Forever Stamps and The Letter Exchange

How long have you been mailing letters or cards for special occasions? Years, right? You would walk or travel to your local post office and buy a booklet of current rate first-class postage stamps. Tear one off, lick the back, stick it on the top right corner of your envelope and---voila! Your letter or card was ready to be delivered. Sometimes you'd wonder if you had the correct postage amount. Was it 30 or 40 cents? You weren't quite sure so why not just stick another one on there. After all, the postage cost is so cheap, right? Mailing a letter or card for under $1 seems like a bargain. Well, I guess it is. If you need the physical item, sure---you need to mail it. But if the message within the letter is the key, then E-MAILing it seems more appropriate and cheaper.

Then came the FOREVER stamps. Stamps for people who were never sure just how much the current postal rate was for a first-class stamp. Just buy a Forever Stamp and you never have to worry again. Your letter or card will automatically be accepted at the current rate. And it seems the FOREVER stamp is here to stay. I recently went to deliver some Christmas cards and I was told if they had anything other than Forever stamps. "Nope, they're all Forever stamps now," I was told by the female postal worker behind the counter. I guess that's good. Not sure what to make of it. I do like that all the stamps now are self-adhesive. I hated licking those older stamps. Just think of the diseases other people's saliva spread via envelope. And, there was a study done, someone discovered that licking the back of one postage stamp with glue earned you 1 calorie. One calorie for licking a stamp? How many points is that on WeightWatcher's Point System? But I digress.

Before e-mail became the most popular form of formal communication (before Facebook or Twitter), I was a member of a letter-writing club called The Letter Exchange. Basically, you would sign on as an anonymous member with a 5-digit "LEX" number and pay a very small fee to have your little blurb published in a thrice-yearly periodical also called The Letter Exchange. Someone, usually another member, would see your little blurb and send you a pen-pal-style letter to The Letter Exchange headquarters and they would forward your letter to the LEX number (name and address) in the system. This way, privacy was protected. If the person liked the letter or message, then they could respond directly or send another message back through The Letter Exchange with that person's LEX number. It was a different and unique way to connect with pen pals. Unfortunately, with the Internet exploding in popularity and the majority of households now owning computers and using e-mail increasing, the reality of The Letter Exchange was that it became less popular. Only older, die-hard members still remain, keeping the business and art form alive---like a dinosaur on a respirator. Younger LEX members and those interested in quicker response times (e-mail trouncing snail mail) became online users as they discovered the ease, quickness, convenience, and cost-savings of searching for "pen pals" online.

With the availability of chat rooms, Craigslist, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and other various online resources for meeting people (especially dating websites like PlentyofFish.com), it seems the art of letter writing and the need for first-class postage stamps (that won't last "forever") has faded into a bygone era---a quaint, old-fashioned time before the mighty computer and Internet became the king of all media.

~Andrew K.