Posted on by Julia B. Hebner · 2 Comments

Somebody Else’s Mail Art

As anyone with a chronic illness might tell you, we have our less-than-good days that sometimes string themselves together into a week or two and turn into depression. Those can be days when the voices in our heads sound something like this: Here I am on my back again and I can’t do anything productive and I’m so useless I’m wasting oxygen by breathing, etc.

On days like these, a letter can shine a ray of sunshine into the dim basement of my mind.

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Postcard from Beq Parker

Most people communicate primarily with text messages and email, or Facebook and Skype. In these modern times, even some prison inmates send and receive email.*

Like me, you may have learned the hard way that emails can pick up an attitude as they zip over the fiber-optic lines — an unintended tone that distorts what you thought was an innocent message. “But that’s NOT what I meant!” I have been heard to moan. I suspect I self-edit to dry phrases to avoid messy misunderstandings.

And none of us would ever hit SEND when we’re angry, over-wrought or over-tired. We’ve all learned that lesson, right?

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Right: Laser print on wood executed by Wes Cheney

Back in the olden days, before email, texting or even ANSWERING MACHINES, when I had a list of people to contact for, say, a food co-op or a ballot initiative or a mother’s club, it might take me repeated dialings of every number over several days to reach everyone on that list. And I had to actually talk to them and they might have quite a lot to say to me in return. It was time-consuming and unpredictable. And interesting.

When there was a bit of money, a group might choose to appoint someone to type up information, pay for Xerox copies at a copy shop, hand address envelopes, lick stamps, and visit a mail box to stop the lets inside and send them on their way. Of course, these mailings might still require follow-up phone calls.

Pre-answering machine and everything else we use now, communication required a lot more effort. Even though I am much better than I was when I first got sick, CFIDS/SEID still makes it impossible for me to imagine taking on this kind of work today.

As a person who is easily over-stimulated into exhaustion, the ease of email and text is not just convenient, but even almost life-saving. I can be part of a committee that meets once or twice a month and keeps in touch by email. I can turn my phone off when I need to, knowing it will accept messages and save them for me to read or listen to when I’m up to it.

Text is great for an impersonal exchange of factual information: what, where, date, time, etc. To avoid misunderstandings in more personal messages, there are those contemporary hieroglyphics — emoticons. Who can take offense when I end my message with a cute kitten or three little birds bracketed by musical notes?

But what I really like is real mail. Letters, cards, postcards. Envelopes  with snippets of yarn or scraps of fabric or sketches of quilts. Manilla envelopes of magazine articles or knitting patterns or relief-print exchanges. Hand-written letters are lovely even when I have to puzzle them out. Typewritten letters are never turned away. Handmade cards are a special delight but any card is a joy and carries something of the person who chose to send it.

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“Holy Post” from Vikki Ensman

 

I wrote my first letter when I was a toddler. My mother held my fingers to the keys of her typewriter and, more or less, took dictation. (My aunt saved that letter. I still have it.) In grade school, I wrote to my aunt, both grandmothers, a great-grandmother, and a pen-pal in Australia. Now I exchange letters with school friends, Quaker friends, and several prison inmates. I send letters to my brother, my sister, an uncle, my step-mother, and my grandchildren. If they write back, that’s great. If they don’t, I write anyway.

Sometimes I make postcards or holiday cards or birthday cards. (see Mail Art in the menu above.) Sometimes these are relief prints done in multiples.Other cards are individually made. I hope that each letter or card I send out contains a moment of delight for the person opening the card.

There are wonderful examples of mail art all over the web.

Perhaps you know the work of Edward Gorey?

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I always think of Gorey as working strictly in black and white. But this article  shows a few envelopes he decorated with bright, playful colors. Aren’t they fun?

Maybe I’ll quit typing this now and go draw some of my own!

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*The costs of internet connections between inmates and their families/outside are excessive and unexpectedly varied.

Laptops are not passed out to prisoners. (Few things are. Inmates are often responsible for buying their own underwear.) Where a laptop is available in a prison, the inmate who wants one must purchase the one offered.

“In many of those states, prisoners can send as well as receive emails; family members access the email system online, while prisoners use special kiosks in their housing units. In some cases, photos or short video files can be attached to the messages – for an additional fee.

Prisoners and those who want to communicate with them via email buy “stamps” to send each message, which cost from $.17 to $.60 each depending on the prison system and the number of stamps purchased; the average price per email is $.40 to $.50.”

Posted on by Julia B. Hebner · 4 Comments

Books: the Obvious and the Undercover*

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Books out in the open and books inside a Kindle case.

 

There are not so many books on my side of the bed. Only five.

This is because our house was built in 1950 and our bedroom is not a large room. The bed itself is an old-fashioned ¾ size, extended lengthwise for my 6’2” husband. Only a small table fits between my side of the bed and the wall and it only holds around five books at a time while still leaving space for a cup of tea.

Here are my current five books:

  • The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain
  • Far More Terrible For Women: Personal Accounts of Women in Slavery
  • The Quakers, A Very Short Introduction by Ben Pink Dandelion (you are getting the author’s name because I enjoy telling you his name)
  • A Fort of Nine Towers, An Afghan Family Story
  • The New Revised Standard Edition of The Green Bible

And doesn’t that make me look like a serious reader? Since nobody ever sees this pile of books but me, I am only fooling myself.

