A Natural-Born Letter Writer

by Chris King

Why Write a Letter?" As a boy I won a national essay contest on that topic. It seemed rigged from the start. The contest's sponsor, the U.S. Postal Service, was clearly acting in self-interest, getting school kids to promote its business. And as for me, I was born to answer that question. I loved to write letters. It was like they handed me the prize.

At the time, my winning answer, more or less, was: "Write a letter for the response." The Postal Service must have loved that, since responses to letters multiply its profits. I still like a return letter, and feel cheated when one doesn't come. Today, however, I would answer that question differently in more ways than one: I have a different answer and a different way of answering.

Twenty years have elapsed since I took home the Postal Service's trophy, and for most of that time I have been travelling as a musician and journalist. When travel becomes, not a departure from your daily life-a "getaway," as we say in the tourism biz-but a basic fact of life, then writing letters takes on new importance. When your return address is an apartment that you won't be seeing for awhile, you don't write a letter for a response. Of course, you write to document your travels, but there is something more to it.

Writing from the road to those who have stayed in place brings them with you. The person you are addressing becomes your imaginary companion at the diner far from home or on the plane high above the earth. At the same time, your transient location, the diner you will never see again, the flight that will change its number at the next airport, becomes more real and fixed for you. "I'm writing from this greasy spoon in Hendersonville, Kentucky." "I'm on Alitalia Flight 228 between Milan and Accra. I can see Africa from 30,000 feet."

Why write a letter? Because it forces you to pause in flux and make a reckoning of your self and your surroundings.

The telephone (one of the inspirations for the Postal Service's contest, no doubt) at first intensified this contact across distances, and then degraded it. How weird to be so far away from you and yet hear your voice, plain as day-and how easy it is to fall back on droll chatter. The mystery of the page, the alchemy of the written word, gives way to small talk. We traded a postmark, with its tangible evidence of otherness and elsewhere, for the soulless numbers on a caller ID.

Why write a letter, when you can just pick up a phone?

Some of us natural-born letter writers never lost the habit. Almost everyone else was revived by e-mail. And, of course, the boy who kept the Postal Service in business became an over-the-road e-mail addict, burning up the Internet from borrowed computers in the far-flung houses where I crashed.

E-mail's ease of access-and dramatically spiked rate of response!-had to face a few discouraging factors. I lost that communion with transient spaces, that ability to smooth out a piece of paper on a bar top and start describing the mood of the tavern to the boys back home.

And then came my new traveling companion, my virtual mailman, Gizmo.

Gizmo-his actual, and rather pompous, name is "The Composer"-is a little rig about as long and wide as a checkbook, and not much thicker than a pair of full lips. He has a keyboard and screen and the capacity to save messages. Once you have composed and saved your letters, you flip up the speaker on Gizmo's back, dial a 1-800 number, and over the phone line Gizmo communicates with servers at www.pocketmail.com. After a period of admittedly ugly blips and hissing, your letters fly into e-mail inboxes, and responses pour into Gizmo, ready to be read.

I still feel nervous when I'm running out of stamps, but Gizmo is my mainline now, my new way of writing letters, and he sits nicely on a diner countertop or an airplane seat's tray table.

Gizmo is a marriage of all the best techniques for overcoming distance between people by composing prose. He is as portable (and wireless) as a postcard, and as instant as e-mail, once I find a phone. So I was walking down a street in Philadelphia, typing in Gizmo as I walked: "Dear Toots" (my mom), "I am walking down a street in Philadelphia. I just saw a tumor that was cut from President Grover Cleveland's jaw." I had something to write home to mom about, and a good way to write it. Why not write a letter?