From the perspective of a dozen years later, I have to laugh sickly when I consider the Dow went from 7000 to 14000 and then all the way back down to 6500 in March 2009. Thank goodness Aunt Charlotte was spared that aggravation.
I reported on the small pleasures of family life when I found them. On January 7, 1997, I wrote of our son, then 2 ½ years old, “Before he goes to bed at night he comes downstairs and asks me to give him some yogurt and I do, and that’s a sweet moment.” But a month later, discussing friends who adopted, I wrote, “Having a child, one way or another, only ends the infertility, it does not end the problems."
By 1997, Aunt Charlotte’s failing health became obvious in her shaky handwriting and uneven typing. On July 21 I wrote, “So, take care, and I hope the pills fix you up. It must be frustrating to be housebound – at least it’s a comfortable house, with Linda and Bill nearby.”
The last letter in the three-ring binder is dated August 4, 1997. I wrote at length about our son, just past his third birthday. “We took Sam to his first movie last weekend, to see Hercules at a multiplex. It went well and he enjoyed it, and even wants to go again . . . On Saturday I took him to the library, and we spent close to three hours in the children’s room. I kept getting magazines from downstairs to read. Sam found other children to play with and it went well. He fell asleep in the car while driving home and slept until 5:30. On Sunday we went to the aquarium and an arts festival, where I pushed him around in his stroller. The big attraction was getting a bag of M&Ms at the aquarium. Again, he fell asleep in the car and slept 2 ½ hours – S said he never falls asleep in the car. I said maybe I was the boring parent and he could not stay awake.”
The letter ended, naturally, with a financial update: “My 401-K went over $100,000 last week, although it might have gone down since then. Now that it has topped that mark, I am not so interested in checking how it is doing.”
The Charlotte Chronicles closed a few months later. The era of mailed letters ended with her death. Email’s arrival swiftly made letters antique and I’ve embraced the new technology. As an obsessive chronicler of life and love, in time-stamped order, I find email convenient, if lacking in the intimacy of the wobbly written word.
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