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Letter Writing, letter writing, Letters from former students, Memoir, Prince of Tides, Reading, Teacher Appreciation Week, Teaching, Thank a teacher, Writing
The 74-year old man in black still sounds like the Robert Plant in your memory … the one who never failed to hit the paint-peeling high notes on a Led Zeppelin classic, the one who belongs up there on a Mount Rushmore of rock and roll frontmen.
A sold-out crowd at the University of Arizona’s Centennial Hall is on its feet by the end of a revamped ‘Rock and Roll, and then a kind of hush as Plant leans into “Please Read The Letter.” It’s a slow-burn of a song that hints at infidelity and mistakes that can’t be fixed. It’s also a song about the way we used to set words down on a page. With intention. It’s a song about making sure that what must be said is said —and heard. Goodbye. I’m sorry. I miss you. Thank you.
Written by Robert Plant and Jimmy Page in 1997, the song transports me back to a time before emails and emojis and texts and Tweets, a time when letters helped close the distance between us. Requiring a little more labor from us, a little more time to shape our news, one sentence a time, with the best words available to us, letters forced us to slow down even as the world around us spun at increasing velocity.
I miss them and all that Simon Garfield says we’ve lost by relinquishing “the post, the envelope, a pen, a slower cerebral whirring, the use of the whole of our hands and not just the tips of our fingers.” I miss walking out to a red brick mailbox, to find a red, white and blue trimmed letter that was its own envelope, light as onion-skin, marked By Air Mail – Par Avion. I marveled at the journey of such a fragile thing, imagining all the hands it passed through on its way to me from a red pillar box in a rainy Northern Ireland village all the way over the Atlantic Ocean and on to the Arizona desert. I miss the creases and ink-smudges; the tea-stained ring of my mother’s cup; and, the barely-there fragrance of her soap.
Like remastered Zeppelin records in the 21st century, letter writing will maybe a comeback …
Against the beat of a steady snare drum, Robert Plant takes me back. With exquisite harmonies and an unexpected fiddle solo from Alison Krauss, I find myself sitting down to read a letter …
While sorting through papers one evening, de-cluttering and discarding, I found folded in four between a hand-made card and a letter of recommendation from a former supervisor, a letter from a former student. I’m embarrassed to admit I do not remember the woman who took the time to explain in writing her decision to withdraw from my Introduction to World Literature class, nor do I recall how I received her letter. Had she turned it in with an assignment? I don’t know. I don’t even know her full name. I’m guessing that in her effort to explain herself on just one side of the note-book paper, she had to tightly position her signature—Carol F.— in the bottom right corner – diminutive and different from the great loops of flowing cursive that had preceded it.
I never saw Carol F. again. Almost a quarter of a century later, I want her to know I read the letter and that I appreciate it.
9.17.1999
Dear Ms. W.
I wanted to write you a note to tell you how very much I have enjoyed your class. You are a delight and a terrific teacher. We have just learned that my mom has cancer, and it is in the brain, lung, and bones. We don’t have much time, and I need every minute I have to be with her. I remember you saying that your mom is your best friend – it is the same with me – and I hardly know how I can get through life without her.
I wanted you to know also, that because her eyesight has been going – and she has always been an avid reader (and all the zillions of stories she read to us . . . do you know of the poem, “You may have riches and gold – but I had a mother that read to me . . . “?) She has been so frustrated not being able to read, so I have been reading to her. I read her “My Oedipus Complex,” and oh, how we giggled – I told her that I wish she could have heard you read it, with that slight, but wonderful Irish accent! So I was especially glad to have O’Connor’s other story – “First Confession” that you handed out. We call them his ‘little boy stories’ – and they have brought her smiles. The Oedpius Complex was especially wonderful, because my father was a pilot in the Army, and was in Korea and WWII so – she with 3 boys (and 2 girls) could certain relate to ‘Daddy’ coming home and the competition for her attention.
Isn’t it strange – I bet you don’t think about the ways you touch other lives – but you have added something beautiful to ours, when we most needed it. I will in time retake this course – so I will be looking for YOUR class.
Thank you,
Carol F.
