Never Walked In High Heels

For my birthday this year my neighbors gave me the most amazing orchid. As I look at it on my dining table I can count over twenty blooms facing the world. It’s something pretty and alive greeting me every morning when I come downstairs.

Naturally, when I received it I did what I was raised to do as a child. I wrote each of the parties who chipped in to buy it a separate thank you note. Granted, the fact that I managed to get them all done in a timely manner was an impressive feat for me. But they were done and out by the end of that weekend.

And then I started getting thank yous for the thank you notes.

So I started to ask around, thinking that maybe there was some cultural difference between the US and UK about the writing of thank you notes which I had missed over the past several years. These responses weren’t just a casual ‘thanks,’ they were ‘thank yous’ followed by a recalling of what it was like to receive a letter in a mailbox. They were heartfelt and meant something.

Which depressed me in a way that I wasn’t expecting. When did a common thank you note begin to carry so much weight? Have people just started to settle for thank you texts and emails?

For me the act of writing a thank you note is an exercise of living in and even understanding the moment. It examines something you’ve been given allowing the  understanding of what it adds to your life, be it something graceful for the dining room table, or that box of chocolate you have been looking forward to all day. There are some gifts I get where I sit down and think “what the heck (this is always a weak choice for the replacment of mild expletives, either use them or replace them entirely) am I going to say about this one.” And so I sit it on my desk and look at it.  Then I start to think about the person who gave it to me. Usually by this point I’ve come up with something to fill a 3×5 note card with my terrible quadriplegic handwriting.

It’s another one of those mother myths that I’m learning is actually true. Thank you notes apparently mean a lot to the people who get them. These days they mean more than ever. Mom was right all along.

These notes weren’t even hand written, which is why I find it so surprising that they got a reaction at all. But then I think about the Christmas cards I’ve written the past few years. They too, have caused quite the stir. In a world of text messaging and the iphone, where we all essentially have all our friends in our handbag, people still love getting an envelope in the mail hand addressed to them. And when it comes to a thank you note, people still need to feel appreciated.

Perhaps it is a sign of our highly materialistic nature, that we get something as a gift and don’t seek to understand the greater value of it with our own lives. Maybe we’ve gotten to a state where text messaging as the only form of communication is enough to sustain a relationship. But if finding a personal note in one’s mailbox is surprising I can’t help but wonder what we do expect from our relationships, and how much time we’re willing to have them take.