A FEW weeks ago I was sorting through a box of old papers and came across a group of letters from my late grandfather. Grandpa Bill, who lived in Texas, was a faithful correspondent. The letters, dozens of them, are almost all typewritten on a thin, delicate onionskin paper. Sometimes he wrote to all four of his grandchildren at once, making copies by sticking shiny sheets of carbon paper between each piece of stationery. How old-fashioned it seems today.
The letters were affectionate and newsy and would update us on my grandparents’ health and travels, which rarely took them farther than the Texas hill country, about an hour from their home in Austin. I have only one handwritten epistle from my grandfather, and it begins with this: “Ordinarily I would use a typewriter for legibility if for nothing else, but Grandmother Lawson is asleep and the clatter of the typewriter would disturb her. I don’t like to do that as she needs all the rest she can get.”
Even in mundane descriptions, my Grandpa Bill’s manner of speaking came through on the page. “The weather down here right now is awful,” he wrote one July. “It is Texas-hot. And I’ve heard it said that is hotter than the hinges of hell.” Or this, when he heard I had broken a bone: “I know a lot of sorry old people that I would not care a whit if they broke their arms, but you are certainly not in that class nor one of them.”
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/01/nyregion/long-island/01Rgen.html