1st Ponder Post

I diverge from the chronicles of my Boston trip to insert a ponder, not wander, post.

Today is my daughter-in-law Carrie's birthday and so I wish her HAPPY BIRTHDAY. I sent her a birthday e-card via  the Jacquie Lawson site. (The site, by the way, has awesome animated cards lovely music.) I ordered her gift online from an electronic registry and had it shipped directly. But what struck in thinking about her this morning, is that although she is clearly technologically savvy - she answers my texts within about 10 seconds of me pushing send -  she is a lovely blend of the old-fashioned. I certainly do not mean old-fashioned in an-out-of-date, or in a dire-need-of-an-update sense but in a very good, personable, holding-on-to-the-best, touching way.

I am glad my son married "the girl next door".

Here I am generating a travel blog. I was away for nine days of travel and I sent no one a post card. Nobody. Nobody at all. Carrie is not like that. Wherever she and my son Dan go, even for just a short weekend away, I get a postcard.  I have saved all these. I used to just tuck them randomly in a picture frame, but I just bought a binder and have collected them in it, leaving the binder out like a coffee table book. These postcards tell me she was thinking of me, amidst her merriment or business, she thought of me enough to jot off a few lines. How old-fashioned and just plain nice is that?

I have heard among the social medium that the first "tweet" was actually a post card. A social media site says, "Postcards could be considered the first form of social media, like Twitter, short and sweet." 

The Boston Museum of Fine Arts states in its postcard exhibit, "In the decades around 1900, postcards were Twitter, e-mail, Flickr, and Facebook, all wrapped into one."

Carrie cares enough to send handwritten card stock glossy postcards, handwritten thank you notes, handwritten birthday cards, handwritten get well cards, handwritten happy retirement cards. I can go back and touch these and re-live the feeling of being appreciated. I do not need to search through some intangible bits and bytes buried on some computer chip to get that feeling.  Maybe I even sent those bits and bytes off to cyber heaven during some mass delete session.

I wish more people stayed old-fashioned in the sense that Carrie does. I am going to use Carrie as an example and try be more old-fashioned. Yes I am trying to move into the modern age with Facebook, blogging, drop box, but I vow to also devote more effort to the old-fashioned way of doing things. I should have more time now, right? After all... I am retired.