For years, I have enjoyed collecting postcards and sending postcards. While teaching in the classroom, I would open every first week of school with a lesson on “tangible evidence.” I asked how many students kept a journal or diary. Not many. I asked how many had received a really special text message and many hands rose. “Well, where is that message now?” For some, they still had it, but for others, the message had been erased if it was over a year with most cell phones. 

I told them, “Sometimes I write down sentimental texts in my journal!” Even photographs are lost in the big I-Cloud in the sky. Many students do not even know how to address a letter or postcard. So, we make and send postcards, and they enjoy this project.

So many postcards that I have collected, and I do send postcards. This postcard on the left I bought in Paris. It is one of the gargoyles on the Cathedral Notre Dame. I love it!

New York journalist, Guy Trebay wrote: “Historians of Facebook and Twitter will be left to scrounge around the Internet for the fugitive relics of the present communication age.” Do you believe that?

This postcard is favorite of mine especially for an English teacher. How many people still know how to diagram? Or even know what diagramming is?

Claire Messud, a writer, posits that “Things we write down are the fragments shored against our ruins. They outlast us, these scraps of words on paper…writing leaves behind a visceral sense of what it was like to be alive on the planet in a particular time. Writing tells us what it means for someone to be human.” And the famous diarist Samuel Pepys said to record the weather, mention the sights, and the price of things.

Save those words that come from others in a journal, so others who come after us do not have to scrounge to know us. And send postcards. We need more tangible evidence of our existence. Write On!