ORIGIN STORY
Years ago, when our girls were away at summer camp, there was an expectation to write a few letters a week as a sign of unparalleled parental affection.
This chore joy is especially hard when your pen pals were giving you very little to riff on: "went to pottery today. WRITE ME BACK!". Never are you more aware of how dull your daily life is than when you have to encapsulate it every second day in a hand written missive. One time I caught myself sharing the fact that I had spent the day vacuuming the exterior walls of the house. There is, of course, a back story there, but does it matter when the end story is so pathetic as both an activity and a story?
Add to that the requirement to literally put pen to paper…a physical pen to physical paper…and multiply by three recipients each expecting uniquer content and equality of character count. It makes my hand cramp just thinking about undertaking such an archaic activity. Especially being a person who can’t operate a ball point pen.
Despite having a stated mission to foster “future leaders”, my high school originated as a girls finishing school/nunnery, and there were many vestiges of this history that permeated my education. This was especially the case given fact that the teachers were tenured. As modernity and feminism became ‘things', the school adapted by relabelling the "Secretarial Skills" as "Computer Science", and “Sewing" as "Fine Art". One of these nonsensical hold overs was a requirement to use fountain pens. The intent was presumably to foster fluid cursive pen(wo)manship (kids: google ‘cursive’). Like every effort of this type that the school foisted upon me, this tactic backfired spectacularly. The writing style I developed is a series of expressive loops and swoops and swirls, bursting out of the confines of full scrap lines, intersecting and undulating into an irretrievably illegible scribble. A graphologists dream, my writing is perfectly suited for signing the corner of a 6 foot canvas, and an impossibility when trying to write letters to kids just learning to read.
The flip side of the finishing School was that I could type like a fiend. This is why, when the camp moved to system that let you email your camper, the camp letters became the repository for any manner of stories, observations and life lessons.
These proved popular at the time, and have since had recurring and unexpected applications over the (many) intervening years. Sometimes the various recipients needed a distraction, a mojo loan, a reminder to laugh life off every once in a while, or on rare occasion some actual thoughtful message or life lesson (usually in the form of learning from my mistakes). "HilarWithUs" stories became a thing, under various names and for limited people.
And now?
Now, I am sending these miscellaneous musings off into the ether. There are no goals or expectations. They are simply out there to be found and, hopefully, enjoyed. Perhaps be good for a smile or two.
So if you found them…
Welcome…
Enjoy.