowed, inky letters and manuscripts, both published and unpublished, famous and obscure.
When I am long gone, I hope a little treasure trove of letters, postcards, journals, ideas, and paintings seeps out through that tangled web of relationships and inspires more of the same among loved ones and strangers.