I’m only halfway through three of these volumes, just beginning the fourth, and open The Green Bible mostly for reference. (Can you hear me blowing the dust off?)

Stories of enslavement can be hard to read.

And I haven’t made it though the rape scene of a ten-year-old Afghan boy. (As long as I don’t read it, maybe it never happened.) And I was doing so well before that. Qais Akbar Omar’s prose is flawless, a joy to read. I am sure he will handle this difficult scene with grace and beauty but I can wait to find out.

In front of this pile of books, on the coaster waiting for that cup of tea, is my Kindle Paperwhite, hooked up to its umbilical cord and safe in its needlepoint case. Here is where I keep my light reading, the books that entertain me when I am immobilized with the fevers, aches or insomnia of CFIDS. I am grateful that when I can’t write myself, I am seldom so ill that I cannot read.

Currently, magically concealed behind the Kindle screen, there are historical romances by Mary Blalogh and Sarah MacLean and Marion Chesney. In Chesney’s other incarnation as M.C. Beaton there are cozy mysteries. And here’s The Smoke Thief by Shana Abe (recommended by Smart Bitches, Trashy Books) and a book from Angie Sage’s Magyk series. And here’s the intriguing Transit in B-flat by Joeseph Erhardt, Fearless Leader of the Rich Writers’ Critique Group.

And oh, look! here’s have a sample of McDonough’s William Tecumsah Sherman. I read an intriguing review of that book somewhere and, when I didn’t find it in the library, thought I’d get acquainted with it before making a serious commitment that involves money.

There are also, sometimes, magazines beside the bed; rug hooking or quilting or mixed media magazines with articles that feed my dreams. But not today.

Less you might think me an ascetic, I will admit to more books in the bedroom than these few. There are books on the other side of the bed (which will not be listed because they aren’t mine since) and books on top of my chest of drawers and an actual bookcase on top of my husband’s dresser.

Of course, there are books, magazines, manuscripts, etc. in every other room of the house, too. And more books inside Little Free Library 3966 in front of our house, which itself is featured in the book Little Libraries, Big Hearts.

So, what books are beside your bed?

(*Books undercover are often also under the covers.)

 

Posted on by Julia B. Hebner · 11 Comments

A Smarter Phone

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Above: One of these is not a phone. It just thinks it is.

 

 

My  reliable red flip phone did exactly what I expected it to do: it made phone calls.

But here’s what it didn’t do that I wasn’t expecting to need: easy texting.

Turns out, lots of people like to text and some of them text to me. To answer a text, I had to tap this key three times and that key twice and it took forever and my arthritic thumbs were sore! Not to mention (but I will) how frustrating this is and what confusion results when I’m in the wispy clutches of brain fog and anything and everything is already too much effort. When I wasn’t up to making a phone call because just the thought of interacting with a real person was overwhelming, texting on this flip phone was almost as taxing.

So I got a smart phone.

This phone is smarter than I am even when I’m at my most alert. E.g., I think I’m talking on the phone but the phone decides this would be an excellent time to take a video of my feet. OR — I think I’m answering my phone but my phone decides to show me little black and grey boxes of setting options.

Expletives were emitted (and not by the phone!) during these frustrating interruptions to my intentions. And my husband would say:

Why don’t you check the manual?

If there even was a manual, I wouldn’t want to check it. I just want to answer the phone! I DON’T WANT TO TAKE LESSONS IN HOW TO ANSWER THE PHONE!

Why don’t you check the manual?

So these days I’m getting along much better with my phone. We’ve had a while to get acquainted. Of course, I’ve had to give a little, modify my approach and pick up on the little hints my phone gives me about how it wants to be treated. In return, I get a little thrill every time I successfully answer the phone.

And the phone is kind enough to beautifully display photos of my grandchildren at the swipe of a thumb (such a useful feature when some kind-hearted person wants to show me endless photos of their cats). My phone will cooperate by taking pictures of an interesting bench for sale at a junk shop or kids rubber boots at a yard sale (Sent to DIL with Are these the right size?).

The phone is less cooperative when I want to play Pokemon Go with a grandson. It sulks and gets glitchy. I think it considers Pokemon Go beneath its dignity or maybe not part of its job description. Playing Pokemon Go is certainly way beyond any job description I would have ever written for a phone!

In fact, “phone” is not a good name for this device. Even “smart phone” isn’t sufficient. “Device” is more accurate but less descriptive. If you strung all the words that fit together to make a new noun to name this object in its full glory, you’d probably be speaking German and people would get up and leave the room before you were even finished enunciating all the syllables.

Now that the device and I are better friends, I am a better Friend (Quaker) because I am not cursing as often.

And my husband? Well, he decided to get his own smart phone (for reasons I won’t go into except to say that his black flip phone was left on the patio overnight during a thunderstorm). The phone came in the mail in a clean-looking box with a dock and a charging cord and a little folder explaining how to activate your account. Just like mine did.

And now, every time I hear my dear husband curse because he’s missed another call or he can’t access his voice mail, I oh-so-sweetly say to him:

Why don’t you check the manual?