I mentioned the poetry postcard yesterday: so it really had to start the series off. This is the postcard I picked up. I loved the title: The Travel Guide to the Country of Your Birth.
Some day, if I’m feeling brave, I may write my own story to that title. Although the poem itself does focus on a country (I need to do my research to pinpoint the right one), the phrase has the feeling of revisiting not just a location, but the past itself.
I find myself sharing family stories more and more, at home. Some of them are about family a generation or so up from me, but others are about me. A me, and a past, and a location that seem more and more distant and strange when I try to recall them.
The past is indeed a foreign country. I know. I even read the book that coined the phrase (thanks, school reading list), so I can be sure of it.
But for now, I’m going to write about postcards themselves. That’s my prompt. Stick to the brief.
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I looked in the postcards drawer today. There is a postcards drawer, you see. Postcards that I’ve bought, or Dan’s bought, or I’ve come into possession of.
Postcards that are kept, because the pictures are lovely, or the purchase marks a special visit, that kind of thing. They live in one of those card files that you pull out, like old-fashioned library cards (the card file in itself, part of a foreign-country past, of an office I used to work in).
There are also postcards that have been received that are kept. Reasons for keeping these are about the recipients, maybe the location where they went to, and their act of thinking to write and say how they were.
There are the postcards previously used for teaching, relics of my TEFL-past when no free postcard was safe if it could be put to educational use.
I am also rather a fan of the bad postcard. There are books for this, if you’re interested. Or at least Flickr groups. The notion is that they are unintentionally bad – they mean to be cheery, but they end up looking silly, at the very least.
When I was first in Poland, back in 1993, it wasn’t that long since the fall of Communism, and the postcards available tended to reflect that.
Regimes tend to help set the tone for bad postcards (though not exclusively, of course). Think heroic skyscrapers and patriotic monuments that are really not that great to look at.
So I have quite a few postcards that cover skyscrapers, monuments – or, at points, both. They are fascinating in terms of helping you think about what a country, or city, wants to say about itself to others.
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Postcards are invested with traditions, one way or another. That same long-distant office had its own tradition of sending postcards: if you were on holiday anywhere interesting (and people generally were, it was that kind of office), you sent the office a card.
The cards went up on the wall, or a notice board, I think. Some of them then got nobbled by the stamp collector of the office. I didn’t much like having to think about work at the point of being on holiday, sending the required postcard, but I did like looking at the cards that others sent.
Another set of postcard traditions were around the ones my granny received. One of her sons was particularly adept at this – whenever he went somewhere, for work or holiday, he would send a card.
The cards would go up on the serving hatch in her kitchen. (This makes it sound grand but it was one of those useful slide up bits between kitchen and dining room, so you could put food through without needing to carry it round between the two rooms.)
It wasn’t quite a shrine. Granny would not like that suggested. But it was a focal point in the kitchen, in its own way, and I liked it for that.
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I used to be better about sending postcards – or even just cards. I would sit in airports on work trips, using the time before flights to write (yes! by hand! with a pen!) to friends in different places. It was a way of showing them I was thinking about them, in the days before Facebook.
These days, Facebook itself is probably a form of postcard. A series of postcards, one after another – particularly where people tag themselves at a given location.
They may not be saying ‘Weather is here, wish you were wonderful’, but we know they are postcards. After all, they go up on a wall – or rather, a Wall.
Postcards are short and sweet. In the past, you might press hard with biro and draw an arrow to show your location, on the photo side of the card. (We stayed…here!) Now, you just tag yourself to show you were there.
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We tend to send postcards when we travel. But really, postcards from home are fascinating too.
I like Facebook for encouraging that element. Those little notes we put up for others, relating to very everyday life at home, that somehow we want to remember, or at least laugh about…these are what I think of as postcards from home.
You and I may live in the same city – or somewhere much more distant. Our days may have much in common – or little at all, even if we are only a few miles away.
But at least we remembered to send a card. Those few short sentences – maybe even just a few words. We put them together and sent them off, and others get to look at them on their own walls, even if only fleetingly.
So go on, post something. Write from the outpost of wherever your life is at today.
One day, that little note will feel like it came from a foreign country – and your later self might just be pleased to receive it.
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Tomorrow’s post: S is for…