The Vegas Voice 4-21

Lost Arts
By: Judy Polumbaum / Our View
As we get up there in years, we occasionally
notice all the baggage we’re dragging
along. In my case, it’s voluminous files from work
and life, going back to my teens.
Retiring from my teaching job and shutting down that office was a
great excuse for culling. I reduced a mountain range to a smaller heap.
Moving from the Midwest to the Southwest three years ago gave me
another excuse to throw things out. Now, the arrival of spring after our
long pandemic lockdown has me combing through file drawers once
more.
I’m focused on a period four decades back when I spent three years
working in mainland China as that country was opening up to the rest
of the world. It was a transformational time for US-China relations and
for me personally.
I maintained voluminous correspondence with family, friends and
colleagues, and kept almost all of it, including carbons of my own
writings. It’s a true time capsule and a useful historical repository.
I’m scanning everything I wish to keep and have arranged to donate
much of the trove to an academic library.
I’m also sending selected parcels to people with whom I once
communicated in that old-fashioned manner – via the postal service.
I’ve kept up with some of these folks, but haven’t been in touch with
others for decades, necessitating some internet sleuthing. They are
thrilled to get their old letters back and to reconnect after all this time.
As I engage in this project, I’m struck by what we’ve lost with the
demise of letter-writing. Once upon a time, we wrote carefully crafted
missives, full of humor and pathos and information. Now we e-mail
and text in bits and bytes that nobody will ever look at again.
The digital magic that enables me to compress documents into
electronic form and dispose of the paper has also killed a precious
communicative art. Ahhh, the blessings and curses of technology!
Judy is a professor emerita of journalism and a transplant to
Las Vegas from New England via China, the West Coast and the
Midwest.
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