For me, the daughter of the owners of small businesses, the winter and the holidays meant more time in family at the table of the dining room, not only to eat but to write the notes of thanks to our customers.
My brother went up to the attic to tear down containers full of congratulatory cards that my mother and I had bought the previous year after Christmas, when the holiday authorization sections in local stores offered boxes and boxes of them with a 75% discount.
My father, a mechanic, would return home from a long and hard work day in his car repair workshop, would change clothes and pick up a pen with his cracked and cracked hands to spend the last hours of the day writing thanks.
Thanks for being our client. Thank you for trusting us with your car. Thanks for your loyalty.
I was as young as 10 or 11 years when I joined this tradition. At that age, my calligraphy was not very impressive, but that was never the point. The point was to take the time to communicate our gratitude in writing.
Now I teach to write in Harvard, a place where no one seems to have enough time. Students are always running out of it: they need more time to study, investigate, write and meet the deadlines. Teachers always want to have more. If we only had more time to return the documents, more time for conference with students.
In a place where there is never enough time, it is easy to lose small gestures such as thanking someone in writing, even in a writing class.
Then, when an opportunity was presented, I took it. My class had two sessions outside our usual classroom. The first was in the Lamont library, where we learned to conduct research. The second was in Harvard's art museums, where we went to a tour to help us start thinking about art and objects as main sources. Of course, we thanked both the librarian and the research curator in person and offered a round of applause at the end of each class. But it seemed important to thank our instructors in writing.
The following week, I walked to CVS in Harvard Square to collect two thanks cards so that the students could write in them. I was surprised, first for the few thanks cards that there were (I only saw three on a wall full of birthdays, baby and wedding cards) and second, for the options available for purchase. A card simply declared: “Thank you for being my person.”
According to the congratulation card association, Americans buy around 6.5 billion cards every year. As expected, birthday cards represent more than half of those sales. But thanks cards are classified in third place, which makes the lack of options even more confusing.
What I thought would be a five -minute message turned out to run from one store to another during the next hour, desperately looking for a decent card.
Of course, I could have bought a “blank interior” card, but the absence of designated thanks cards worried me. He felt a sign that we don't know who to thank and why thank them.
Have we stopped thanking people? Do we do it by email or text message now? Have you become too complicated in our world driven by technology to search and buy a card, write by hand and then give or send it by mail to someone? Or have we simply ceased to be grateful?
Maybe my Harvard Square experience is an anomaly. But even so, it is worth paying attention to: If gratitude is missing in a university city, what lessons could we expect our students to transmit to future generations?
My parents taught me from the beginning that there is a difference between saying thanks and writing thanks. The spoken thanks is fleeting: it does not mean that it makes no sense, but extending the gratitude for the writing makes it more intentional, more reflective, a kind of archived gratitude that does not expire, a moment I could return to.
In the end, it was in Bob Slate Stationer, a small company in Harvard Square, where I finally found a vibrant selection of thanks cards to choose from. The one I selected said: “I want to thank you in writing.” With a Sharpie, I turned the “I” into a “we”, and asked my students to spend the last minutes of our class writing thanks. Some wrote short notes, while others wrote thanks in their native languages, including Ukrainians and Choctaw.
I am not your writing teacher, but I have a suggestion for you. The next time someone makes you a solid, take a moment to reduce speed. Go find a thanks card and write them. They may seem small, these businesses, these moments, these gestures, this lesson. But the biggest image seems less promising without them.
Taleen Mardirossian was raised in Torrance and currently lives in Cambridge, where he teaches writing at Harvard University. She is working on a collection of essays on the body and identity.
