Postcards for Dirk and other unmailed letters from the heart
I took out a pen and a paper and began to write.
“Dear X,” I said in an unmailed letter to this day. “I write this letter from a quivering hand that is no longer used to holding a pen. But I have chosen this painstaking process because it is going to slow me down.”
That was years ago and I haven’t finished writing the letter still. Between us is a distance of tens of thousands of kilometers and a deep, consuming agony. The light has gone out in the vast virtual space that used to connect our respective worlds, but it is isn’t a void bereft of resurrection.
It takes a mere touch on a screen to connect, but the pathology of relationships is similar: the medium is not the message. An email, a WhatsApp or Viber message, a like on Twitter or LinkedIn post? A heart on Facebook for all the world to see, perhaps? It’s not the same as mailing a traditional letter across the oceans. “More than kisses, letters mingle souls,” wrote the poet John Donne. That is, of course, assuming that both parties have souls.
On the day I started writing the letter, I bought a performed stationery, as it was done in the olden days. If you were on the receiving end of that overture, would you respond positively? Would you take it as a peace offering rather than an intrusion or veiled aggression? People have strange viewpoints. No one knows if a well-intentioned letter could cook up a malevolent storm.
“When you write on paper,” I continued scribbling in beautiful long hand — a labor of love, “you are always careful with words because there is no undo button. Every thought, once it’s been inked on a sheet, cannot be erased.”
I was overly careful not to further strain the last piece of thread that probably connect us. Too careful perhaps, that I didn’t find the courage to send it by slow mail across the oceans. I, too, have great fear of the unknown.
***
When my eldest son was 13, we found a free music resource for beginning guitar players. Dirk’s Guitar Page on the web was a simple website built on mid-2000 web technology, but it was everything we could ask for — music sheets of guitar classics arranged by composer that a student needs to learn, an audio clip of how it was supposed to be played. And all it was asking in return was a postcard from where one lives.
Back then, I could imagine how many postcards Dirk had received from all over the world, a treasure trove of analog photos that were rare finds in those days, and even rarer still today. I went to the bookstore and bought three postcards. “Dear Dirk,” I wrote on the back of the first postcard with the photo of the famous Manila Bay sunset. “We live a stone’s throw from this place, where the day ends with a burst of vermillion colors, in the capital city of the Philippines.”
The second postcard was a photo of the Manila Central Post Office, an iconic landmark in a busy side of the city that they say was built in 1926. “Dear Dirk,” I wrote on the backside. “This is where we mail our letters since the 1920s, a remnant of old Manila and part of the history of our country.”
The third postcard has the photo of the iconic Philippine jeepney, the king of the road everywhere in the country. “Dear Dirk,” I wrote. “This is the primary mode of transportation in our place. It’s loud, it’s colorful and hardly ever efficient, but it is a relic of a past that we still cling to these days.”
Like the letter on perfumed paper, I painstakingly wrote in bold, beautiful strokes, but the postcards were never mailed because the hustle bustle of daily life no longer gives us the luxury of actually going to the post office, buying stamps, sticking them on the card, and paying for its journey to the other side of the world. Life happens, lifestyles change and technology obliterates in a blink of an eye what the world has been doing for hundreds of years.
I, too, have regrets. And not mailing the postcards for Dirk when I still had the chance top the list of those anguish unassuaged. Today, asking for one’s postal address is even considered an invasion of privacy.
***
The passing of days was swift. Eldest son grew up, went to college, found other interests and settled in the corporate world. The guitar has been muted for over a decade. During the pandemic, youngest son turned 12 and found elder brother’s old guitar and quickly signed up for lessons. In less than two years, my favorite pieces — the trio from Francisco Tarrega’s compositions “Lagrima,” “Rosita,” and “Adelita” started humming back to life in our home.
But Dirk’s Guitar Page was no more, a casualty of the times and of laws that wouldn’t allow it to live on the Net forever. But there is hope and on the Net it’s called Wayback Machine, a California-based digital archive of the World Wide Web founded by the Internet Archive.
In a few clicks, I found everything — the music sheets, the midi files from classical to modern, from Dionisio Aguado to Sylvius Leopold Weiss, from Louis Armstrong to Andrew Lloyd Webber, arranged neatly in alphabetical order the way it used to be.
Perhaps, it is a new era. And even I have a hankering for new things, new ways to live, new music, perhaps? I love the classical guitar for its melody of romance and of the old and ageless that never fade with time. Fernado Sor’s “Hunting Piece” and Gaspar Sans’ “Canarios” were high on the old list. But should we try something else? Scott Joplin’s “The Entertainer” or McCartney Lennon’s “Fool on the Hill” perhaps?
I am cherry picking what we may no longer be able to play or learn to play, considering the poverty of time in the social media-soaked world. But who knows? The year is young and hope as well as possibilities are as deep as the oceans as expansive as the skies.
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