Postcard from Chris

In late 2021 I began sending out emails with a subject line “Postcard from Chris”. The days are long gone when I used mail-merge to issue printed letters to some 500 people on my client/prospect/personal list. Two years ago I deleted the folder “Clients” and with that megabytes of VBA code written for paying customers. The database of contacts and prospects went with it. Now I am restricted to a database of records that is essentially personal acquaintances, for some of whom I still do computerized tasks.

For the past thirty years I have sent out a multi-page Christmas letter, printed, later emailed, and received similar letters. For me this was a guilt-plagued issue because I procrastinate and my Christmas card and snow-pictured card would go out as late as July or, as one snide remark had it, “was five months ahead of everyone else”. I remember Missoula (“A River Runs Through It”) mainly for New Years Eve in a family restaurant with an eight-year old asking his mother “why that man had so many envelopes”. I was signing furiously to beat the midnight deadline. I had purchased 500 US stamps, USA postage being cheaper than Canada and had just learned that US postal rates went up at midnight rendering my stamps insufficient, and the US post offices were closed so I could not purchase 500 2¢ stamps. I was faced with throwing away 500 30¢ stamps or incurring the wrath of my contacts. I never returned to Missoula.

Fast-forward to Garrison Keillor’s book “We are Still Married”, written in the early 80s, and the short essay on postcards, praising the value of a short message describing one aspect of today’s life, the traditional one being “Having a lovely time in Bonavista; wish you were here”.

I thought about this, and that had I mailed cardboard postcards with a 10¢ stamp (remember them?!!) over the years, I might not have lost touch with some high-school friends and teachers, colleagues, friends and so on. Of course most contacts would have withered as they do.

Then two months ago I started a trial. I wanted to know how it would feel if, instead of an annual letter hanging over my head, I issued each week just one postcard to one acquaintance. It need be only two hundred words, tops, but over the years it would present a good idea of my life (“I have bought a house in Bonavista”). There would be no pressure to reply. Who replies to a postcard with “We can be in Skegness by Thursday”? But a reply, when it came, could be read, savoured and responded to within, say, a month. Such exchanges would sink into the sand like the Colorado river until the person’s name came around on the roster.

Indeed, since about 2005 I have been doing that with one correspondent, I just didn’t call it a postcard. David or I would issue an email with a question, there would follow a flurry of exchanges, perhaps a dozen emails in all, growing shorter, then silence would (and does) reign for three months or so, when either one of us would wake up and issue a question or comment on a different topic.

I have a basic idea about timing:-

(1) Alongside my desk is a paper-and-pencil list with 13 (now 14) (Oct 2022 now 20) names which I work through in sequence starting a new postcard as required. Nobody is overlooked.

(2) Once I have issued a postcard I am off the hook for a week. This means that I will emit about four postcards a year to each person.

(3) If the person replies, I have a week before I need reply; it is after all a postcard.

(4) If there are several replies in my InBox, I should emit one reply per day, but I take no pressure to “empty my InBox”. I am retired and on holiday, remember.

I suspect that this lazy schedule will be better for me than spending days wading through my diary to find important events. Every event is important as it happens, otherwise I wouldn’t be taking part in that event.

Today I will write a postcard to Bill (1970). What will I say to Bill? I will tell him about the delivery of moose meat last night, in itself not earth-shattering, but the equivalent of “Went on a pony-ride up the mountain yesterday”. If only I had sent four postcards a year to Bill over the past fifty years ...

Today I will reply to Forrest. I meant to reply last weekend. This feels wonderful. Gone is the pressure to reply Right Away. Instead I can set aside ten minutes and tap out three paragraphs and then it will be lunch time! Gone is the pressure of writing to 500 people and replying to 100 people.

The LIST is not gone; it is re-incarnated as a pencil-and-paper list stuck to my wall. Although there seem to be 14 names on the list there is really only one - the next person in the cycle!

Thursday, February 10, 2022: An article from the BBC: How to live with your regrets . “Connection regrets concern lost relationships with family members, friends or colleagues, often through simple neglect”

Monday, May 09, 2022: I have been pondering what happens when I email someone on the list with a non-postcard issue. This happens when I see an article about alternate currencies and email the link to someone with whom I worked (on alternate currencies some twenty years ago). I rarely forward emails or links of YouTube videos and the like; I think of my Postcards as text about my life since last we wrote, but I am coming around to a way of thinking that "this keeps us in touch and helps avoid attrition", as well as "this could re-spark a conversation about a mutual interest'.

Sunday, June 05, 2022 I continue to adapt. I send off a postcard and sometimes this becomes a dialogue for three or four passes, then quietly dies away. That is fine by me; my aim here is to stay in touch, not to indulge in prolonged conversations.

I feel no urgency to reply to a reply to a postcard; replying within a week seems polite enough to me. I am leaning more and more towards dedicating one day a week, perhaps Sunday morning, to reply to all replies and to institute a new mailing. With seventeen names on my list, that means from the recipient's point of view, a postcard every four months, three per year.

Saturday, September 24, 2022 You live and learn. I found Trevor from 1978/79 and sent a re-introductory email; Trevor replied, I replied to Trevor and then - Silence! Had I said something that upset him? Was I too familiar?

No. Trevor's reply had been sidelined into Spam by the mail client Thunderbird! I rescued it and we are up and running again.

Moral: When I contact a lamb that was lost, I ought to establish the email address in my active white-list within the mail client Thunderbird. Contact me if you need clarification. But don't lose the contact that you have just found!

Tuesday, March 19, 2024 I transferred the paper-and-pencil list to a small computer table today; the list was fading away due to the sunlight coming in through my new windows.

Monday, December 02, 2024 I continue to learn. In today’s Inbox a spontaneous email from Geoff.

The arrow points to Geoff’s name while the tail indicates my latest email TO Geoff – less than a month ago. And very welcome it is too!

Now my original paper list I saw as a means to cycle through peoples names and issue a postcard to stay in touch, and not let too long a period pass without some sort of communication FROM me.

So what to do about Geoff?

With the little spreadsheet it is easy. I shall reply to Geoff’s email, update the date, and if I don’t hear back from him, he will resurface about four months from now.

However, If Geoff responds to my reply, well, that will be because we have something to discuss, and that’s what “staying in touch” is all about!

Saturday, December 07, 2024

Postcard From Chris is a mechanism to help me to keep in touch. The basic idea is that everyone gets some sort of email contact from me without a long gap, where a long gap is defined as twelve months. Gone is the bog-standard Christmas (or “Xmas”) letter, and now you get a personal account of what’s been going on in my life this week, or better, this day.

The small worksheet is not a rotary file; I don’t update it when I have emailed a postcard to the individual. I update it whenever I have sent an email or a reply to the individual.

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