I Found an Old Love Letter (And it’s too good not to share!)
For this edition of my travel blog, I’ll be traveling a considerable distance: twenty-two years, to be precise. Let’s journey back in time together to a very good summer, the summer of 1996. That’s when I worked as a camp counselor in Interlochen, Michigan. It’s also the year I received the love letter I’ve decided to share here today.
I was a youngin then, just twenty years old. The summer of 1996 happens also to be when I met dreamy fellow-camp-counselor, Romeo. That’s theΒ pseudonym I’ll be using for the guy whose letter I recently stumbled upon.
It was a mere two months ago — in August of 2018 — that I rediscovered that gem of a twenty-two-year-old love letter and decided that it’s just too good not to share!
Summer Lovin’
In 1996 I had a gargantuan crush of epic proportions. It was an infatuation of the “Summer Lovin'” varietal, as in the 1978 classic movie musical, “Grease.” But from Sandra Dee’s perspective, obviously. (Maybe Romeo would give you Danny Zuko’s side of the story, but we all know who the more reliable source is.)
Had Me a BlastΒ
I’d completely forgotten about the letter. (But could I ever forgetΒ Romeo? Not possible!) When summer camp ended, Romeo and I went our separate ways. I moved to the Hawaiian Island of Kauai, and Romeo — well — you’ll hear where he went in the letter!
Now’s probably a good time to point out that these were the days before Facebook or social media. Mobile phones had already been invented, but no one I knew had one. So, as the social beings that we are, what did we do to stay in touch? How did we cope? How’d we communicate?
Well, we made telephone calls on pay-phones or on landline phones at home. Or, we wrote letters.
Happened So Fast
Before you know it, twenty-two years fly by in the blink of an eye. So let’s fast-forward our story to this summer — the summer of 2018. In August, before heading back to Europe for my second round of touring, I flew to Arizona. I went home to spend time with my parents.Β
Whenever I head to their place in Rio Rico, Arizona, I try to sort through some of my crap. I’ve got boxes and boxes of stuff hogging up space in their garage, so I need to get rid of whatever I can bear to part with. The only problem is that I can’t sort through a thing without boarding the Orient Express of memory-lane travel.
Tell Me More, Tell Me MoreΒ
So, the letter. I mentioned that I found an old love letter.Β And I think it may actually be the best love letter I’ve ever received — at least when ranked for humor as well as for clever ambiguity as to the depth of its sincerity. Is he genuine? Is it all joking? Allegedly there’s a grain of truth in every joke. So what I want to know is, how big is the grain? Is it the tiniest of grains, teff? (About 100 teff grains are the size of a kernel of wheat.)
Or is it a big-ass (in comparison!) wheat grain?
Well, pondering aside, I’m guessing you came here to see the letter. But before I share it, I want you to know that Romeo is not a native English speaker. English is his second language, so instead of judging the spelling of a letter written before spell-check was even a thing yet (at least not a widely used thing) — be impressed that he is bilingual!
The Old Love Letter
In case you couldn’t read from the above picture, I’ve typed out the old love letter for you, errors and all. (Leaving the errors in was painful for me, but I did it for you.)
You’re welcome.
Dear Stefanie,
Since we had an opportunity to talk on the phone couple of times this summer,I decided to write a letter to you as I promissed. Ofcourse some of my picturs will be included because I know that you are dying to see my beautiful face and chlothing. It was trully a pleasure to talk to you on the phone this summer and refresh some of great memories from the past that occurred at Interlochen. However ,I am now at the school at North Carolina and I love it so far. I have an appartmant that school gave me and I live with 4 gyes,but I have separate room and we all share bathroom ,toilet and kitchen(and toilet paper)-just kidding!
The picture that you have sent me earlier this summer I put on the wall along with two other pictures of my favorite girls,so I can look at your precious figure every time I go to bed(alone)... I know that you think that I am lieing at the moment ,but that is just your problem because I am honest about people that I love.
I have all the freedom of the world here at the college and "overhappy" is just a little word for me. I am just hoping it will continue to be this way. Anyways, if you would like to reach me you can give me a call on [redacted] but you have to be careful because I am sharing the phone with three other gyes, so if you live the message (how much you love me and miss me) everybody in the house get to hear it. Smart thing would be not to leave the message and just ask for me if some of them answer.
