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Call it a lost art, though I know there are people in the world who refuse to abandon all to technology, who still have a hand for elegant penmanship.

Perhaps not lost but anemic is the art of courtship with a personal, passionate, aesthetic touch. A dove, in the upper left corner, carries this letter from one man who was heart-over-head in love. Notice the date, 1919. DeAlva Allman would have been 19 years old, born in 1900. She was my maternal grandmother, he, my grandfather, Duncan Robert (D.R.) Jackson. He played the violin, painted desert scenes, and worked in the Texas oil fields, and later, after moving to California, the oil fields in Long Beach. He died there at the young age of 61.

We now send light-fast notes, stripped of all but prefab emoticons, disposable. Give me a sad face, somebody.

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