Love Letters to My Sons

Last year I had this idea that I'd write a letter to my teenage son for his birthday. Okay, I didn't exactly "write" it; I typed it up, printed it, and signed it. But it WAS on a piece of paper.

I realize that these days all too often our communications are lost in an inundation of information--or, as Aldus Huxley would put far more eloquently, "truth [is] drowned in a sea of irrelevance". Our children don't hear us any more--not in the real sense of hearing. They are hearing and seeing too much, from everywhere. It's not that they are consciously or deliberately ignoring us, it's just that what we say is a piece of a million other bits of data presented to them everyday. In that regard, I'm no less guilty than my children; I am a poor listener, too. A while ago, I discovered that it is far more effective to write a message to my children than to tell them verbally. For some reason, words written down carry far more authority and longevity than words spoken. You can't argue with an email. Unfortunately, emails do get lost in the inbox, and at some point, those bytes of data will be forgotten as well.

So I decided that I would write a real letter, just once a year, to remind my children how much I love them. That way, when they get older, they'll be able to look back and have a stack of letters testifying to my love and concern for them over the years. This idea is not new, of course. People in the past have always written to their loved ones and given them encouragement and instructions in this way. Decades, even centuries, later, their offspring can still open those letters and rediscover the thoughts, the emotions, the beliefs and guiding principles of the writers. They'll always have with them something of the person who lived, and not just in the silent personal articles such as a pocket watch or a quilt, but in the form of words and sentences. They'll have preserved a piece of the person's being, who she was, what she loved, and what she lived for. I want my sons to be able to read, in concrete sentences, in pages they can hold in their hands, even decades from now, what I value about them and what I wish for them.

Call me old-fashioned. Call me sentimental. But I think there is something from the past that is worth preserving. Having worked in the computer industry and, in a small way, contributed to the building of the modern information age, I know only too well how transient those bits of data that we call memory are. I still have megabytes of my journal written from ten, twenty years ago, but they are sitting in floppy disks (remember those?) in formats no longer readable by any modern programs. For some reason I can't bring myself to toss them, but they are like burnt-up scrolls that can no longer be read. The same can be said of photographic images. Despite wars, displacement, family tragedies, and moving across continents, my father managed to pass on to me old, faded photographs of his childhood, but I don't know if my great-grandchildren will ever know what people of our generation look like. Do we seriously trust that those JPEG files will last for another fifty years, though we have thousands upon thousands of precious memories stored in our computers?

So here's a token effort at giving a slice of myself to my son. Happy birthday, my beloved boy! Twenty years from now, you may not have this blog to read, but you will have, in your hands, a letter from me.