“Hi Nana and Poppy, I hope you’re having a good summer. Please respond.”
Okay, so I know this isn’t explorative prose, but to a grandparent this is the big summer enchilada, our oldest grandchild’s first postcard from camp.
It’s from Shalom Chanania Tuvia, and he’s 8 and in his first year of overnight camp in New England.
Yes, that’s young. But his dad, our son-in-law, is the camp’s Mashgiach Ruchani, so that gives us a happy feeling.
I mean, “Please respond”? Of course the entire bunk was probably required to write a letter home, following suggestions from their counselors. How many 8-year-olds would know to write “Please respond”? But you know what, I’ll take it. Because I remember the reverse of this, when I couldn’t wait to get a letter from my parents or my older sister as a homesick 12-year-old first-time camper.
Also, you shouldn’t be surprised that my wife, who is better known as “Nana Lisa,” has already sent off enough mail to this child to keep the US Postal Service in business for another year. And don’t get me started about the packages with red, green and blue gummy worms, baseball cards, lollipops and an ample stash of Jelly Bellies.
What is it, I want to know, that possesses grandparents and parents to run to the candy store and purchase these care packages for their grandkids and kids? I mean, we acted the very same way when our daughters went away for camp.
It’s almost like a mantra went off in our heads, saying in a monotone voice: “Must go back to the candy store. Must spend lots of money on cavity-inducing products.”
Back to the mail. We don’t write letters to our grandchildren like our grandparents might have written to us. Instead, our grandchildren FaceTime or Skype with us. If that isn’t possible, grandparents are now finding their way more and more to common ground with their grandkids on Facebook, texting or other social media.
My wife even sent me out on a mission to find cool postcards to send to camp.
Guess what? It wasn’t so easy to find them. And quick, how much is a postcard stamp these days?
That’s right, 35 cents.
Okay, so here’s an epiphany. When was the last time you sat down with a pen and a piece of paper or a postcard at the kitchen table and wrote a letter or a quick note to anyone?
What if we wrote notes to our children, grandparents or even out-of-town friends on paper, using envelopes and stamps, pen and pencil, instead of texting?
So I wrote my first letter to camp this week. I told Shalom what I did around the house (like an 8-year-old cares that I reorganized my files). I spent most of the letter asking him how camp was going. What were the names of his madrichim? How were his friends Nachum and Eshy doing? How’s softball and swimming? What about ruach and bug juice? (I explained what bug juice was, just in case). I also told him that Nana Lisa and I were looking forward to seeing him on visitor’s day, when the care packages grow exponentially and we get to drink plenty of bug juice ourselves in the same sort of chadar ochel that I “dined” in 50 years ago.
Anyway I’m going to try and write a letter or send a postcard to Shalom every day. Then when camp is over in mid-August, I’m going to try, and I write “try” with total conviction, to keep sending him letters, and when his younger brothers get older, expand the writing to them.
It’s a good goal.
And I’ll end the letters and postcards the exact same way Shalom did to us.
“Please respond.”
By Phil Jacobs
