Letter Writing

I had been writing to penfriends ever since I was a young teenager, in the 1950s and 60s. I remember Sammy Quayne Lartey from Ghana, West Africa. He sent me a picture of himself dressed in tribal costume. We corresponded for awhile but the interest diminished with the passing of time. Another penpal, Austin Thomas from Kerala in southern India wrote my name in his language (Malayalam). Since their script is different from ours, I traced it as a signature when I answered his letter. He wondered how I knew the language. He must have forgotten what he wrote in the last letter. I suppose I remember their names since they were some of the first foreign penpals I corresponded with.

It was in the 1980s I engaged in letter writing in earnest, especially after I had written letters to a lady in Missouri. I had answered an ad in a country magazine to write to her since she had a list of shut-ins who desired to have penpals. She sent the list and I engaged in correspondence with a couple of them but my main correspondence was with her. I don’t even remember her name, but she said she was Catholic, she had a four-year-old granddaughter who was blind, and her husband had leukemia. We wrote back and forth for awhile, describing subjects of mutual interest, and some of the daily goings-on that letter writers are apt to include.

That correspondence gradually died and it was almost a year when I became aware of it. Since our correspondence had been quite interesting I felt that something must have happened. I didn’t know what would be wrong, but since her husband had leukemia, I felt that there might be something that changed for her.

I wrote a letter, aimed at the idea of something needing prayerful attention. I included the words of a song we used to sing at our church:

Be still and know that I am God,
Be still and know I’m He;
On mountaintop, in valley green, above the sky and sea.
Exalted I shall ever be, between the cherubim and thee;
I’ll guide thee, and keep thee, eternally.

A couple weeks later I got a letter from her, written in shaky handwriting. She informed me that her granddaughter had died, and her husband had passed away. She also said that, when she was in the waiting room at the hospital, when her husband was in ICU, friends tried to console her, but all she could think of was “Be still and know that I am God” taken from Psalm 46:10.

I wrote back words of condolence. She wrote back and said that she would no longer be involved with the shut-in list, and that she would not write letters anymore, but that she would count me as one of her dear friends.

This interchange inspired me to keep writing letters to others around the world. I found penpal lists, subscribed to The Letter Exchange, and generally found people all over the world with varying interests.

A woman in Berlin, Germany, was interested in the Pennsylvania German culture I described. For a while we had an argument about the origin of "Pennsylvania Dutch". She insisted it was "Hollandisch". I gave her a history of the emigration of Germans to Pennsylvania in the 1700s. At one time the language of Pennsylvania was largely German.I also sent her an Easter poem from The Budget, a Mennonite/Amish newspaper published in Sugarcreek, Ohio, which usually has something written in Pennsylvania German. She sent it back with a translation into High German. She told me the poem sounded like “Sachsich”, either the Upper or Low Saxon dialects. She also said that she doesn’t believe in Easter because she is atheist. One time I wrote to her and I didn’t get a letter for several weeks. She told me that my letter came to her with “Melbourne, Australia” stamped on the back. All in all, we had interesting correspondence and discussions about our differing cultures.

Back in the early pioneering days Pennsylvania was populated with mostly German immigrants and English was hardly heard anywhere. One day a Dutchman was hunting deer in the Lebanon County hills when he grew tired and lay down to rest awhile. He dozed off but suddenly awoke to see an Indian there by him with bow drawn and the arrow pointed at his heart. The Dutchman raised his hands in fright and exclaimed, "Sheess net, sheess net!" (don't shoot). Surprised, the Indian lowered his bow and replied, "O, kennst du aw deitch?" (do you also know German). My cousin told me this joke.

One lady from Taiwan was interested in me personally. I was not really ready for that, although I had thoughts of raising money for a trip to Taiwan, but after awhile that correspondence faded away. She was a teacher and she was very informative about her Chinese history. Her father had worked for the Chinese government and when the Communists took over in 1949, he and his family fled to Taiwan, like a lot of others at the time. She also wrote my name in Chinese, delineating the strokes in detail in writing the Chinese characters. I answered the letter and signed it with my name in Chinese characters.

My motive for writing was to gain more understanding of the world around me. I had been alone much of the time, and was interested in spreading my wings a bit, to be more sociable. What better way than to launch out into the world by writing to others who may have the same interests, or gain more knowledge by letting them describe their different points of view.