Faded Letters

Back to the photo project topic, I promised to elaborate on Kevin's memory book in one of the past posts.

Kevin's mom gave him the memory book a few years ago.  He looked at it then we put it away for safekeeping and forgot about its existence.  With the photo project, I brought it back out.  He looked at it again the other evening after I added photos and reordered it a little.  It has to be chronological or what's the point, right?

She not only had all of his school portraits and class photos, she included birth announcements, doctors orders (he was a failure to thrive baby), birthday cards (see, I'm not the only one who keeps/hoards them!)  and report cards.  We were both amazed at what she kept and that she thought at the time to keep them.  They moved many times during his childhood so this had to be quite the effort.

Imagine Kevin's surprise and eventual embarrassment when he discovered that she also kept (and somehow FOUND) Kevin's love letters. Love letters being from when he was ages between thirteen and sixteen.

He sat and read them with a mixture of humor and absolute horror.  "My MOM read these!" he said at one point.  They were simple, age-appropriate letters from girls that he was "dating" at the time.  They were actual letters too, with stamps and everything! It was a picture to see him, some nearly forty years later, long married and wearing reading glasses.

One is written in pencil and is extremely faded.  I offered to scan it so he could better read it and he was a little horrified, "Um, no, no, you don't have to do that..."  I didn't read them while working on the book so I had no idea what they included, other than they were written by girls.  I've read them since and they're the typical letters from that age, you know: heartfelt and utterly humiliating to read as an adult.

But it gave me the idea that Kevin resoundly and immediately squashed:  Find the girl on the facebook and message her a copy of the letter, just for a laugh.  I mean, what good is social media for if not to share humiliating memories?

It also made me think of the episode of Everyone Loves Raymond where Raymond discovers that his mother read his journal when he was a teen.  The embarrassment was acute and hilarious.  Once again, I found myself in one of those sitcom episodes.