But if you really,really want to tell me how much you are desperately in love with me you can write to me and here is the address:
[redacted]
In the mean time I want you to know that I am thinking about you a lot and if I could just see you my life would be complete.
At this time I won't writ e like you "always"Stefanie, I am going to write this.
I love you forever and always Stefanie...
Your little boy ,who would like to hold you and kiss you [redacted]
Wonder What He’s Doing Now
So why on earth am I sharing this personal letter? Well, it’s so darn entertaining! Rediscovering this little gem made my heart beat faster. It brought back the surprise and delight of first receiving it! But also, I started thinking about the youth of today. People don’t write letters anymore, especially not teenagers. So the younger generations won’t have little treasures like this delicious old letter to unearth twenty years down the road.Β
It also seems that maybe people put more effort into communication in the pre-texting era. Receiving a letter in the mail was like unwrapping a present on Christmas day! Twenty years from now, will today’s teens and young adults be able to “stumble upon” their old text messages?
And if so, would the words just be a hodgepodge of acronyms and abbreviations carelessly strewn together — sentence fragments constructed chiefly of “OMG”s and “LOL”s, FFS? Perhaps with a quick “hey” being the extent of many a message?
What do you think? Have you come across your own letters from the past? How did they make you feel? And what do you think about the idea of future generations missing out on such experiences? Am I being overly dramatic about all of this? Give me your take in the comments section!
And don’t forget to share if you care to!Β
Until next time, happy travels!
Hi, Stefanie,
I was lucky enough to live in Norway for an entire year, June 1969 – June 1970. That was WAY before social media and email! I didn’t keep a journal that year, but I wrote home to my family at least once a week. I learned just a few years ago that Mom had kept all of my letters. What a thrill it was to go back and read through them. So many memories came flooding back. I remembered people and experiences that had completely disappeared from my conscious memory. I didn’t get to travel again until around 1999, but now I always keep a journal. Travel is so filled with new experiences that my husband and I will sometimes say to one another, “What did we do day before yesterday?!” The journal brings it all back. Photos help, but they don’t capture the other senses and emotions one experiences while traveling. I would recommend to anyone who travels to write about it…in letters, emails (that they save later!), journals. They won’t be sorry!
(By the way, I was in Oslo in the summer of 1969, up in the middle of the night in my dorm watching the first moon landing. I learned from one of his books that a 14 year old Rick Steves was also in Olso that summer watching it, too. )
Hello Joan Lindsay Kerr!
What a beautiful surprise to be able to read all of those letters and to get to experience those special days in Norway all over again! I totally agree that journal keeping is such a wonderful way to capture experiences even beyond what pictures can do. One of the reasons I started my blog two years ago was the realization that I had had so many wonderful travel experiences, but I hadn’t captured them properly. It’s so nice to be able to look back and re-read written memories as a way to relive those old experiences. Thank you so much for stopping by and sharing your story! And what a fun coincidence with Rick also being in Oslo at that same time back in 1969! π π
Iβm older and so wrote and received letters.I treasure the ones of my father as he wrote sparingly and with full of wise advice (that I may or may not have followed). As a historian and family record keeper, I was lucky to have family letters back to 1840βs. They are in collections now with my transcriptions. But the best were the ones my mother revealed late in her life, the love letters from my Great Grandparents in 1873 during a vicious yellow fever outbreak. They were quarantined in separate states so the only communication was the mail. They may be quant but they start out very formal and within a short time, become very intimate and passionate in the language of the time. She was a Yellow Fever widow and he was her attorney at the time. He lost his law partner during the epidemic which eventually took about 1,200 white people (numbers vary). They survived, married, had 3 more children to add to his 2 from his first marriage and lived a long and happy life. βCome nestle by my side, my turtle dove, I wish to talk to my Mary tonightβ. Yeah its that corny but its sweet to view that time through their words.
Mary, what a beautiful story! And what a treasure, indeed, to be able to get such intimate insights into the lives of your parents — and even great grandparents — through their own words kept safe for future generations in their letters. Thank you so much for sharing this here!
It’s probably not a surprise since I’m male, but I’ve had lamentably few people over the years refer to my figure as “precious”.
Colin recently posted…Me at Arthur’s Seat
Haha. Yeah, well, it’s not a very common adjective for describing someone’s figure. Thanks to “Lord of the Rings,’ I think of it primarily as a descriptor of something else, my precious! π π