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My husband and I went to our son's reading tournament last week. The kids competing in the event sat in two groups on the floor in the center of the room, leaving parents, siblings and grandparents to find seats in the student desks shoved in a tight and hazardous bunch at the room's perimeter. To my immediate left, a woman played a gambling game on her iPhone, sharp red fingernails stabbing at the screen to stop the wheels from spinning, hopefully revealing a lucky combination of cherries or apples or the number seven.

To my right and a bit forward, something much more interesting was going on: There was a man with a bushy grey beard and long silver hair spilling down his back and onto the black windbreaker he wore. The windbreaker was adorned with the name of a local boxing group and a pair of red laced-up gloves. The man wore a baseball cap and reading glasses. He held a yellow mechanical pencil in his right hand. In his left, he held a letter, tri-folded and opened and closed many times. It was written on both sides of two sheets of unlined paper in neat rows straight as the rows of peas and carrots and green beans my father marks in his garden every spring.

The man looked at his letter, stroked his beard, then added a line to his own letter, composed on a small tablet. His pencil scratched and paused. Scratched and paused, every word weighed and considered before being added to the paper. The man set the pencil down. He clapped as a student correctly responded to a question. He unfolded the letter and examined it. He picked up his pencil and pushed on the eraser to send out more lead before continuing.

I wondered about the content of those letters. I tried in vain to read them. I wondered what type of person takes the time to write a letter these days.




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