Since the age of about 14, I have kept almost every letter, birthday card, postcard and thank you card I have received.  Along with concert tickets (my first:  April Wine, at Lansdowne Park in Ottawa, on August 28, 1981.  I was 13.  Bryan Adams and Loverboy opened.  Cost?  $10.50).

These artifacts sit, like hundreds of time capsules, in three banker’s boxes.  Last week I was organizing the similar keepsakes of someone I know.  Reflecting on someone’s life got me reflecting on my own.  So, as I seem to do every several years, I opened up the boxes.

Did you know that people used to write each other?  Using a pen or pencil?

There is a 1994 letter from my friend Pierre, from Switzerland.  He had broken his leg and wrote to tell me about it.  He marked the envelope “Air Mail” in pen (evidently there were envelopes – and paper – easily at hand) and told the story of his skiing mishap, taking a *FULL PAGE* to do so.  Can you imagine how much time and hassle that took?

Even more incredible to me are the thank you cards, for all range of matters that today rarely merit a hard-copy follow-up:  hosting a friend for the weekend, attending someone’s graduation, sending someone a gift, hosting someone for dinner.  When was the last time you received a thank you card?  If it has been in the last decade, count yourself lucky.

Then there are the congratulations:  for graduating high school or university; for landing a new job.

Then there are the condolences for losing a grandparent.

I wonder how many cards and letters I wrote?  I have evidence of only a few, because they were returned to me after the recipient died.  It may be accurately inferred from my posing of this question that I have not written a letter or thank you card in a long time.  Although, I can boast of having written two postcards this summer, to mark my first return to my birthplace in tiny Berwick, Nova Scotia.  Naturally, I sent them to my parents.

Finding, buying, writing and mailing those postcards turned out to be a surprising amount of work.  Nowadays most of us send a text. It may not include complete sentences or even complete words.

“Thx.”

Possibly with an emoji, maybe with a photo, perhaps with a GIF.  Quite likely with typos and misspellings.

You know what is missing?  The feeling. The letters and cards in my banker’s boxes are startling to me for the emotion they conveyed – and still do, all these years later.

Eight or 10 years ago, I mailed a thank you card to one of my first advisor clients, Greg Jizmejian.  Perhaps a week later, I arrived at his workplace for a meeting.  Upon seeing me, he immediately walked toward me, a big smile on his face, his hand extended for a handshake when he was still 20 feet away.

He was doing something that 20 years ago, he never would have done.  He was thanking me for sending him a thank you card.