"We need to write, otherwise nobody will know who we are. They will have only a vague impression of us as A Nice Person, because, frankly, we don't shine at conversation, we lack the confidence to thrust our faces forward and say, "Hi, I'm Heather Hooten, let me tell you about my week."

Mostly we say "Uh huh" and "Oh, really". People smile and look over our shoulder, looking for someone else to meet.

So a shy person sits down and writes a letter. To be known by another person - to meet and talk freely on page - to be close despite distance. To escape from anonymimity and be our own sweet selves and express the music of our souls.

The same thing that moves a giant rock star to sing his heart out in front of 123,000 people moves us to take a ballpoint in hand and write a few lines to our dear Aunt Eleanor. We want to be known. We want her to know that we have fallen in love, quit our job, that we're moving to New York and we want to say a few things that might not get said in casual conversation. Thank you for what you've meant to me, I am very happy right now.

Probably your friend will put the letter away and it'll be read again a few years from now - and it will imrpove with age. And forty years from now, your friend's grandkids will dig it out of the attic and read it, a sweet and precious relic of the 1990's that gives them a sudden clear glimpse of you and her and the world we old-timers knew.

You will then have created an object of art. Your simple lines about where you went, who you saw, what they said, will speak to those children and they will feel in the hearts the humanity of our times.

You can't pick up a phone and call the future and tell them about our times.

You have to pick up a piece of paper."