When I was in college (early 80′s), my mom and dad each wrote to me every week, my grandparents not quite so often. I would read the letters aloud in the post office, then put them on my dorm room door for everyone to read. Treasures from home. I still have reams of letters and when life nips at my heels, I sit down for a good cry and a read.

Or perhaps, that the impersonal tweet and IM, despite their usefulness in disseminating information rapidly, cannot compare to the handwritten letter’s personal touch and sense of cohesion? One can hardly tell the difference between a personal and a computer generated email but one can certainly recognize (or used to) the distinctive handwriting of a loved one.

Time saving devices do have the paradoxical effect of imprisoning us with the tyranny of expecting immediacy and the inability to get away, even for a moment.

No, I’m not a Luddite; but sometimes a slightly slower pace in which one is a little harder to reach sounds very attractive.

There’s a kind of nightmare scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s movie North By Northwest where Cary Grant is at a crossroads in the midwest somewhere. Wheatfields and cornfields range as far as the eye can see. A small biplane flies overhead. It turns lazy circles around him like a fly. But one of the circles stops halfway and the plane turns straight toward him. Cary Grant notices this. And then he notices the plane is closing the distance between them fast. He turns to run away. You see this fly turn into a huge malignant machine that Grant is running desperately away from. Grant falls to the ground as the biplane practically flies into the theatre.

I was reminded of North by Northwest because for the first two nights I was in Abeline I had strange dreams. On one night I was running away from a super volcano. On the next I was stepping up from an enormous geologic fault that was sub ducting in real time. I attributed the dreams to the classic rock station I listened to on the car radio driving out from Kansas City. Classic Rock has a deep streak of self pity. After church on Sunday–Sunday night my dreams turned sweet.

The midwest is much more relaxed than the coasts. The hotel I stayed at had free high speed access. It was much better than my Verizon wireless. I loved talking about how my gps made it easy as pie driving out from Kansas city and then getting around to all the points of interests in Abeline. One of my distant relatives said he liked gps too. But he used it to mark the underwater topography of a nearby two mile wide lake. He used the GPS to mark the coordinates of his favorite fishing spots. He could get to them by night or day and get back without a second thought.

Typically, farmers like rain. But Abeline has been getting too much rain lately –like much of the rest of the country. Its slowing down the harvest of winter wheat. The big combines need a couple days of blast furnace hot weather to dry the fields. They might get it this week.

Lifeofmind #3: Junk mail used to be a problem. I routinely either deliver most of my mail directly into the trash can or let it accumulate before trashing it a few months later.

Now, junk e-mail and phone calls have made those mediums worse than junk mail. I have found that calling a company on the phone is nearly impossible any more. You get sent to voice mail and often never hear from them. Using e-mail for someone you don’t regularly communicate with is equally challenging. It usually takes at both a phone call and an e-mail, in which in one you agree to receive the other.

By the way for some junk mail I have adopted the following practice: When it comes in an envelope that does not have a clear return address and is often marked Extremely Urgent! I take the envelope, write on it “You wasted my time by sending this to me with insufficent markings and now I am wasting yours”, put it in the prepaid envelope they include and mail it back to them.

Thank you for the link– wonderful photo of the train, too.

I suspect “Night Mail” is a BBC popularization of “Night Flight” by St-Exupery (1931). It’s a memorable book. Some human beings will sacrifice their lives to keep open the lines of communication.

In Iran and many other countries, governments will sacrifice lives if people try to use the means of communication.

Here’s an Amazon review by reader Jerald Lovell of ‘Night Flight’:

“This is an epic narrative of a single evening in the Argentine night mail service. The chief character is the air manager, with peripheral characters being pilots, pilots’ wives, and other personnel. Without spoiling the plot, an unexpected crisis occurs in the way of a trans-Andean storm, and the pace quickens to unforgettable climax. But read the book. It’s short, and not so much as a phrase is excess weight. A spine-tingling thriller about men in crisis, and the women who wait alone. You may grimace at the manager’s resolve, but you will never forget him or the pilot coming from far southern Argentina. A masterful insight into the days when character was a desirable thing and profit wasn’t the only motive for excellence.”