There is no question the internet has been great for many things. But I would argue that there are many many many more reasons to hate it, many of which I don’t even miss until I see life through my kids’ eyes.

One of my most indelible memories is of waiting until my sister was on a date with her creepy boyfriend then sneaking into her room to look at her albums. The Who; Crosby Stills and Nash, The Almond Brothers, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell — it was mysterious and inexplicably cool even when I wasn’t convinced I actually liked the music (I had horrific taste in music as a kid, though I’ll defend my favorite songs until I’m hoarse). The album covers struck me, a suburban kid, as rebellious in a way I didn’t understand but wanted desperately to be; the liner notes were secret missives.

When I got my own turntable, I would splay the records around my room, grab them at random, listen to one while I read the lyrics and committed them to memory, try to understand the philosophy of the occasional mission statement. I studied the photographs — both the cover and the pictures inside, looking for a clue to…something. Whatever it was I searched for, I’m not sure if I found it but I did find other things: dreaminess, stimulation, creativity. Music I never would have heard today because I wouldn’t have had the patience. Given the choice of staying where I was or making my way over to the turntable to skip past the “dull” songs, I chose physical inertia. And often I found that those “dull” songs were pretty good. A few became favorites.

Okay, so my teenagers have their phones with pretty much any song available to them instantly through Spotify. Is that a good thing? Yes and no. The access is great (as are the options, with more and more artists able to produce music), but lost is the artistry of the album. An even worse loss is the visual stimulation, which I am fairly sure both kids would appreciate but which, like so many of the holes the internet has carved out in our lives, they don’t miss because they never had it.

Parts of Bruce Chatwin’s book, Songlines, about the songs of Australian Aboriginals, were fabricated. And Chatwin never consulted the Aboriginals before publishing it.

Thirty-one kids tested positive for COVID at Camp Pontiac. The camp costs around $13,000 per camper. One family sent a private jet to pick up their kid, a fact most kids would find enviable and most parents would find depressing.

Deer really really like salt blocks and will crash through (and largely destroy) two laboriously erected makeshift fences to get at one.

I’ve been going through boxes (many many boxes) of old letters written to and by my mom and to my dad, letters from and to my grandparents. The older ones are yellowing and falling apart. Many were composed on that light blue air mail paper you’d fold up and seal so that it became a self-contained letter and envelope in one.

Some of the letters are interesting (descriptions of trips to Europe or the poetic love my grandfather displayed for my grandmother — even long after they were married!) and others are not that interesting. They were probably never meant to be seen, more like the emails you get from a friend telling you the weather is good and they look forward to hanging out again. And yet here they are, fifty plus years later.

There is something inherently interesting about them just because they are letters. I am not the first person to say this and I won’t be the last, but I miss writing letters and I miss receiving them. Sure, they are dated, their contents composed days or even weeks ago, a lag which now feels almost archaic. But even just one sitting in your mailbox between bills and tactile spam is thrilling. Then there’s how a person’s handwriting can be incredibly revealing (a college boyfriend had incredibly calligraphy which is probably why I didn’t burn them when we broke up).

On a family trip a few years ago my daughter made friends with a woman in her twenties. The woman lived across the country from us so the two of them agreed to write letters, and they did, for more than a year. Mundane, thrilling letters.

It’s probably not a surprise that I like reading collections of letters, primarily of artists and writers. Chekhov’s are great, as are Van Gogh’s, though one of my absolute favorite book is of the letters of children’s book editor Ursula Nordstrom, especially those to her writers, including E.B. White, Margaret Wise Brown and Maurice Sendak.

Recently though, I’ve been getting into those between not-famous people, friends who are just keeping in touch. There’s a fair amount of weather and much mundane life and it reminds me of my family letters, and those I used to send home from camp, which were spectacularly boring, yet must have meant something because they are also included in those boxes.