Culture and Connecting Again

My plan to get the hell out of Racine, Wisconsin, came to fruition a year ahead of time when I got accepted to an exchange program while I was in High School. I spent my Senior year in Liège, Belgium attending a public school for girls and living with three different host families, spending roughly 3 months in each. This was in 1990 and living abroad back then was a completely different beast compared to now. There were no cell phones or email just yet so communicating with home was all about crackly phone calls, writing letters on onion-skin paper, and trips to the post office. I was limited to one collect call home per month because it cost a lot and the quality was terrible. I spent most days writing long and detailed letters about my life in Belgium to anyone whose address I had remembered to record in my address book. The mail arrived twice a day in Belgium, and my goal was to receive mail in both deliveries. I wrote about 10-12 detailed letters a day.

Besides the endorphin kick I got every time the mail came and there was something in it for me, letters helped me cope with homesickness, process my experience, and make sure life didn’t go on too much without me back home. Every time I met someone I liked, we exchanged addresses and wrote letters to each other. I told my pen pals things I couldn’t tell anyone else in a million years. Letters were the magic stuff of procrastination and not paying attention in class. I loved them.

Mix tapes were the sophisticated cousin of the hand-written letter, the soundtrack to our teenage years. My friend Peter, a prolific mix-tape maker, remembers hours in the basement recording them, trying to create “the perfect score.” Sometimes they took days or weeks to compile, one song at a time. The choice of tracks was painstaking and planned. There was no internet then so you had three choices for collecting music: records, including scratches and skips, other cassettes, or the radio. You could also punctuate them with your own recorded voice like a radio D.J. or a Henry Rollins spoken words album. They took time to make and getting one was special. You didn’t just listen to them, either, you learned them.

Nikolai was in Belgium that year, too. He lives in Strasbourg and I live in Trieste. We try to speak every few weeks even if we both prefer letters. The first part of the conversation is mechanical, the things we perceive we are supposed to talk about. Then comes the good stuff along with a sigh of relief. What books are you reading and what did you think of them? What are you writing? “I am working more on my letter writing,” he says. He still sends post cards, and long letters when he has something complicated to say. I call him, but I wish for letters.

For a while, blogging was a good alternative to letter writing. It helped me process my experiences and gave me a satisfying boost when I pushed “publish.” I could go back and manipulate or delete what I wanted, and there was no mental anguish like there was when waiting for someone to reply to a letter. But blogging triggered the voice of my inner imposter. Why are you writing? You’re wasting your time. Nobody cares about the crap you’re putting out there. You should be doing something that brings in some money! Loser!

I never expected that people would actually read anything I wrote, so when they did, I felt ashamed and inadequate, which made me write less. I worried what people would think of me.

The humble, heart-revealing letter has disappeared, I lamented on a regular basis, along with that special connection between writer and reader. Can friendships be as deep without them? Has the intimacy and vulnerability of writing down our feelings and sharing our deepest secrets with that special person who is lucky enough to be on the receiving end gotten lost in the abyss? These were the questions I had been pondering before February 2020 when life changed forever in my tiny village on the outskirts of Trieste. The country went into lock-down because of the arrival of the novel Corona virus.

We were not allowed to go to work, or even leave the house without meeting strict guidelines and bringing complicated signed declarations with us detailing where we were going and what we were doing when we should have been home not getting infected. After a few weeks, we were all working from home and distances that used to seem immense got tiny.

I loved teaching online. I started making regular contact with friends from Racine, Wisconsin I hadn’t spoken to in years and others who were in Belgium with me. We met on Zoom and WhatsApp and laughed like old times. They came into the virtual classroom with me as guest speakers. I was in the International throngs of online working and my oldest and dearest friends were right there with me. Our friendships, in turn, went deeper.  

We dispensed with small talk. We stopped asking each other what we did after college, where we work, who we’re married to and how many kids we have. We started asking the important questions. What are you reading? What do you think of what’s going on in the world? What is important to you? And we were talking to each other the way we used to write to each other. The heart of the hand-written letter was back.

We also started creating together. Culture was never as important as it became during that lockdown period and since. Like letters had saved me during my year abroad in high school, culture became my new survival tool: creating art, reading about it, watching plays online, writing. Culture and creativity keep us alive and connected. When you can’t leave your house, culture is what pulls you through. Tanja, my bestie from Racine, and I are doing a writing course together to unleash our inner artists. Laura, who was with me in Belgium and lives and teaches in New York state, comes into my Zoom classroom once a week and we teach and learn together. We also started writing a play about being exchange students. Could it be that it took a pandemic and a complete shock to the way we live and work and communicate to remember how to connect again from the heart and make it matter?