Feeling My Age by GJ

I've been thinking (meditating? musing? pondering?) about the link between snail mail, e-mail, and blogging. I'm not at all captivated by the latter two, I'm afraid. They just don't have the true, personal touch of your name-on-the-envelope-recognizable-handwriting, postmarked date and place of snail mail. (The first step down my slippery slope was the typewritten envelope, I guess.) Those of us who lived through WWII considered mail as almost sacred, in a way. The mail between home and military ultimately used something called "V-Mail," which used a much thinner, lighter paper and was, if I'm correct, both stationery and envelope-in-one. In 1945, it took almost three weeks (and often more) both ways, South Pacific to Chicago. Dad and I wrote at least once a week and my brother and I exchanged some from SP to Europe and I have no idea how long that took, but maybe not much more? Because my mother was deceased, there were no cookies or cakes, and it really never occurred to me to feel sorry for myself, because the packages I saw others receive were often stale, reduced to crumbs, or in pretty bad shape. And, in the navy, our chow tended to be better because we always had our kitchen with us. (I recall that hardly anyone on my ship cared for ripe olives. When the cook discovered that I was almost the only one eating them, he told me I that all I had to do was ask and he'd give me a whole can, which had to have hundreds in it. I've often wondered if, in some shallow bay in the Pacific there might be a whole olive grove sticking up out of the water where I threw those thousands of pits.)Is there anyone out there in bloggerland who had to endure the days and weeks without a hot meal, like in Europe, WWII? Anyway, mail meant the world to us in the mid-1940's. It took 40 or 50 years, but cheap phone rates and modern technology AND rising postage costs, AND a poor record for teaching handwriting eventually eroded the practice of nice long, chatty letters. (One other victim of this (to me a tragedy) was "keeping in touch.") Many people had a firm list of those he or she wrote to on a regular basis. Those who managed a letter a week received a letter a week in reply. Mailboxes sometimes conained at least one letter per day. (My Dad's generation was inclined to write about the weather, mostly. That may seem funny, but whomever he wrote to knew that he was OK, and that was important.) Oh...almost forgot...prior to WWII, the postcard was in extremely wide use as a means to "keep in touch." Hmmmm. I wonder if I should take that up again for my relatively small list of "keeping-in-touchers?"