reading other peoples' mail

Though e-mail has changed some of my letter writing (and saving) habits, I suppose that I'm still a letter writer. And reader. I find the genre of letters fascinating, perhaps mostly because although they're highly personal, we're also often very aware that they're being written with at least a hint of one day becoming public. Perhaps there's something proto-internet about them, in the sense that they can be public and private at one and the same time.

One evening, stepping into the house after work, I found myself stepping on a collection of letters: letters from prison, love letters, letters of protest, and the like. This was the sort of thing that I save - had I thrown out this special insert from one of the Shabbat papers? It was already a couple of weeks old, but I hadn't yet read it. And it was no longer salvageable. The best I could do was read the pages that were still legible, that hadn't been crushed and/or dirtied by muddy feet. And perhaps find consolation in the fact that another compilation of similar letters had been published by a different Shabbat paper only a few months earlier, and I'd saved that one ... and still hadn't gotten around to reading it.

If anyone reading this saved that special section, please let me know. I'd still like to read, and save, it.