Love Letters

My dad still uses the mail. You know, the write with a pen on paper U.S. postal service lick the envelope stick on a stamp drop it in the box kind of mail.

It's one of the many things I love about him.

I started getting letters from him when I went away to college -- that was pre-email (ahem) and pre-free-long-distance-on-my-cell-phone (cough) days, so mail was a primary communications tool with my family. But even now, when he's got email, cable phone and texting at his fingertips, I still get the occasional envelope in the mail box from my dad.

More often that not, the envelope contains an odd assortment of newspaper and magazine clippings. Occasionally, one of them is a wedding announcement for someone I knew in high school, although those have become less frequent as I've gotten older. Sometimes it's just something quirky that caught his attention. Or it's something relevant to a part of my life or recent conversation we've had.

The recent pile you see here includes a photo feature about fathers and daughters, an op-ed about Mitt Romney, an op-ed about Art Pope and The New Yorker and a spotlight on a local restaurant owned by my college roommate's family. Always a hodge-podge.

The articles are generally interesting or at least a little trip down memory lane. But what really makes me smile when I get a collection in the mail is knowing that on any given ordinary day, while he's sitting at the table reading the paper and eating his morning bowl of cereal, my dad is thinking about me.