Unchained Melody

"Tenderness awakens within the security of knowing we are thoroughly and sincerely liked by someone. The mere presence of that special someone in a crowded room brings an inward sigh of relief and a strong sense of feeling safe."

Passed along to me from Sunshine Gal via the book Abba's Child

I decided to start with a quote in lieu of a photo this time. I was chatting online with Sunshine Gal, and she shared these words with me. They directly related to what I want to blog about - Mama and Dads.

Their song? Unchained Melody by the Righteous Brothers. I can't help but cry each time I hear it. I think about how they chose that song years ago as their own, and how they had no idea at the time what ups and downs they would go through during their lives together. Throw a crazy daughter in the mix, and their days were complete!

My parents met through letters. I firmly believe my love for the written word stems from this original relationship. My mom wrote to my dad for about two years while he was stationed in Nancy, France, with the US Army.

"He wrote the longest letters," she commented this morning during our daily morning discussion. "The other guy I wrote to was cocky." Score one for Dads!

"Perhaps you need a pen pal," was my mother's comment on my social life. Yes, possibly I do. Seeing as I love to write postcards and scribe all sorts of stories a pen pal would seem an ideal situation for me. However, it would be hard to do the things I love with someone just through letters - experience drives to nowhere, long talks in coffee shops, and sitting on a beach getting sunburned. SPF 70 need not apply. Redheads still burn...in more ways than one.

I love letters. I do get excited each day as I open up my mailbox or post office box to see what arrived for me that day. The experience is somewhat lost with email and text messaging. Two boyfriends have sent me postcards, and that endeared me to them for months. I'm a sucker for the written word. To see the handwriting is like seeing the person's soul. Have I overdone it? I don't think so. I feel like I know them better, can feel them, once I see their handwriting. Sharing words on paper has become an intimate experience in our day and age of electronic media.

But I'm still hooked on letters of any kind - email messages, Facebook exchanges, texts, you name it. Letters flying across the screen get me excited at the possibilities! I have met so many great people through Postcrossing that evolved from postcards into emails, texts, and eventually a visit. There's Sis - my forever friend in The Netherlands. I feel no one in the world may know me better than her. And then there's Baer. With him, the word raisin will never mean the same! And then there's Sakule, my new friend from Germany whom I can't wait to write to three times a week via postcards.

I know what my mother felt. She must have waited for the mailbox to be full, with letters from Dads. Each word brought forth the possibility of a future, of a connection. Who knew when she met him if he would be a total ass? Thank goodness he wasn't! History was set, and along came MausiGal, MustangBro, and Sprout.

Emails. Texts. Letters. Postcards. All the same, yet so different. Perhaps my mom and I have more in common than I thought...