Letters across the ocean

MANILA, Philippines - You love to read? You love to write? You like a book you can read in one sitting? You like something charming, sweet and delightful? Go get yourself 84, Charing Cross Road. It will make you fall in love all over again!”

Thus said the lady sitting  beside me at the Narita Airport during my six-hour layover on my way to Chicago to visit my daughter Maripaz, a nurse.

While I slept our downtime away, she was reading. And as she closed her book, she was wiping a tear!

“Must be a good book, eh?” I asked her, trying to be cordial.  

“A real gem! One of my all-time favorites. One of the best, if not the best I’ve read for years,” she answered. “It’s a  nostalgic book, reminding one of a time when the thought of love and friendship blossoming over talk of books didn’t seem precious.”

Helene Hanff, a freelance  New York correspondent, strikes up a long-distance relationship with used-book dealer Frank Doel, together with staff of Mark & Co. of London, lasting for 20 years.

“It’s not fiction. It’s real. Thinking about it with modern contexts in mind makes the story almost impossible, but there it is. The bookshop that once stood at 84, Charing Cross Road and those letters are a testament to their friendship.

“Re-reading this treasury of collected letters makes me think that perhaps we’ve lost more than just an outmoded form of contact: letter-writing .Thanks to carbon paper, their timeless correspondence was preserved.

“Easy read. It’s that quick (95 pages). It’s also perfect when I have just a couple of hours to devote to a book.”

Whereupon I vowed  to get a copy for myself, as soon as we get to our destination.  

I love reading. I was introduced to the love of books many years ago as a child. Our English teacher Dolores Borja, fresh from UP, made us submit one book report a month, to earn points to up our grades. It was like a game and I remember loving it. The alumni would donate volumes of encyclopedia  as well as fiction and non-fiction books.

That’s how we met Robinson Crusoe, Little Women, Silas Marner, The Scarlett Letter, Ivanhoe, Knights of the Round Table, and the like. In my day, books were still books!            

I will always be grateful for that training. In college, we used the library to the max. After classes, my dorm mates and I would take early dinner at the cafeteria, stay at the university library up to 10, then back to barracks to socialize with other friends.

Further, we explored as far as the USIS (United States Information Service and the provincial library in Laoag (eight kilometers from our hometown Vintar) during our semestral breaks.     

However, if we wanted our textbooks for our own, we  braved the second-book flea markets along Recto Avenue. If we could not find what we were looking for, there was the good ol’ National Book Store , as well as Alemar’s. If at all, we could easily write the Ramos and Marzan families as to when the textbooks would be available.

I love writing, too. In high school I had many pen pals within and outside our province. It was my brother Rolly (Ramiro) who had an American pen pal named Penny June Michaelis. After college, he was sent to the US in connection with his Sunburst magazine (l965), and he made it a point to meet her in Kansas. Two years older, he was a wider reader than I was. He was the writer in the family, was editor of Letranite News during his time. He would have loved Charing Cross Road but he went too soon.

Our librarian, Tata Priscilo, would display the letters in the cupboard for everybody to see, and I obviously had the most. Oh, I just love the smell of a real letter posted in the mail. I am someone who loves writing and receiving letters. It was my way of honing my language skills and I liked it when my friends would point out that I needed to be more precise — to express myself in clearer terms; or, for heaven’s sake, to write more legibly.   

So many years later, some of my friends have gone abroad, others to the great beyond but a few I still communicate with to this day, on Facebook. In fact, one of them has just come home for good, retired from military service in the States, with the second wife, and I still have to see him in person, after 55 years!

 While I don’t have anything against social media, I believe that there is something more beautiful about letter correspondence (you know, the kind that requires a stamp, not an Internet connection) that binds people in a very personal way, the stuff that seals friendships, even though people are separated by an ocean and never officially meet — or see each other for the first time decades later.

To the Barnes and Noble in downtown Chicago our daughter took us for the book of my dreams. “Now, all you want, Mommy dearest,” she was saying, as her dad and I oohed and aahed at the meticulously arranged bookstore. In one corner, we sipped our coffee away as we leafed through the brochures.

According to her, with the advent of e-book, and iPads, some other bookshops, like Borders, have either downsized their personnel, reduced their floor areas or stopped operations entirely. How sad!

How the landscape of books has changed! Sooner or later the electronic media may take over the publishing industry completely and we would henceforth have no permanent records of most of our written communication, God forbid. Let’s just  hope it won’t happen in this lifetime.

Nevertheless, though everybody else has taken to Kindles and Nooks, still there’s nothing like an honest-to-goodness hardbound or paperback to keep you company, like my co-passenger in Narita. There’s hope for the world, after all!

Meantime, I found my dream book, the first ever that I bought in these  United  States of America!

84, Charing Cross Road is a story of friendship retold through a series of letters written between 1949 and 1968. It all began with a letter inquiring about second-hand books, written by Helene Hanff in New York and posted to a bookshop in London.

As Helene’s lively and witty letters are responded to by typically prim and reserved Frank Doel, bookseller at Mark & Co., she would request him to send her various copies of books (classics). From then, while they would converse via mail showing the cultural differences between the UK and the US, as well as reflecting the wartime atmosphere in London, the letters developed more personal touches.

The two mostly talk about which books are available and what books are yet to be found but somewhere along the way, the two started dropping hints about their personal lives. Helene also sent some help not only to Frank but to the whole staff of the bookshop when they were dealing with food packs in London. Everybody is grateful to her kindness as seen in their letters of gratitude to her.

If you love books, the letters that Helen and Frank (and the other staff and family members) write back and forth tell the story better than any attempt at narrative form would have. You can’t help but fall in love with everyone and knowing that it is a work of nonfiction just makes it all the more perfect.

Helene is too broke to visit London for the purpose so she has to rely on her friends to see what this shop is really like. Interestingly, she claims it as her bookshop and yet, it only exists in the letters that she receives and in her imagination.

 As one who loves writing and receiving letters, I found it fascinating to read the correspondence of two complete strangers. By the end of the book, I felt like I knew the letters as if they were written by my friends.

Helene would occasionally puncture the Englishman reserve  in Frank and we see the results. She would lose her cool but her letters are funny (I laughed a lot!) and  always warm, and her intimate discussions of the most obscure books are  engaging.

The idea that people could come to life through letters and develop a relationship without even meeting each other is so wonderful to me. Now, with the Internet, I guess this is a much more common phenomenon than it used to be but thinking about these letters traveling by post overseas is almost magical.

Helene was always planning a trip to England to visit the people she had written to for a great many years. However, life forever got in the way and the trip never occurred.

Reaching the last page of the book made me sigh with longing, contemplating in a different ending; out where Helene would already make it over to England.

But go get a copy for yourself. It will make you fall in love all over again!

This week’s winner

Pureza Ramiro of Vintar, Ilocos Norte, is enjoying her retirement with her husband Nick Sr., also retired from the Department of Agrarian Reform. Their children — Nick Pacis, Jr. (pianist, based in Tampa, Florida), Maripaz (nurse in Chicago, Illinois), Roland (engineer) and Deanna Marie (architect) are now into their respective careers. At times, the couple are either in Vintar, Manila or Bartlett, Illinois helping take care of their grandsons.