A stack of letters from long ago
April 28, 2008 – 10:11 am
Recently my ex brought me two stacks of letters that I had put away in our daughter’s closet. They are only a small portion of the letters I have received over the years. I also have tons of postcards.
When I was 13 for some reason my mom wrote me off as a failure and trying to accomplish anything after that was pretty much useless so I stayed in my room. I could have used the Internet back then but it was 1984! I passed the time by watching music videos on my 14 inch TV. I then figured out that by hooking cable into my radio I would get stations from Montreal and beyond (Hello CHOM FM and better yet RFI!)
I spent a lot of time writing to my many pen pals. The hottest commodity around were stamps. Back then they were in the low 30 cent range so any time I had a bit over 3 bucks I would buy stamps. With that I could send 5 letters. Noticing that this was important to me, my mother started intercepting the letters so I had the letters sent to my friend’s house. Over the course of 10 years I had dozens of pen pals.
Around 1990 my dad gave me a computer (8088) and my brother gave me a 28K modem. I quickly landed on Fidonet. I started exchanging letters with my new friends behind the quickly crumbling iron curtain in USSR, Yugoslavia, Romania and Bulgaria. We couldn’t send pictures to each other back then but the text would only take a few days to get from Moscow to Quebec City. The oldest e-mail (node-to-node) beat snail mail by a long shot.
I read first hand accounts of the Romanian Revolution, the destruction of the Berlin Wall, the end of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and the arrival of the first 56k modem in Sophia, Bulgaria. Some of my Fidonet friends I have found again and added to my Facebook. Some of my buddies just couldn’t believe that I had dozens of contacts from Cardiff to Vladivostok but I always thought it was the most normal thing in the world and it did direct my choice of career in the end.
I have never traveled beyond North America but I have never felt disconnected from the rest of the world and I am surprised how many tourists (and immigrants) I have met who cannot believe I know so many specific details about their country or hometown. There is a huge misconception that the world is big. It isn’t because many of my foreign pals and I are only removed by one person whom we both know well or have met randomly. These will wind up in a scrap book 
