Syndicated Post.

BlogHer, the company that advertises on Smithellaneous, has selected one of my recent posts to syndicate across their network. That means I get to post this little cool piece of blog bling on my side bar!



BlogHer features many great writers on its main site and I'm honored to be included. If you have a minute, please click through to see where some of my writing has ended up. And if you have just another minute, I'd love it if you'd leave a comment over there, as well; it will make my article feel a little less lonely as it hangs out over there in non-Smithellaneous land.

(Also, if you haven't read the Big News post below this one, be sure to do so!)

Letters to Obama and E-Mails to An Editor

We received our first shipment of the Letters To Obama book this week. It was so exciting to see Sarah open a box of books that contained her writing; we are incredibly proud of her.

I don't know if I ever explained how she came to even be in the book; if I did, please bear with me as I re-explain.

David Tabatsky, the editor I worked with for my Chicken Soup article, e-mailed me earlier in the year and said, "My colleague and I are putting together a book of letters from children to the President; it's going to press in a couple of days but if Sarah can get something to me tonight, we would love for her to be included."

Well, let me just say that Sarah jumped at the chance and dived into super intense writing mode; by 9 pm, her letter was finished and e-mailed to David. He wrote the next day and said how much he loved it. Since there were 1,000 submissions and only 179 made it into the book, Sarah was extra honored to get his special invitation.

If you go to the following link, you'll find a heartwarming story about some of the other children involved in the the book.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bruce-kluger/a-proud-day-in-lincoln-ne_b_191611.html

As happy as our family is about this whole project, there has been one small glitch. When I started glancing through the book, I discovered that the entire last paragraph of Sarah's letter had been left out!

I gaped! I gasped! I was taken aback! I asked myself in a distinctly discombobulated way, "WHERE did the paragraph go?"

I immediately sat down and e-mailed David, thanking him again for inviting Sarah to be involved and then very nicely letting him know that an important part of her letter was missing.

The next day I received an e-mail from Bruce, David's co-editor. In essence his letter said that while he couldn't put his hands on Sarah's letter right at that minute, the deletion of the paragraph was not a mistake. He said that he and David had discussed it at some length and had jointly made the decision to leave it out.

WHAT??!!?

Well, don't you know that my momma hackles raised right up and I immediately prepared myself to jump on a plane to New York City and personally bang David and Bruce's heads together. In the nicest possible way, of course.

However, I am not a veteran minister's wife for nothing. If I've learned nothing else in twenty-seven years of trodding the pastoral pathway, I have learned the art of diplomacy and tact.

And so I composed a lovely e-mail to Bruce to express my "concerns." (Don't you love that word?) I thanked him for involving Sarah in the project, I complimented his work on the book--and I truly meant every word of it! He and David did an outstanding job.

And then I went on to say that I was curious as to why he and David would omit the most poignant, meaningful part of Sarah's letter. I said that the letter now ended awkwardly and the edit, in simple terms, just did not work. (And since he couldn't put his hands on her letter, I included the original letter in the e-mail.)

And then I took a deep breath. And waited. With hackles still slightly raised.

Only a couple hours passed before I received a return e-mail from Bruce. He was appalled but thankfully, not at me. He was appalled at himself and David.

He said that he had gotten Sarah's letter mixed up in his head with another child's letter (which they DID have to edit, for whatever reason). He agreed with me that the (inadvertent) edit done on Sarah's letter was awful and he apologized profusely that the paragraph had been left off. He said that in the hurry to include her letter at the last minute, the last paragraph must have been accidentally chopped off in the typesetting process.

He went on to say that although the book is not yet being printed on a large scale, they may very well be headed in that direction soon. If so, he promised the change would be made to her letter and that he would send us some free books in apology.

Sigh.

At least it was nice to know that they hadn't done it on purpose. You can probably imagine how puzzled I was after being told that they had discussed her last paragraph and made the decision to leave it off. I just couldn't quite wrap my mind around the fact that her little sweet paragraph was somehow inappropriate.

Anyway, if you order one of the books through us, I am going to print out and include the last paragraph of her letter, just because you folks are special and need to see the whole thing!

So that's the story! And as I mentioned, the first order of books is in and the second order is on the way. Info about how to order the Letters to Obama book can be found in the right column.

Pull Out A Smile

When our family traveled full time for fifteen years, getting our mail was always an interesting challenge.

I mean, think about it. When you are in hundreds of towns every year, how does your mail catch up with you? Do you retain your own personal mailman to gather up your letters and personally deliver them? Do you hire a flock of carrier pigeons? Do you reinstate the Pony Express? Do you just live your life without mail and have a lovely time ignoring all those pesky bills?

