I suspect that I am substantially older than you, but I can relate to the thrill of corresponding with a mysterious “friend” whom you have never met. Growing up in the fifties and sixties — long before we had coined the word email — having pen pals was almost a rite of passage, and I had several. With them, I didn’t need to be the awkward, shy, bookish nerd that my classmates saw. And of course, since I really knew next-to-nothing about my correspondents, I could color in the empty spaces and make them into the friends that I thought I needed. Funny, while I still recall the excitement of coming home from school and finding a letter from one of my “pals,” I can’t actually remember any of their names.

Today, of course, we have email and social media (which, I have reluctantly embraced because it is apparently the only way to communicate with twenty-something grandchildren who live in another state and who assume that the post office disappeared along with the horse and buggy). Having retired last year from a long career on the mainland and returned home to Hawaii, I am both amused and gratified to now have another pen pal. A close friend that I acquired while working writes me a lengthy, hand-written letter each week, usually running three to four pages of standard notebook paper. He mails it to me in a letter-sized manila envelope, stuffed with clippings from the local newspaper which he deems to be of interest. I regard him as the last practitioner of a dying art form, although — unlike my childhood correspondents — he and I know each other too well to pretend to be anything other than ourselves.

Thank you, Laura Jane, for a well-written article that took me back many years. Pen pals fall into that nebulous realm between imaginary friends and real ones. We are social animals who not only crave but actually require human connection and pen pals, like Facebook “friends,” allow us to establish those connections on our own terms. If there is a loving God, one suspects that he or she will kindly overlook the occasional white lies that we exchange in that process. And I am betting that an older and wiser Andrea has done likewise.