When I was a child in elementary school, long before the World Wide Web was a gleam in CERN’s eye, having a penpal — someone you’d never met but to whom you wrote letters — was not uncommon, and in fact, there were a number of girls with whom I corresponded on a somewhat regular basis. With the rise in popular usage of the Internet and the subsequent ubiquity of email, I’m not sure if the traditional penpal relationship has changed somewhat, but the notion seems to remain fairly well understood, as evidenced by a number of dictionaries I consulted for the definition of “penpal.”
I honestly don’t remember when I started any of my penpal relationships, nor do I remember how many I had or where they lived. I was in elementary school, maybe in the third or fourth grade (basic literacy was a requirement, of course, so I doubt it was any earlier than that). By the time I was in high school, I ceased writing because by then, I was away at boarding school, and life had simply become that much busier.
By now you may be thinking, “Get to the point,” so I will. The fact is, one particular girl — I’ll call her Celeste — who lived in Peekskill, New York, wrote to me for much longer than any of the others. She was two years ahead of me in school, so she was growing up first, and I remember feeling somewhat in awe of her experiences, which seemed so much more exciting than mine. For example, she was already married by the time I graduated from high school, and then gave birth to two boys while I was still in college.
As the years went by and I drifted around the country, we lost touch, until one day not so long ago, out of the blue, I received an email message asking me if I was the same Becky Ikehara from Hawaii who had had a penpal from New York. Thanks to the Internet and AOL member search, Celeste had found me again! We started emailing each other and gradually caught up with each other’s lives.
And then, we decided it was high time that we met in person. Celeste had planned a two-week vacation on Cape Cod, which is only a 2-1/2 hour drive from my house, so yesterday I drove to South Dennis, and at last, after 40 plus years, we met in person! We had a great time talking and reminiscing about the years we had shared with each other as penpals, and we vowed to continue writing. Here is a photo of my most faithful penpal that I took outside on the deck — I also have some photos of us together, but I haven’t had a chance to scan them yet.