by TaD
A disclaimer: I spend a lot of time with social media — professionally and personally. Its power to connect across great time and distance is obvious even to the Luddite that lives in many of us. This is not some quivering nostalgic screed on the sacred act of putting pen to parchment. No, it is simply a nod to the random personal connections that still appear and startle us from time to time in the great cyber swirl of friends and followers — like one of those fragments of lives swept up and carried for miles in the funnel of an EF5 tornado, to be dropped in a tree of someone else’s life. Upon seeing it, we are suddenly transient, vulnerable and entirely human.
The holiday ritual of sending and receiving greetings still calls to us. We now mix the handwritten card to the distant college friend with a computer created “family news” letter, and more and more of us go the e-card route (with full animation and soundtrack). This year the snail mail brought one of those increasingly rare fragments of the living in a large manila envelope, hand addressed with a serious sharpie. Recognizing the return address, I opened the envelope to discover a hand written holiday greeting and personal note accompanied by two circular, hand-colored images with the hand printed signature, “colored by M… with love”.
Suddenly, a confluence of hands and memory — touched me in a way that nothing else could have done. The source: cousins I haven’t seen in many years who represent the last of my father’s family with whom I still have contact. I do hear from them on Facebook occasionally, a much appreciated connection, but this new communication was a magnitude of power that defined. It rolled over and through me. No way to close the app. No walk away from this terminal. No scroll down to the next message. I was awash in my life.
Cousin M was not a constant part of my early years — she and her family moved south, southwest long, long ago. But she is a connection to my childhood, family, hometown — to who I am in total as a person of some years. As we grow older, our history does take on more color and light.
She is a link, however, to more than history. She is a direct connection to kindness. I remember her kindness and that same kindness in her mother and sister and my own father — a human capacity easily lost but treasured more as we age. And this kindness has all the more power coming from Cousin M who suffered a devastating accident last year that resulted in a serious concussion, lasting damage and a move into a long-term care facility. But according to the note (written by her husband of many years), she was now doing better and would come home for a holiday visit. I soon figured out that all of the note and message had been written by her husband, and she, who was now unable to write or communicate in her usual mode, had sent the colored images to me as a message for the season — a message of love and kindness that still lived after words and the web failed her.
Let us value and even wonder at the ease of connecting in this wired world. It is a grand and glorious thing to live in a global village. But do not mistake the click of keys or voice command or Skype session for the elemental shock of being alive. This moment of time collapsed still happens to most of us, I would wager. And it is triggered by sound, by smell, by the action of our senses fully engaged — something that still eludes even the touch screen and the Google cardboard virtual reality. It is the static electricity that “charges” all of us. It ignites and flares in the darkness after all else has flickered out. Treasure it, protect it, practice it when you feel the distance growing. Love and kindness are given and received freely — but most surely by a human hand.
