When I read his post earlier this week, I’d wanted to join E Hayot in his exercise in “anger management.” I’d also been feeling that these times are, politically, times of greater despair than I’d known; that we all had been slipping backward, losing some of the gains that had been hard won and tenuous at that. Though I find myself more prone to sorrow than to anger, looking to the delightful, to the “incandescent explosions” that punctuate the quotidian, may well be good medicine for me too.

We got a postcard in the mail yesterday. I have always delighted in sending and receiving postcards. They arrive as an unexpected gift, the thoughts of friends and family.

So, in lieu of a postcard, dear readers, a few postcard-sized thoughts on what makes postcards marvelous:

1. Time. Postcards travel through time. It takes time to select, compose, time to make it from one place to another. Sometimes the traveler arrives before the postcard, and the cards’ late arrival folds in the past, present and future. In the age of e-mail, instant messages and camera phones, sending postcards has become a practice borrowed from another time.

2. Space. Postcards travel through space. They connect what are often the most unlikely places while preserving the distance between them.

3. Care. The sender selects a postcard especially for the recipient. They care to write, to remember an address, to find postage which is often difficult in a strange place.

4. Handling. Handwritten and handled, postcards are touched. Handwriting imprints the person writing, inscribing personality into the card. The card passes through the hands of postal workers who deliver it to the recipient’s hands.

5. Poems. “Denali today. Home soon. Love Dad.” There’s a special language for postcards, a spare language of nouns and verbs. This language speaks of people, places and objects; it declares existence, actions, and occurrences.

6. Objects. Postcards endure in the way that virtual means of sending words and images do not. They pick up traces; they get marked and smudged on their travels. Saved but rarely sought-out, we come across these objects later in a drawer or a box and they delight again.

To senders, thanks for the pleasures of postcards.