asia calling

When I moved to Mexico, I opened a postal account with Mailboxes, Etc. in Manzanillo.

Like most northerners, I had heard horror tales of  Christmas cards arriving in July, magazines having gone missing, packages delivered to the wrong city. I thought I would avoid all that with a speedy courier service.

The Mailboxes, Etc. system was rather simple. I paid a monthly fee. The address I was given was a mail drop in Laredo, apparently to give the impression I was not living outside of The States. My mail would be delivered there and then shipped to Manzanillo, cutting the Mexican postal system out of the process. When the mail arrived, I would pay a delivery fee based on its weight.

That delivery fee was quite expensive. Magazines constituted the bulk of my mail when I opened the box. National Geographic. The Economist. The American Spectator. National Review. The Oregon State Bar Bulletin.

But that soon changed. The political network had spotted a good thing.

Within two months, I was receiving solicitations from almost every political group on the spectrum. Planned Parenthood. Right-to-Life. The ACLU. The Federalist Society. Some obscure gay rights group. The Moral Majority. The Wildlife Fund. The Sierra Club. Greenpeace. Three different political parties.

Apparently, they were all as confused about my politics as are some people who know me.

But the candidate solicitation letters were the worst. They arrived like a plague of locusts. Often ten at a time.

I would pay the delivery fee and often drop them in the trash unopened. Just as I did at my post office box in Salem. I could have cut the procedure short by simply dumping the peso notes in the trash

That changed when a Texas candidate for the United States Senate sent me a solicitation letter that looked like the manuscript of a sequel to War and Peace. It was so thick it had to be stuffed into one of those envelopes that disguises the type of calendar you have ordered for the year.

That was enough for me. I started investigating the cost of a postal box in San Patricio. The price for a year's rental was a fraction of what I had paid for that last solicitation letter. I signed up that day and shut down my account in Manzanillo.

Once I switched to the Mexican postal system, all of the political fund pleas stopped. I guess they lost track of me. They are not quite as dogged as the alumni associations of my university, master's program, and law school.

Other than those waste basket missiles, my postal box now hosts cards and letters from friends and relatives. (I now read all of my magazines and newspapers on my telephone or Kindle.)

And that is a long way around to say that I found an unexpected treasure trove in my Mexican postal box yesterday afternoon. Two post cards.

When my house guest was here recently, we talked about the lost art of post cards. In the 1970s, I had a list of about thirty people who I would send cards to whenever I traveled.

That was the same list of people with whom I exchanged long philosophical letters. It was a different era. Today people (young and old) snap a selfie of themselves eclipsing a famous monument. The very act is filled with metaphors of the age.

Post cards hark back to an era when life was every bit as adventurous, but sharing it with the family back home was a bit slower. Young men heading off to war or undertaking The Grand Tour. Families on vacation. Grandparents still living in the Old Country. It was all quite nineteenth century.

I felt a bit like that when I looked at the front of the cards. One was the communist equivalent of a Byzantine icon honoring the late (but not necessarily lamented) Ho Chi Minh. The other was a photograph of the Hawaiian royal palace with captions in English and Japanese. I was momentarily flummoxed about the origin of the cards.

Of course, we all know how to counter that flummoxity -- just turn over the card. And so I did.

My Ho card was from Gary Denness, the former blogger of Mexile. I now have three of his post cards. One of The Queen decked out in cool shades. One of the London Eye. And now a bit of commie adoration.

And, as always, his greetings were witty and timely.

The Japanese Hawaiian card was from Teresa Freeman. Some of you may remember her encouraging comments when I was preparing to move to Mexico. Her background is Cuban, but she always wanted to move to Mexico.

At the time, she lived in Washington. The night before I left Salem, she gave me a Spanish-English-Spanish dictionary that I use frequently to parse out the subtleties of Spanish -- on the rare occasion I even recognize a subtlety exists.

She and her husband Steve never made it to Mexico. Instead, they moved to Japan. Thus, the post card. She did not mail it from Tokyo, though. She was back in The States preparing a move to Tennessee. She mailed the card from Washington.

Until I looked closer at the card, I was positive it had a Japanese chrysanthemum stamp. I was wrong, It is one of those American forever stamps. The photograph appears to be an artichoke. Shot from the top. It turns out to be a succulent.

Keeping with today's theme, she added cheerfully: "By the time you get this we'll probably be in TN." And she was correct. I received an email from her several weeks ago informing me they had arrived.

That last sentence sums up the tension between electronic mail and post cards. If I am only interested in receiving timely information, nothing beats email. Or Facebook. Or any one of the other countless applications people now use to share their their immediate experiences with the world.

Post cards are different. They do not require as much time and thoughtful preparation as a letter, but they are a physical reminder of friendships won and then well-tended.

I have known both Gary and Teresa at least two years before I moved to Mexico. That is thirteen years.

And it is true that I met neither of them in person at my favorite restaurant or at a reception for a political candidate who is addicted to lengthy solicitation letters. We met on the internet. Through Mexpatriate (though it was called something quite different then).

So, I cannot discount the power of the digital community in creating relationships. They do happen. Some of you who are reading this have had similar experience. With me. And others.

But meeting them through these pages led to meetings in person. In Salem and in London. Tending what was planted.

I am often asked why I send out anniversary and birthday cards to people whose addresses are in my contact list. Those two post cards are as good an answer as any. Friendships and acquaintances are hard won. Voltaire was correct in advising Candide to let his garden grow.

And that is what I am about to do right now. I have just completed writing notes inside three birthday cards (to my nephew in prison, to a good friend facing the choice of marriage, and to my cousin who I have shared years of common experiences).

Yesterday, Asia called. Today, I need to make a call of my own. Three, to be exact.