Postcards

It seems old-fashioned but I don't care. When you're on a trip you send postcards to family and friends. Who gets a hand-written message these days? It's so much easier to send a text or even call.

Remember when calling Mom on Mother's Day from France cost enough to constitute a gift? Those days are gone. Thirty-five bucks gets you unlimited calling for ten days. So, postcards?

Back before we had email and even into that era we kept in touch by postcards. My friends and I wrote cramped deep messages or jokes or guess who I ran into in Kyoto or did you see that Thelonious Monk has died. Easily a thousand a decade. Most got delivered, but I'm still waiting for one from Tehran just before the Shah fell.

Postcards are easy to find. Even the public library has them: for sale, not just for checkout. Museums, too.

Stamps are another matter. The hotel desk described a store nearby that sold them. International postcard postage is two Euros, and I never found the store. And I never saw a mailbox, or post office. The cards got carried home. Mailboxes can be hard to find, but there's one at the supermarket at end of my block. Sorry friends, I promise that I wrote them there but couldn't mail them until here.

As for craft: postcards are a form of writing, with constraints and rules, open for anyone who comes across them to read. Perhaps sidewalk chalk is a good analogy. But they're bespoke: I took up my pen and wrote your name and your address and asked for your ZIP code last time we met.

Alas, I did not have the energy for bespoke messages, so you got one of two, with minor tweaks:

"Amsterdam: Water, water, every where, Nor any drop to drink, unless you shell out two euros for a tiny bottle"

or

"Amsterdam: Frites with war sauce [oorlog], satay and mayo. Conqueror and conqueree"

I had to have two because I have two kids and didn't want to send them the same thing.

I've been sending more postcards lately. It's kind of an anti-AI thing and it's personal and it's outside the world of broadcast publishing. If I put a (short) poem on a postcard it doesn't count as published so I can submit it again.

That is, if I make a cop

y of it before dropping it into the mail.