Don't I wish.

When we were on the road, we came up with the solution of using Steve's parent's address. Once a week, they would bundle up all our mail in a big Priority Mail envelope and send it to the town where we were headed next. And then if all went well, when we arrived there, our mail would be waiting.

Now remember. The majority of our traveling was done in the olden days, before there was widespread use of the Internet or even (gasp!) e-mail! That meant that opening the mail was the high point of our week because we hadn't been in constant e-mail contact with friends and family around the country.

In fact, we didn't even have (gasp, again!) a cell phone! If we wanted to make a call, we had to go into the church we were singing at and ask to use the church phone. (Putting the charges on our own phone card, of course.) I remember so many times just wishing for a bit of privacy to make a call, as the church secretary sat five feet from me while I talked to my parents or a friend. I was always tempted to say to the secretary, "Wouldn't you like to leave now?" but, alas, I never did.

We thought we were really in high cotton when we finally got a pager. We'd be going down the road and Steve's pager would go off and we would all be so excited by that cutting edge advancement in communication. Unfortunately, we were driving a rig that was over 50 feet long and so just pulling off at a pay phone was not always the easiest maneuver. We'd have to wait until we finally got to a truck stop or a rest area big enough to handle the size of our home on the road and then (sometimes an hour or two later) finally return the page.

I'm sure some of you younger folks reading this can hardly believe the quaint antiquity of those long ago days.

But anyway, back to the weekly mail pouch. One of the things I always looked forward to was the multi-page, handwritten letters I would frequently receive from my childhood friend, Lorrie. She was such a faithful correspondent and it always made life on the road seem a little less lonely when I saw my name in her familiar handwriting.

For the first few years, I wrote her back by hand until the wonderful day came when we got a typewriter. Not a word processor or a computer mind you, but a typewriter. A manual typewriter. A machine with a returning carriage that made a "ding" sound. A machine that had no Internet connection. A machine that didn't even have to be plugged in! How quaint is that?

I was so excited when that newfangled, high tech machine appeared in our lives. Finally, my horrendous penmanship could be shelved. Finally, I could write as fast as my mind could think. Finally, my friends and family members wouldn't have to hire hieroglyphic experts in order to read my missives. It was a huge step forward for womankind!

Since we lived in an RV, there was not a lot of extra space to sit and write and so I came up with a grand idea. I took the typewriter into the bathroom, put the lid down on the toilet and sat in there with the typewriter balanced on my knees. (Sort of a precursor to the lap top!)

I was perfectly happy and contented in there--that is, until someone had to actually visit the bathroom for its originally intended use. Sigh. Didn't they know I was doing important work in there?

Okay, by this time you're no doubt wondering, "What is the purpose of this post? Is Becky getting to the age where trips down memory lane are all she has? Have all those malted milk balls she's consumed since Easter morning somehow clouded her thinking and messed with her mind? Just what is going on here?"

Okay, I'll tell you. What set off this rambling, reminiscent post is a letter I got in the mail two days ago. From Lorrie. Several pages long. Handwritten.

She and I e-mail back and forth a lot, but every once in a while she will give me the gift of her time, and stationery, and penmanship and send me a real, old fashioned letter, the kind of letter that is quickly falling by the wayside in this era of instant messaging and speedy e-mails. And seeing her handwriting, unchanged in the thirty-five years I've known her, just brought back all those memories of the road, and the Priority envelope, and the old typewriter, and the simpler lives we lived before the Internet took over.

It occured to me that getting a handwritten letter in the mail these days is a rare luxury; in fact, it's so rare that I really think that we need to have a handwritten letter revival. Just think about how you feel when you open the mailbox and amidst all the bills and advertising circulars from Pizza Hut, you see an envelope with your name penned on it? Isn't that so much more meaningful than skimming through letters in your inbox?

Pen and paper were here long before the Internet ever made its appearance; they are our "old friends" of letter writing. You can't bundle e-mails in a ribbon and store them in a special container; you can't hear the rustle of pages a decade old when you're surfing the Internet. There's just something so special about the feel of an envelope between your fingers that makes communication between friends so real and so precious.

As much as I adore computers and technology, I get a little lonely for the days of more personal communication. And so I wonder if you'd like to join me on a journey back to the lovely, old fashioned world of letter writing. Would you like to break out your pen and the box of floral stationery you haven't look at in two years and jot a note to someone special in your life?

Wouldn't it be wonderful if we all decided to occasionally hand write a letter, simply because we know that whoever is on the receiving end will look into their mailbox, reach in, and pull out a smile?

That's a good enough reason for me.