POSTCARDS FALL FIRMLY in the personal-experience category of cozy. They are the letter’s little brother (or sister—I say “brother” because I have a little brother). Postcards, in their infinite variety, are the easiest, most particular way to quickly check in. Hello! This is where I am. This is what I did, and I’m thinking about you. I suppose there is social media or sending a picture on a phone—or even just making a telephone call, but then you don’t have the physical object in your hand. You can’t see the person’s handwriting; you can’t carry it around or use it as a bookmark. I’ve even done that thing where you put on lipstick and kiss the postcard itself to make a very personal point. I’m not saying getting a text with a picture of the burrito your friend is about to dive into isn’t cozy, but not in the same way as a postcard. Thomas’s godmother has sent him a postcard from every place she has ever traveled, whether it be a city close to where she lives or a very faraway land. A lifetime of check-ins. One day he will be blown over by how much she wanted him to know he was in her thoughts.
I’m not sure how long one should really spend in a museum. I’m in the group who ascribe to the go-lots-but-not-for-long way of thinking. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, because my mother subscribes to this philosophy. In the almost fifty years I’ve been around, one thing I’ve learned is that we really do turn into our mothers. Mum thinks that as vastly essential and marvelous as museums are (she majored in art history and worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art), they can be exhausting, and if you spend too much time in them, you could endanger the impact of what you came to see. This applies the most when you bring children to a museum. It doesn’t take long for a child to get a sense of the place and to absorb the contents. Obviously, there will be those who disagree, like Vanessa, who firmly believes a twelve-hour day isn’t enough time to spend in the galleries of a great museum.
My mother devised something called the Seven-Minute Louvre. Her grandparents lived in France, so the museum she saw the most was the Louvre in Paris, thus the title of the theory, but it applies anywhere, the museum doesn’t matter. The Seven-Minute Louvre includes: the Winged Victory of Samothrace, the Venus de Milo, and the Mona Lisa. In seven minutes, you can expose small children to these masterpieces without anyone getting fatigued, cranky, or too hungry. Is there more to see at the Louvre? Resoundingly yes, but she didn’t want to overwhelm. She wanted us to love museums and perceive them as friendly, easy places where you can be moved to tears, astonished, and transformed. She was teaching us to feel cozy about museums so we would always seek them out for ourselves.
However, art was not the only reason we went to museums—there were also postcards. I vividly remember Mum slowly walking along the aisle, carefully looking up and down the racks of four-by-six cards with images of famous works like Van Gogh’s Starry Night, or tiny Egyptian sculptures. Every few cards, something would catch her eye. Maybe it was an image of a donkey (her beloved creature) or a Leonardo. She would pause, lift it up, flip and read the back, and then take four or five before continuing her search. The result of this kind of harvesting is a robust and personal postcard collection—a reservoir, a stockpile for her to draw from and use. A friend of mine gets a postcard from every museum she visits, and instead of saving it to someday give away, on the back of the postcard she writes the name of who she was with and the date, and then sticks it up on her wall.
Postcards are for notes of all kinds, but the great thing about a postcard, as opposed to personal stationery, is that what the image conveys is as important and personal as what you write. Because you have collected the cards yourself, not only is the picture something you particularly like and have chosen, but each postcard has its own history. The recipient might not be aware that you purchased the card they have received when you went on a trip to Dia:Beacon. They are not aware that it was a steamy, beautiful day during the summer, or that you were with your boyfriend—but you know it, and that energy of that day will go into the note you are sending.
Postcards can be sent with abandon. If someone leaves a sweater at your house and you return it the next day, drop it off with a postcard. (If you are lucky, you have one in your collection with an item of clothing on it.) Use one as a thank-you note for dinner or leave one with a plate of cookies on a neighbor’s doorstep. Put one in your kid’s backpack for acing an exam or send a really jolly postcard to apologize for a missed appointment.
This drawing is of a postcard my mother gave me, and I don’t even know how long ago because it has no date, but it’s a black-and-white Richard Avedon photograph. It’s called Dovima with Elephants. Dovima, who was a Dior model, is standing in a black evening gown with a dramatic pale sash, between two great elephants. Her satin shoe is pointing elegantly in the hay on the ground, her arms outstretched between the massive beasts. All at once she looks like a swan, and the elephants look like ballerinas. I am crushed with love for this image. On the back, in my mother’s unique (almost illegible) very vertical handwriting, it says, For my darlingest daughter with so much love from her Mumma. Simple enough—probably went along with a Christmas present since half of the note was written in red ink and the other half in green. I don’t remember the present, but the postcard is everything I love in this life, boiled down to something that cost fifty cents. It has been leaning against the lamp on my bedside table for countless years. There are pinpricks at its corners that tell me that at one point it must have been tacked on a corkboard.
I have another postcard that lives on my bedside table with a heart at its center. There is one that lives in my kitchen, an Adolf Dehn watercolor of Central Park from a friend who was returning a serving plate. Some I must recycle, but there are ones that I will have for the rest of my life.
Recently our son Thomas was going to a bar mitzvah. He needed a card to go along with the check we were giving the newly minted adult. I sent him to go look in the pile of postcards, and he found a Winslow Homer of two boys sitting in a pasture.
You might consider a postcard a fleeting, isolated object. I like thinking of them, and items of like kind, more like pearls on a long, long-treasured string I carry with me.