Kashmir shrinks into my mailbox,/my home a neat four by six inches.//I’ve always loved neatness. Now I hold/the half-inch Himalayas in my hand.//This is home, and this the closest/I've ever been to home…
-Postcard from Kashmir, Agha Shahid Ali
I’ve always been sent and have sent postcards to distant places from other distant places. Sometimes a bit bigger than four by six inches, but not by much. I’ve liked buying postcards as much as stamps for postcards wherever I’ve gone. I try to convince the postmaster that postcard stamps should cost less than letter stamps, usually to no avail. It’s the same effort, he says, to deliver an envelope as it is a card, the same hand to hand, hand over hand, hand after hand effort required for both.
That’s why I like sending a postcard, the fact that when it is mailed in a place like Sudan, say, or Nepal or Argentina, many people’s hands, starting with mine, touch it (and get a chance to read it and look at the picture) before it arrives finally in the recipient’s hand So many different people in that chain of events, I bet they would be surprised if they were ever to be in the same room and were told, You all helped deliver the same postcard.
Finding the right words for a postcard is an art, for me mostly a jokey form of art. From Cuzco, Peru I once mailed a card to Mel Gerling, a farmer friend in Missouri who drove combines and tractors and used electric augurs to lift grain into bins and bailing machines to pack straw. The postcard showed a family of Inca farmers wearing ponchos and chullos and standing barefoot in their field with a ox-drawn plow. I had written on the back, Greetings from Peru, this is how all the farmers work here. It was a joke, but when I got home and saw Mel, he pulled out the card and asked me if it was really true. I had to admit, No, that photo was taken a hundred years ago.
I used to write cards to a man in Upper Egypt from whatever other country I was in. Once I sent one from Havana and when I saw him later he pulled out a high stack of the cards he’d received from me over the years and we went through them one by one, him asking me about each country’s stamp. I remember he really treasured the Cuba stamp.
Maybe it all started with postcards I’d been sent when small by my great Aunt Ahwee, who got her name when my toddler sister could not pronounce her name, Marie, properly and could only say Ahwee. Aunt Ahwee would send me in St.Louis postcards from Disneyland that always signed off Love and Kisses, Ahwee. That’s how I really feel like ending every postcard I still write. Ahwee…