I’ve recently been trying a new app/service called Bond Gifts. Bond is essentially a gifting portal app with an assortment of curated gifts designed to live at the mid- to high-end. One of the novel gift options – one I haven’t seen elsewhere – is a handwritten letter. Essentially you type your message/letter in the app and then Bond turns your note into a handwritten note (see how it is done here). Their catch phrase is – “you type it, we write it.”

This past week I sent several people these “handwritten” notes. I loved the idea of the service. As I initially saw it, I could send a heartfelt letter from my iPhone. The easy of the iPhone with the care and touch of a handwritten note.

I am caught in a hybrid generation. One that began with the norm of written notes but one wherein the digital transition has now shifted written notes to the peripheral. Of course I never truly wrote letters like generations before me where travel and early communication technologies like interstate telephony were costly and/or not as heavily used.But I certainly lived a time when handwritten notes were all I knew. When I lived in Europe in the 1990s I hand wrote a letter to my parents each and every week. During that time I spoke with them only twice a year. Email was only then becoming common and it still required me to go to the local library where I had access to a computer and Internet access. As a result I didn’t send or receive many emails. I still have every handwritten letter I wrote and every letter I received from my parents during this period. I can still hear my dad’s voice in those letters. Despite their increasingly infrequent use, I still believe a handwritten note is appreciated. It is special. Obviously what Bond was trying to capture.

Bond attempts to upscale the handwritten notes by sealing the letter with a wax seal. As a return address they use my name with a mailing address in NYC. I sent a few “handwritten” notes to a few different people and the response was interesting. One recipient thought it was horrible. They knew my handwriting and thought it was someone attempting to make a bad joke – or worse – someone attempting blatant fraud. They didn’t believe the message was from me and the NYC address added doubt. The sincerity of my message was lost with the imperfect attention to details – details only I can personally get right. A second recipient asked if I “had my secretary in NYC write the letter.”

In all of this I realized the true art of the handwritten letter is not the “handwrittenness,” it is the time taken to write the note. I still like the idea of a handwritten note. A heartfelt note. I like the idea of taking the time to show appreciation. I decided to challenge myself to see if I could write just one handwritten note a day – 365 in the next year.

I plan to start tomorrow morning. And each morning after that for the next 364 days. Traveling might impede the perfect execution of this goal – I fly about 15 red-eyes a year – and have a pretty hectic schedule.  But I’ll try to make it the first thing I do at the start of each day.

I’ll report back in a year on how this experiment worked.

I’m at the beach this week for one final taste of summer. I rarely find make the time for pure leisure reading – opting instead to catch-up on work-related reading, of which there is always ample. But in this final week of vacation, I wanted to remain off-the-grid as much as possible and once here decided I’d mix in some pure leisure reading to solidify this push . I’d only brought work-related reading with me, but found several books on the shelves in the house.  I typically read several books at once and rarely finish any of them so I pulled River : One Man’s Journey Down the Colorado, Source to Sea and Flags of Our Fathers off the shelf and began both. As is likely obvious – I have a hard time making time for fiction.

I’ve always been attacted to the travel and adventure genre and am currently about half-way through Touch the Dragon: A Thai Journal. River : One Man’s Journey Down the Colorado, Source to Sea fits squarely in this style.  A good read – but slower than I’d prefer and perhaps a better read for a hiking or camping trip than a week at the beach.

Many in the house had previously read Flags of Our Fathers and strongly recommended it. Having lost my own father  – a veteran of two hot wars and one cold one – earlier this year, the experiences and perceptions of James Bradley are eerily similar to my own. My father never really spoke about his time in Vietnam or in other assignments and I realize there are vast swaths of his life that I don’t know. I have baseball games and family road trips, but I have only rare glimpses into the other side of his life.

I was reminded how grateful I was for the soldiers who came to his viewing, and later funeral at Arlington National Cemetery.  They shared stories and antidotes. The side of his life I had never seen. I thought of the day he died in the hospital – like “Doc” Bradley- and the many stories that died with him. Reading Flags of Our Fathers left me craving to know about these large voids. My father had received a variety of citations and medals – including a bronze stars, a bronze star with valor, and the purple heart – but I never knew the experiences behind them.  Not until after his death did I really know about the bronze stars nor that the purple heart and the bronze star with valor derived from the same event.

My father was a young lieutenant in Vietnam – in charge of even younger men.  Boys really. He lost one of these young men and while he never talked about it and after reading Flags of Our Fathers I wonder if it is the reason he never talked about it. Like Doc Bradley – my father never had the appetite to return to Vietnam.

The glimpses I did get came from adjacent experiences.  For example, he always had a profound respect for the flag – a respect he taught me through example. Six men raised a flag on Iwo Jima. While my dad wasn’t even a year-old yet, he would later learn through personal experience what that flag raising stood for. As I read Flags of Our Fathers I learned more about my own father and the experiences he never talked about.

For the last seven years, we’ve had a tradition on the Sunday evening before Memorial Day.  We start at the Tidal Basin and walk the monuments in DC. We first pass the WWII Memorial, then Vietnam, the Lincoln Memorial, circling through the Korean War Memorial, FDR and closing our walk at the Jefferson on the way back to the Tidal Basin. It has become a tradition that dozens of families now join us for.

Then the next day – no matter what is going on – we call my dad and thank him for his military service.  We buried my father in Arlington earlier this month and this year no call was made, but I did reflect on him constantly throughout the day. I thought about going to Arlington to visit his grave. While I wanted to, there was a part that didn’t and this part of me won the moment and the day.  I haven’t been there since burying him several weeks ago.

My dad never talked about his service.  He served in two hot wars and one cold one – earning a purple heart, a couple of bronze stars including one with Valor, the Legion of Merit and many other honors over a lifetime of service – all of which I only really learned about after his death. As we made final edits to his obituary, we only found these metals and awards after much searching.  They were stuffed in a box stored in the garage.  Several men who had served under his command attended his service and recounted stories – probably more in that day than I heard in a lifetime from my dad.

Yesterday, I received an email that quoted John McCrae’s 1915 poem – In Flanders Fields:

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our places; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly.
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

I reflected on visiting Flanders Fields when I lived in Europe and being moved by the Last Post ceremony at Menin Gate in Leper, Belgium. I reflected on the sacred experience of visiting  The Netherlands American Cemetery outside of Maastricht and other experiences I’ve had visiting hallowed grounds around the world.

I wish I would have visited Arlington today with some poppies.

While this article by Randall Stross doesn’t mention exact correlations, I’m a believer in the premise that legos are a valuable training tool (gender aside).  With my oldest now nine, I’ve been doing research on how best to start him programming as well.