Snail Mail from an Inland Valley Daily Bulletin Reader

What a wonderful surprise to find this delightful card in my mailbox! She wrote in response to my December 12, 2021 column titled “Writing Someone a Letter Would Be the Gift of a Lifetime.”

The writer shared her lifelong enjoyment of corresponding with “Pen Friends.” She remarkably maintains correspondence with twenty people around the world.

She spends an hour-and-a-half to two hours writing each letter with a BIC pen, whose six-sided barrel she praises for its non-slip grip. Her immaculate penmanship supports her claim.

What a pleasure to connect with someone who enjoys my love for correspondence! I hope she will let me join her global group of Pen Friends.

I will definitely treasure her letter to me as a gift!

Note: Her stationary is designed by Yoshiko Yamamoto and printed by the Arts & Crafts Press.

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Playing with My Christmas Presents

I received a letter-S sealing stamp along with an assortment of sealing wax cubes and a sealing wax melting spoon and stand for Christmas.

I had fun trying different colors and experimenting to see how many cubes I needed to make a well-rounded seal.

My letter-S stamp is rather large. I found four cubes to be the number I needed. I also found it effective to make a circle the size I needed for the stamp and to fill the center before pressing with the seal.

I have a lot to learn about wax sealing letters, but I am having fun along the way!

Colorable Postcards to Spark a Child’s Learning

I was so excited when I discovered this box of 50 colorable postcards. I thought our family could send a different card to my great-niece once a week. What a great way to engage a young mind with nature and the joys of learning and corresponding! Our only disappointment is all fifty cards are not different. There appears to be two of each. I will have to find some other animal postcards to send alternately.

Making Envelopes

I found a fun set of six envelope templates at Michaels this week. I don’t think I have made my own envelopes since I created some from magazine pages when we regularly corresponded as part of our long-distance relationship.

My wife gave me a sheet of scrapbook paper to use tonight. I am going to repurpose some old New Yorker pages over vacation to make some more envelopes.

Keeping My Letters Neat

To keep my margins straight as I hand write a letter, I use an under-sheet that I created on my computer with a bold-lined frame. To help me find my centerline, I use a folded sheet of stationary overlapping from the right-hand side. These two simple tricks keep my letters neat.

My folded sheet, under sheet, and letter-in-progress spread apart.
My left hand firmly holds the stationary overtop the under sheet while I write.

One Man at a Women’s Club

Over thirty women filled the luncheon tables of the Beaumont Women’s Club on Sixth Street when I arrived.  “Would you help us with an extra table?” asked Ruth Jennings, the Program Secretary of the Club.  Getting put to work, I immediately felt like I was at a family event where the men had all escaped to another room.

A few weeks earlier, Mrs. Jennings had written me a beautiful handwritten letter in response to my Inlandia Literary Journeys column, The Lost Art of Letter Writing. She had invited me to join Cati Porter, Executive Director of the Inlandia Institute, to discuss the work of Inlandia and share some of our poems.  Written on gray cotton stationary, Mrs. Jenning’s formally formatted letter described her own remarkable personal letter collection, including letters written by relatives describing scenes of the American Civil War and the funeral parade of President Garfield in 1881.

Although in my childhood my grandmother Margaret Stone was a longstanding member of the Waverly Women’s Club in Pennsylvania, and my mother, a housekeeper, had been paid to wash the dishes for that group’s meetings, I had never been privileged to view the proceedings of any of their meetings.

When the women in Beaumont stood to start their meeting by saying the pledge to the American flag as I brought in the last of the extra chairs they had asked me to retrieve from the hall closet, I paused in the door and placed my hand over my heart, feeling like a kid in school.  I quickly joined Cati Porter at our back table in time to listen to the women recite the Women’s Club Pledge as they held hands.  At first I felt compelled to join the women in committing to virtue and service, but hearing my own lower voice, I fell silent and scanned the room.  The youngest were middle-aged like myself.  The oldest, Blanche B. Fries, sat directly in front of me.  At a hundred years old, she told me she still teaches piano lessons to children.  She has five students.

President Joan Marie Patsky, chairing the meeting from a podium at the front, encouraged members to pass a clear plastic jug and give “Pennies for Pines.”  A thoughtful member told me of the Club’s service project, how they collect money to purchase property and to plant trees.  I followed the example of most of the members and emptied my wallet of some green bills and not copper.  A container for a fifty-fifty raffle soon followed.  One lucky member takes home half the pot, and the Club earns the rest.  They asked Cati to draw the ticket for the day.  The winner shouted when she determined she held the winning ticket.

Cati and I filed to the back of the room to pick up one of the antique clear glass luncheon plates with a corner raised ring to stabilize a cup.  Disappointingly, no matching glass cups were set out for this meeting.  I have never dined with that form of dinnerware.

Stretched over several tables were finger sandwiches, deviled eggs, crudités, sweet breads, and fresh fruit.  Back at the table, I pleasantly startled myself as I ate what I thought was a pitted natural olive, but turned out to be a homemade chocolate.  I enjoyed the sweet treat just before I stood up to speak.

President Patsky introduced Cati and I to the members.  Cati described the mission of the Inlandia Institute to promote literary activity in the Inland Empire region of California through writing workshops, readings, and the publishing of books through Heyday Books and more recently under the Institute’s own imprint.  She announced the inaugural Hillary Gravendyk Poetry Book Prize.    Cati read a poem from her book Seven Floors Up inspired by a sticker that came home with her son one day, “Caution Please Do Not Turn The Head Forcefully.”

Inspired by the fine penmanship in Ruth Jenning’s letter of invitation, I began my portion of the program with “If We Stop Teaching Cursive” and “Reading Time.”

Attempting to highlight the range of Inlandia publications, I read several of my poems from the 2013 Writing from Inlandia:   “On Seeing the Cost of Time Change,” “Riding the Flexible Flyer,” and “A Dammed Life.”  I displayed broadside prints for each of these poems with the block print illustrations I had created.

From Orangelandia:  The Literature of Inland Citrus, I read “Wishing for a Ladder” and “Redlands Sunset.”  From Inlandia: A Literary Journey, the official online literary journal of the Inlandia Institute, I read “Creosote,” and “A Rare Night Air.”

I closed with “Two Eggs,” “My Father’s Amputation on Tuesday,” and “My Top Drawer.”

The members asked Cati and I numerous questions about Inlandia and the topics brought up in my poems.  They also spent several minutes in animated discussion of Timothy Green’s Inlandia Literary Journeys column “Poe and Poetic Discovery.”

More than thirty years after my mother had shooed me out of the kitchen at the Waverly Community House and told me a Women’s Club meeting was no place for a boy, I decided it was a great place for a man to visit.

The Letter that Made Me Write

My mother’s failure to write me for three months after she had written me regularly for over thirty years scared me.  I feared I had received my last letter from her.  My Inlandia Literary Journeys column this Sunday, December 14th in the Press Enterprise came from my personal reflections and research into the world concern about the decline in personal letter writing.