Handwritten notes

When I was growing up, my mother taught me that many situations required a handwritten note. Someone gives you a gift, you write them a note. You want to invite people to a fancy party, you write them all invitations. If you can't attend said party, you send your regrets in a handwritten note. You do so with the best pen you have on the best paper you can afford, ideally notes printed for this very purpose.

Almost none of these situations ever applied to our life. We received almost no gifts from anyone outside our immediate family. We were poor and did not throw fancy parties, nor did anyone invite us to them. Our pens were cheap, as was our paper.

The lesson, though, stuck with me, and at some level I still believe it. That's the reason that I am personally writing well over two hundred thank-you notes to my company's clients. The notes are brief, and my handwriting is awful, but they are handwritten, and that seems to me, given my mother's training, to make them both more personal and somehow better. After all, I email people all day long, but I rarely write notes.

I wonder, though, whether this belief is a passing fancy, a notion lost on generations younger than mine, or at least on the children of generations younger than mine. I certainly rarely bother to handwrite, even when I have topics of great import to cover. Email is my medium.

I do, though, appreciate the rare handwritten note I receive, and I suppose for that reason if for no other I shall keep writing these cards to demonstrate, in this small way, how truly thankful I am to our clients for their business.