A Forgotten Packet

Remember Airmail writing pads? The ones that usually had “Par Avion” and a drawing of an airplane along with its label?

During a lull in using my computer last week I rummaged around in my bookshelves and from the back of a cabinet I retrieved a packet that somehow had survived the many cullings as I reduced the number of belongings I had to move when I migrated from one residence to another over the past five or six decades.

That packet hadn’t been opened in at least 30 years, but was in pristine condition, so what could it be?

There they were, fragments of two Airmail writing pads and assorted loose sheets of writing paper. They were filled with the writings of a young man who was uprooted right at the beginning of his maturity and transplanted into a completely unfamiliar world, far removed from his first and only home and his extended family. A young man, with an upbringing that had stressed close family ties, a network of mentors, authority figures, wise elders and institutions that determined and monitored everyone’s values and behaviors for generations, cut loose from every one of those influences. A young man, who had only lived in a world where one’s life was pretty well mapped out and where there were always nurturing relatives, priests, guidelines and dogmas to keep him on course but who was now free of all those supports. A young man where no one took note of him or anything he might do, or cared what he did.

The writings seemed to fall into two categories: the introspections of that young man trying to find himself, to establish his own identity as he observed, misunderstood, marveled and interacted with his unfamiliar world, and the pseudo poetic laments for his usually hopeless and largely fantasized romances.

I hardly recognized myself.

By what miracle or good fortune did I morph from that person I was embarrassed to identify as me in those writings into a reasonably mature senior citizen?

And how did those writings happen to be on obsolete airmail writing pads?

Well, it was largely because I didn’t have a camera in 1959. Actually I did possess a good 35mm camera and even a light meter and a folding flash that used up one flashbulb for each flash... but you only carried around all that cumbersome gear to record rare special events. More compelling was the long time and the expense it took in those days to use up and develop those expensive 36 exposure rolls of 35mm film then airmail the heavy prints overseas back home.

So, I wrote letters, lots of them and at length trying to recreate all those new scenes, events and experiences that I so wanted to share with my parents and siblings who I knew strained to imagine just what my new world was like. Just before I left home I happened on my mother more than once holding her forearms in the fridge trying to feel the unimaginable (for us Tropical natives) cold her poor son would soon be enduring. Some of those letters I didn’t mail, or copied to myself, and there they were, some, leaves still attached to the pads.

They were thin and fragile to the touch as though they would disintegrate just as the uncertain young man they revealed had disappeared into time past.

I won’t be blogging about that young man. There are one or two passages in which this young person looks in wide-eyed wonder at some scene or place hitherto unknown to him and those I may publish.