No sooner did I get done ranting and raving about the evils of the ever-present phone, when I got a lovely reminder of an almost lost art of communication: a handwritten letter. While any letter is much appreciated, this one landed at just the right time.

I frequently hear from readers, and I always do my best to engage with them when I do. Most of the time, this happens over social media, and I’ve gained some truly lovely “friends” this way. Occasionally, though, I do get an actual piece of mail. This one had come to the main office and was forwarded to me.

As luck would have it, G was in the car with me when I went to retrieve the mail, and when I saw the envelope from the Times News, I got a little excited. G is by far the nosiest of my three kids, and his curiosity was immediately piqued. I opened the larger outer envelope, and I could immediately tell by the lovely cursive script on the inner envelope, that I was going to enjoy this letter.

G asked what it was, and I simply said that it was probably from a reader who either loved or hated something I’d written. I will forever regret not having my ever-present phone ready to capture the look on his face. After he picked his jaw up of the ground, he looked at me in disbelief. “You get fan mail?” he asked. When I told him that, yes, I sort of do, his expression ran an entire gamut of emotions, from “no way,” to “seriously?” to “holy cow, my mom is awesome enough to get fan mail.”

I might be embellishing that last one a tiny bit, but I am sure that for one teeny tiny moment in time, G was actually proud of me. G has always been the least literate of my children. I tried every genre of book when he was younger, until one day he looked at me and said point blank, “Mom, I do not like to read and I am never going to like to read. I can read when I have to, and I’m good at it, but I will never like it, so please stop trying to make me.”

That was one of those moments that I chose to really hear what my child was saying to me, and I gave up trying. His grades in both reading and writing have always been excellent, so I guess he knew what he was talking about. At any rate, he has always known about my column, and I’ve always tried to get his approval for anything I write about him, but he has never really gotten into reading it as much as the other two have. So, hearing that someone else appreciated my writing had a bigger impact on him than if he actually read it himself.

His next question was about what was in the letter. Crossing my fingers that it was a good one, I gave it to him to read, since I was trying to drive up the driveway. He immediately laughed and gave it back to me. It was written in beautiful cursive writing, and he didn’t have a prayer of being able to read it. So, I pulled over and read it to him, and when I was finished, he said, “cool.”

If you have a 16-year-old male child, you know that he just bestowed upon me the highest form of praise one ever hopes to expect from said child. My day was beyond made, both by the kind words of the letter writer, and because for a split second, no matter how fleeting, something I did made my kid think I was “cool.”

I love getting letters. I still have shoe boxes full of letters that my grandmother wrote to me when I was in college. Even though we spoke weekly on the phone, she always mailed at least one letter a week, sometimes more if she had a lot of things to tell me. I could always count on hearing about her adventures at the senior center, which friends she’d been out to lunch with, what my grandfather had been doing in his garden, or what she’d made for dinner. I am sure I wrote her back, but I know I didn’t go into all the details that she did.

I’ve kept this shoebox for years, both because it is meaningful to me, and because I hope some day my own kids will want to hear about their great-grandmother’s life. One of the other great treasures in my family is a shoebox full of letters that my uncle saved from his time in the military. While most of the letters are from my paternal grandmother, who died before I was born, there are also letters from my father and my other uncles.

Having never met my grandmother, reading those letters gave me insight into the woman, wife, and mother that she was. I could also find different versions of the same events, between her letters and those of my dad or uncles. Of note are the struggles that my father was having with some of his advanced science courses in college. While he seemed to think that praying harder might improve his grades, my grandmother was of the opinion that a particular female in his life might be distracting him.

Every time I get an actual handwritten letter, or even a lengthy email, I do my best to respond in kind. Taking the time to write words on paper is its own art and sending it is its own handmade gift. Sitting down to write, collecting, and organizing thoughts, and putting them out into the universe is its own kind of therapy. The act of reading someone else’s words, taking the time to decipher their unique handwriting is a very special kind of relationship, as well. RC, I am so grateful for your letter, for the time you took to write it, for the moment it created between me and G, and for reminding me that there are still beautiful forms of communication in the world.

Liz Pinkey’s column appears weekly in the Times News.