News You Can Bruise for 2006 May 8 (entry 0)

(3) Mon May 08 2006 22:00 PST Postcards from my Father: We've been sorting through my mother's archives, planning to digitize everything. Hopefully we will actually do it and not leave it to the next generation.

After a long morning we thought we had it all done. Then I opened a cupboard and there were about ten boxes: "Rachel's Schoolwork", "Leonard's Postcards", "Susanna's Certificates", etc. etc. We let out a collective groan.

But what a find. "Roy's Postcards" fill up two boxes. There are more than 500 of them, and the vast majority were never sent to anyone. My dad was a compulsive postcard buyer. He bought them for himself, and wrote on each postcard a description of how he got it, or what he'd done that day.

In our excavations we have encountered many of my dad's journals. Usually he'd only written on the first five or ten pages. But these boxes contain a journal going from 1982 to 1991. My dad could keep a journal going; he just needed the right medium. He needed a LiveJournal.

The vacations, museum visits, and other memorable moments of my youth are especially well-represented in the postcard box, since that's where he usually got the postcards. So on balance, I'm glad we found all those extra boxes of stuff that needs to be scanned.

I haven't even mentioned "Leonard's Postcards", which include many examples of me-learning-to-write hilarity such as this one from 11/23/1984. In this piece, I start off following the rules of a mailed postcard, but as space runs out I get more and more desperate, finally piling all the letters atop each other in the corner like a typewriter that won't line-feed:

TO DAY WE WENT
TO DISNE-
YlAND
ANDWE WENTOBIG THUN-
DER MOUNTAI
NANDIDIDNOTL[big jumble of letters]

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Comments:

Posted by Kristen at Tue May 09 2006 10:03

Cutie writer.

Posted by Susie at Tue May 09 2006 11:36

We sure are ambitious. I'm sure mom planned to type up/scan all the letters too...

Posted by Jill at Wed May 10 2006 22:58

That is awesome that although your dad never sent any of the postcards he documented on them. I was just going through my postcards and have no memory of why/what the purposes of getting them were. oh well, try better next time. love you guys, it has been a good stay with you all in California. :)