old letters

I was going through some old papers the other day, and came across an envelope of letters that my family wrote to me during their North Carolina camping trip in 1982. Ruth was 18, Jim was 16. I must have stayed home for some reason. Jim's instructions refer to our computer at the time, a TRS-80 Model III.

The letters are especially precious to me, now that Jim and Mom are gone. The letters from Mom and Ruth both described what they had done on the trip so far, what they planned to do. Ruth's letter included a quick sketch of Jim while he was writing his letter to me (see picture at the top).

Rereading the letter from my brother made me laugh. As you can tell, he was very much into computers even back then:



(click to enlarge)




(click to enlarge)


As I wrote this Blathering and took another look at the images, I realize that I actually did write the sounds that those two commands created; you can see my notes in pencil just under the commands.

Jim and I used to spend hours taking turns reading BASIC programs out loud to each other from computer game magazines and books while the other person typed in the code. We saved the programs on cassette tape (our computer didn't have a floppy drive back then).

It's Jim's birthday next Friday; he would have been 37.

POLL: Do you save snailmail letters or cards? For how long? Are there any you are especially glad to have?

As I carefully reread those letters from my family, I could tell that the paper was already getting brittle, so I scanned everything and saved the images. It still distresses me to think of those letters gradually disintegrating over the years, no matter how carefully I store them.

Then again, I'll be gradually disintegrating over the years, too. :-)

Links:

James Lileks reviewed The Two Towers in his daily journal yesterday (about 1/3 way down the entry). Check out the opening paragraph of his review:

"Saw the Two Towers Friday night; words fail me, etc. Never looked at my watch once. Commanded body to shut down all liquid processing so I wouldn't have to miss anything. Iíve never seen a three-hour movie that made me wish it had been four - but perhaps that disappointment was salved by the knowledge that the special edition DVD will stretch it out to five."

My sentiments exactly.

Terry Tate - Office Linebacker: Watch the Quicktime or Windows Media Player movie. Pretty funny. :-) (warning: strong language, violence) Thanks to Ray for the link.

Jan/2003 comments: Read | Post | LJ