Postcards

In the days before Facebook, if you wanted to keep in touch with friends and relatives but couldn’t think of much to say to them, you sent them a postcard. The brilliance of the postcard is the side opposite where you are supposed to write has been decorated for you. Most postcards illustrate a location and are intended to be used by travelers to keep in touch with their loved ones back home. These were also frequently used to let others know when they’d be arriving (“Got a flat tire here and will have to wait until Monday to get it fixed. Hopefully, we can get there by Thursday...”). I quite enjoy looking through written on postcards at antique shops. Most of the scribblings are barely legible and mundane, but contemplating why a particular postcard was chosen by the sender and why it was kept by the recipient can be titillating. Two days ago I couldn’t resist spending a dollar on a head-scratcher of a postcard. The front is not a picture but a poem:

The Cynic’s Toast
Here’s to the glass we so love to sip,
It dries many a pensive tear;
‘Tis not so sweet as a woman’s lip,
But a d— sight more sincere.

Underneath has been handwritten “aint (sic) it the truth” replete with quotes. I turned the postcard over expecting a consoling note to a guy who’d just been dumped, but instead it is addressed to “Miss Bess Sanders,” and reads, “Have always known this but didn’t know how to express myself, not being verry (sic) poetical.” For a moment I thought someone must have been sending the equivalent of a raised middle finger to an ex, until I noticed the postmark date: Feb 14, 1910. The fact that this postcard was pristinely kept instead of immediately torn into a hundred pieces leads me to believe this was an incredibly ill-considered and, as the postcard was headed from Pocatello, Idaho to Springfield, Missouri, late arriving Valentine!

Last year I took the train up to Seattle to see an art installation designed and built by my close friend Jake and his girlfriend Ellen. Two artists who start dating and then start collaborating on projects run a good chance of producing nauseating results, especially when their collaboration is for an erotic art exhibit. I was very impressed when their entry turned out to be the cleverest thing there, which honestly wasn’t that huge a feat considering most of the artwork involved naked people being tortured. Their piece, entitled “Love Notes,” was a huge bed covered with over a dozen unique pillows. The idea was to select a pillow (not dissimilar to picking out a postcard) in which you both left a note for the next random person who chose that same pillow and took the note left by the random person prior. I guess you were supposed to keep the note, but then I guess the person before you was expected to write something worth keeping.

The exhibit inspired me to send a postcard featuring a different Yoshitomo Nara artwork to my long distance girlfriend every day for a month. This turned into a very nice ritual of getting home from work, writing a sentence or two and walking two blocks to the post office, during which I found myself passing the same lady walking with two kids and headed to the southern food joint that I never did try.