Granny's Letters
By Jeff Gamble

From the time that we were able to read, Granny Hazel was sending my brother and I epic-sized letters that – in my opinion at the time – contained no pertinent information or material whatsoever. There was never any mention of toys, sports, or anything that could be applied towards candy, such as money. Cash in five dollar increments was only reserved for birthday notes and Christmas cards. This isn’t to say that her work wasn’t tedious and masterful, however. She took great care in putting letters together.

The paper she hand-wrote the notes on was always undersized - some decorated stationary no bigger than the size of a standard photo. Regardless, she still found a way to pack the little page with innumerable thoughts and observations, sometimes repeating on themes for emphasis. Telling us how proud she was of our grades in one sentence might be followed by her mentioning the happiness she felt in how well we were doing in school during the next. For a kid of eight or nine, reading twelve to fifteen pages of this was exhausting, like math.

Often times the stationery’s margin was adorned by printed illustrations of angelic children with oversized eyes and heads, or of some gathering of woodland creatures. And it was through these images that you could see where even Granny would get sidetracked. In spite of already having jammed the page with sentences, she would break away from the letter she was writing and find a little room to call attention to these figures. With decorative arrows connected to words like “precious”, or “blessed”, she left no doubt about where she stood regarding these illustrations.

Sometimes the whole package was just a letter itself, but other times it included interesting articles clipped from the National Enquirer, or The Star. Pulitzer candidates like “Washing Hands linked to Winning Lottery Numbers” might be followed up in subsequent letters with clippings declaring that the image of Jesus was reportedly seen in a crop formation somewhere in Wales. And of course you had to find it all even more amusing because you knew that Hazel likely believed every word.

The true artistic genius of Granny however was not on the paper itself, or on the things clipped to it. It was in the packaging of it all. Contradictions ran wild in her posts, and thus hinted at an art form that ascended simple correspondence. Envelopes, for example, symbolically sent a mixed bag of messages. On one hand, because they appeared with pastel colors and heartwarming stickers of puppies or fruit plastered to them, they seemed warm and inviting. You could see where it almost said, “Open me. I am your special letter from Granny.”

Reality, however, told a different tale.

The fact was, Granny spared no expense in her liberal use of scotch tape. Nothing was ever sealed without a certain amount of meticulous scrutiny. No crevice or edge was overlooked. No pore left to breathe. Things were air tight, and it could be argued that you could preserve raw meat in anything she prepared for delivery. The downside to this of course was realizing that getting to the goods inside was something of a project unto itself. So despite the happiness exuded on the surface of these envelopes (i.e.: stickers and little hearts), there was also a not-so-obvious “NO TRESPASSING” undertone, which from a cutting edge artistic statement standpoint, was pure genius.

During her letter-writing apex - 1980 to 1990 - she sent an innumerable number of letters to Mark and I, which more or less saw me through grammar school and into college. The tone or these letters however, never ever changed. At age nineteen, while I was running amuck on campus, figuring out various ways to pollute myself, Hazel was still calling me Jeffrey, asking me about my little friends, and still talking about my long-dormant comic book collection. My friends of course were no longer so little, and my comic books had turned into magazines with content of a more “mature” nature. So the letters needed to be taken with a grain of salt by saying, “Well, that’s just Granny.”

It wasn’t until after I was out of school, when she was no longer writing much, that I began to miss her letters. Despite their epic length, reoccurring themes, and predictable schmaltziness, I had grown accustomed to it all. The consistency wasn’t so bad, as it turned out. There was a certain amount of comfort in knowing that even on the most uneventful of days, somebody out there was still thinking about me. And if at the time I had had the presence of mind to even save a few thousand of them, I would have a significant personal written record of her life, something that seems more important now that she’s gone.

Directly related to her letters though, Granny Hazel did inspire me to start doing consciously what she did unconsciously. Now, whenever I can, I keep track of where I have been and what I have done. I find that records I keep of even the simple things are reminders of things that will otherwise escape in time. And although it may seem inconsequential to me now, maybe next year or the year after, it won’t. Maybe these things will mean something in the bigger scheme of things, and may even be interesting to friends or family somewhere down the line.

The traditions started by Granny have not gone away with her, however. They have found new life in the next generation. My Aunt Judy keeps people in the loop with the periodical stories she writes and forwards to people via email, although it should be noted that she does so without the trademark repetition. And my Dad, although notorious for sending mail without writing anything more than the address on the envelope, does send clippings from the newspaper. And interestingly enough, as the words in his mail have disappeared over time, the amount of scotch tape that he uses on the envelopes continues to increase.

- April 4, 2003