I remain your Affect and Afflicted Mother

Over the last few weeks, I've been dipping into Undelivered Letters to Hudson's Bay Company Men on the Northwest Coast of America, 1830-57, Edited by Judith Hudson Beattie and Helen M. Buss (a prof and former Manitoban who publishes fiction under the pseudonym Margaret Clarke).

So far, the assembled letters remind me of the letters I received via email while in Korea in 1999. Though at that point I had become used to checking my email frequently via university computer labs and work connections, the computer I used at home was over a decade old. Accordingly, I didn't bother to bring it with me to Korea, reserving that space in my bags for bottles and bottles of shampoo, protected against mid-Pacific explosion by 48-packs of maxipads.

("You'll be a giant there, you know! A giant!")

And so, after breakfast somewhere, I would almost always spend an hour or so at the neighbourhood internet cafe, among the boys playing killing games without headphones, intent on their bursts of gunfire and called commands and the girls using rudimentary chat programs, buoyed by their emoticons and clusters of exclamation points.

Though we had a telephone in our apartment, the time difference and the fact that we were never home made it difficult to reach us that way, so email was our only reliable link to those at home and, given the cost of intercontinental long distance, the only economical way to express longing and affection.

Many of the emails I received, in those early days of email, were like those in Beattie's and Buss's collection - misspelled and without punctuation. They were like notes toed across the aisle in elementary school - meant to be accompanied by significant glances or intimate knowledge of the sender. They were also magnificently ephemeral, akin to the blue flares of electricity you can sometime raise on old carpets - each one transmitted small shocks that were equal parts surprise and pleasure.

Many of the letters, also like those in Beattie's and Buss's collection, spent time documenting phone calls that were made and went unanswered and emails that were sent and not responded to...and many of them similarly asked when my sister and I were coming home.

I suspect though that my joy at coming in and finding email every day or every second day was not as sharp as that of seamen whose letters were already a year old by the time they received them...if they were addressed to the right ship.

This sharpness, the imagined distance, makes it hard to read more than a few letters at a time. But it seems to be the text I need in order to bleed the edges between consciousness and sleep, so I keep on reading...