{"id":74111,"date":"2014-07-17T15:55:40","date_gmt":"2014-07-17T19:55:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=74111"},"modified":"2014-07-17T15:55:40","modified_gmt":"2014-07-17T19:55:40","slug":"thinking-of-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/07\/17\/thinking-of-you\/","title":{"rendered":"Thinking of You"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Doubling_Point_Light,_Arrowsic,_ME\"<\/a>

A postcard from Maine. Photo via Wikimedia Commons<\/p><\/div>\n

When I was thirteen, and my dear friend Laura went on a teen hiking tour of the British Isles, I wrote her religiously. Letters, yes, but cards, too. I was stationary in New York, but I had found a lot of vintage postcards somewhere ,and sent a pair of fictional spinsters around the country on an imaginary road trip; each card chronicled their increasingly lurid and ridiculous adventures. One of the sisters proved man-crazy, the other developed a gambling addiction in Reno. When Laura transferred to a boarding school in Wales, their adventures continued.<\/p>\n

Nowadays, that doesn\u2019t seem like that big a deal. People are always sending Flat Stanleys and toys and gnomes around the world; you can download a template right from the Internet. Nothing new under the sun, I guess, but I loved having that imaginative connection to a friend across the world.<\/p>\n

Now, as a grownup on vacation, I\u2019m sitting here with a pile of postcards in front of me, wondering what to do about it. What, after all, is a postcard? In the age of e-mail and Instagram and Twitter, it\u2019s a self-conscious anachronism. When you read an old postcard, their messages\u2014in that spindly, legible, Palmer-script hand\u2014are often strikingly banal. People really do say \u201cwish you were here,\u201d without embarrassment, and talk about the weather. With traditional postcards, the thought is<\/em> what counts; these were, by and large, generic images bearing the most impersonal of greetings. <\/p>\n

The modern postcard, paradoxically, takes some work. One must find stamps and mailboxes. And addresses are a problem: they are specific and important and not usually very close-at-hand. And there are few things more anticlimactic than having to secure someone\u2019s address before surprising them with a mailing.<\/p>\n

We still like to be thought of; of course we do. But now, an earnest view and a few inanities wouldn\u2019t cut it. There has to be some element of self-conscious irony; the deliberate cheesiness of a classic vista, the weirdness of a subject, the cheery \u201cwish you were here\u201d sent from a site of carnage or tragedy.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I owe that dear friend a letter. I owe her much more than that. A dozen times I have started an e-mail, but I have never had the nerve to write. But being up here in Maine, where we first met\u2014we both had A Tree Grows in Brooklyn<\/em> on the shelves over our bunks at camp\u2014I think of her all the time.<\/p>\n

Perhaps that is the point, after all. Maybe I can re-animate those adventures. Maybe, sometimes, \u201cWish You Were Here\u201d is actually enough.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I was thirteen, and my dear friend Laura went on a teen hiking tour of the British Isles, I wrote her religiously. Letters, yes, but cards, too. I was stationary in New York, but I had found a lot of vintage postcards somewhere ,and sent a pair of fictional spinsters around the country on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":178,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13115],"tags":[5733,512,14652,959,14651,13612,14650],"class_list":["post-74111","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-our-daily-correspondent","tag-correspondence-2","tag-irony","tag-letter-writing","tag-maine","tag-personal-history","tag-postcards","tag-vacations"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThinking of You<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Sadie Stein on the postcard in the modern age.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/07\/17\/thinking-of-you\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Thinking of You by Sadie Stein\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"July 17, 2014 \u2013 When I was thirteen, and my dear friend Laura went on a teen hiking tour of the British Isles, I wrote her religiously. 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