Dear Grandson,
How are you? Are you having a good time? I am fine. I’ll see you when camp is over.
Love, Grandpa
This letter is probably not much different than what my grandparents sent to me when I was in summer camp. One reason is because of the gap in the connection between the family’s oldest and youngest generations. However, many other things have changed and here are some of them.
- Kids today no longer learn cursive writing in school. They learn how to print, but not how to write in a flowing manner. This might not be so terrible with the many digital ways of communicating thoughts (including voice dictation), but by not learning how to write, they also are not learning how to read what we write to them. That means I have to type out my letters and possibly postcards (if I could figure out how to get them into the printer).
- They are not learning how to spell. Today when you type a word wrong, the spell checker corrects it automatically. The same with grammar. The words come out fine, but the kid isn’t learning what they are doing wrong or the right way to compose a sentence. I find this with myself. Where I used to look up a word I could not spell in the dictionary, I now type it anyway I can, and the spell checker makes it right. To avoid getting lazy I always look to see what I did wrong. The grammar is a different story. I’ve developed my own style and sometimes I am offered a correction that I do not want to make. I attribute that to a stupid grammar checker.
- Synonyms are important to me. I am not sure if my grandkid even knows what a synonym is. I know that when I was in camp, I didn’t care. Today I am very fussy about not using the same words too often in a letter, or paragraph or ugh, in the same sentence; so I click the right mouse button for a synonym. This is a feature I like and use a lot. In the old days, I used the Roget’s Thesaurus over and over again. Today what I do is easier, but I no longer get to look at the large volume of choices Roget used to give me. Now, I usually take the first choice and get on with what I am doing. I still have my worn and frayed Thesaurus and Dictionary but they have been getting very little attention these past many years. Actually I’ve probably abandoned them before my grandson was born.
- Another previously well-used book that is now idle [comment: I originally wrote abandoned but I used that word in the previous sentence and didn’t want to repeat it so soon] is Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. I used to go through this book if not daily, then every few days. I love using quotations and while I was searching for an appropriate one, I would come across so many others that I enjoyed reading and thinking about when I could use them. Today I just need to put a few words in the search line, and I get dozens of quotes that are all great to use. The problem is that I no longer have the adventure of finding related, and many times unrelated, quotes I will enjoy reading.
- Talk about getting lazy. I set my Autocorrect to change “iew” to “I enjoyed writing this letter to you because it got me to think about you and look forward to any mail you send me and to the next letter I will write to you.” Actually he will not be writing me except the obligatory letter the camp counselor will give him a template for to send to me. But I will continue writing to him. I now have so many Autocorrect sentences that I prepared a list to refer to them, so I do not need to remember them (but I still need to remember that I have an Autocorrect for that phrase or
sentence and to look at the list for it). - I use old postage stamps on the mail to my grandson. I like doing this and I have fun choosing stamps I think he would notice and look at. The problem is that most people do not use stamps anymore; they use postage meters. Also, forever stamps eliminate the need to continue buying
new stamps or to keep track of postage rate changes which seem to occur about twice a year. The old stamps I use plaster the entire front of the envelope, take extra time but I find it a comfort to do. And maybe it would kindle an interest in my grandson for stamp collecting. When
I was young everyone collected stamps. Today it seems to have stopped with those “everyone’s” from when I was a kid. Not too good, but still a great hobby.
Things change. Most are for the better, but perhaps not everything is for the better. However, one thing that has not changed is the letter at the beginning of this blog. That is still the same. Too bad about that. Maybe in a year or two, ChatGPT would come up with a better letter.
Contact Us
If you have any tax, business, financial or leadership or management issues you want to discuss please do not hesitate to contact me at [email protected] or click here.
