THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, October 2, 1994 TAG: 9409290198
SECTION: CAROLINA COAST PAGE: 04 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: Coastwise
SOURCE: Ford Reid
LENGTH: Medium: 62 lines
A friend once accused me of having been born in the wrong century.
``I can just see you sitting with a quill pen,'' she said, ``writing letters by the light of an oil lamp.''
It is, of course, not true that I am that old fashioned. I am, after all, writing this on a computer and after I am finished I will send it to the office by way of a modem.
What happens to it after that, that is how it gets to where you are reading it now, is a mystery that does not concern me. I am sure that it involves all sorts of marvels of modern technology and I am all in favor of it.
However, I do hate to see some of the old fashioned things disappearing. The human voice, for instance. So called ``voice mail'' is more an abomination than a nuisance.
``Have your machine call my machine,'' which was once a joke, is now a reality. People can - and do - do all sorts of business without ever talking to each other. I leave a message for you, you leave a message for me, we act on each other's messages and so it goes.
It's a message mess.
I mourn, too, the lost art of letter writing.
There is something very special about a letter. You might carry the memory of a telephone call around in your head for awhile, but a letter you can carry around in your pocket, taking it out from time to time to read again and again.
The next best thing is a postcard, a sort of mini-letter with the added attraction of a nice color picture or maybe a humorous drawing on the other side.
One of the great things about postcards is that there isn't much room to write. It allows you to keep in touch even when you don't have very much to say.
I send a lot of postcards. My list keeps growing and I feel obligated to send one to everybody on it each time I go out of town. I'm not compulsive, you understand, it's simply that it makes me anxious if I don't do it.
The trouble is that when the list hit about 50 names I began to spend entire vacations writing postcards. There was no time to fish, not time to hike, no time to nap in the shade, no time for anything except writing postcards. It became a chore instead of a joy.
So I came up with a solution. I had a rubber stamp made. It says:
``Having a wonderful time. Weather is fine. Wish you were here. Warmest personal regards,
Bryan Moss
Ford Reid
Frank Kimmel''
The other names belong to friends who sometimes borrow the stamp. You simply cross out the names that do not apply to the particular postcard.
It says everything that you could want to say on a postcard and it does it quickly, efficiently. With the stamp, I can knock out 50 postcards in an hour or so and be on with my vacation.
And they say I'm not modern. by CNB