During my backpacking heyday in the early 1980s, staying in touch with friends and family in Boston as I roamed across Europe was hard work. I couldn’t pop into an internet café for a reassuring exchange of emails, and I certainly couldn’t pull out a cell phone and text or ring home.
Those outlets just were not an option because they’d yet to appear on the international travel scene.
Instead, my preferred mode of transatlantic communication all those years ago was the humble postcard.
Ignoring Garrison Keillor’s advice that the ideal postcard should not exceed 50 words, I attempted to turn mine into mini-travelogues, regularly crossing over to the address side to accommodate my glittering insights. I kept an intermittent journal while I travelled and in its back pages I sketched out first drafts for my postcards home. Reading them now, it’s clear that I should have followed Keillor’s cardinal rule.
Subtext
Of course, what I wrote in my rambling reports was beside the point. There was a more important subtext.
By sending home a postcard of St Paul’s Cathedral in London or the Ponte Vecchio in Florence, I was in effect proclaiming myself a citizen of the world, while at the same time reassuring my friends and family that I hadn’t forgotten where I came from.
I had another reason for gathering up postcards along the way. To record my travels in photographic form, I arranged an extended loan of my sister’s Vivitar C-135 camera, a fine piece of equipment in its day but rightly regarded now as a technological relic. As those of us who came of age in the pre-digital era can testify, the odds of capturing a viable image with such a device were 50-50 at best. (A surviving photo album, assembled after my first backpacking lark in 1982, provides convincing evidence to this effect.)
Images
Being neither a capable photographer nor a gambling man, I decided to hedge my bets and made sure to buy a few postcards wherever I happened to turn up. As a result, in a back bedroom wardrobe in my home in Dublin I still have some lovely images, captured on postcards, of Barcelona Cathedral, Stormont Buildings, and the Santa Maria della Salute in Venice.
Along the way I also accumulated some wonderful postcard depictions of Cork City at night as well as the ancient monastic ruins at Glendalough in Wicklow – each purchased when I was a mere tourist in these parts.
Aerial view
In the same stash I also have an intriguing aerial view of my hometown of Medford, located a few miles north of Boston. My family home isn’t visible in the photo, but if you look closely you can spot the basketball court at our local park and my best friend’s house just across the street. I remember buying this particular memento for 10 cents off a souvenir rack at a now long-defunct stationery store in Medford Square, simply because I was so astonished to find my nondescript birthplace commemorated in postcard form.
Even with today’s sophisticated cameras, I couldn’t hope to take such compelling snapshots as those found on my collected postcards.
Without doubt, though, I picked up my most meaningful postcard in 1986 in a small town called Augusta on the east coast of Sicily. This is where my paternal grandparents were born.
While I was there on a surprise visit, having dropped in on my father’s uncle Francesco and his family out of the blue while on an Irish sojourn, I found an oversized black-and-white postcard of the local church where my grandparents were married before they sailed for Boston.
Framed
As soon as I saw it, I knew that I’d discovered something special. When I returned home three months later, I had the postcard mounted and framed, as a gift to my father.
As I’ve noticed in my walks through Dublin and strolls around Boston, postcards are still available in many retail shops, although I suspect that with various social media outlets now offering instant communication, they’re not an essential travel item, the way they once were.
In my world, though, postcards will always have a prized place, helping me to remember where I’ve been – and where I’ve come from.