I would like an app that automatically adds items requested by email to my shopping list – email from our soccer coach, and our children’s teachers and the school’s office staff and everyone else who has a small and totally reasonable request. I’m not ignoring you. And to be clear, as my youngest’s Girl Scout leader, I am one of the emails showing up in my parent peers’ inboxes. Can anybody hear me? Sometimes I feel like I’m shouting into a void because I rarely get a response. That might be annoying except that I get it. My own response rate is not good. I read as many as I can. I mean to go back and read more. But it’s that scene where the hero and heroine have only minutes of air left as their sinking ship fills with water. Except that in this case it’s not water, it’s email and instead of endearments, our heroine says, exasperated, “You get the same emails I do. You should already know what time the game is.” “I assume you’re reading them,” our hero says. End scene.
And this is why I need the email scanning and list making app. (And yes, I know that when AI rises up and takes over, I’ll be partially to blame.) Actually, if the list could be automatically sent to Postmates.com, and the items then just delivered to my door, tagged by purpose, child and due date, all without me having to read email in any sort of timely matter, that would be ideal.
Instead, life goes something like this:
Soap and deodorant for school giving drive? Check. Wow, I am totally on top of this week!
Hmm. No nut no dairy team snack? Okay. That’s doable. Let me just run back to the store. (That snack is always going to be snack-pack Goldfish by the way…and if anyone ever shows up with cute clothespin snackbag butterflies, I swear there will be consequences.)
Three marbles, two toy cars and wood blocks for 2nd grade science? Well, we had a marble run at one point. Two houses ago. That was fun for a day. Surely there are still marbles at the bottom of a piggy bank or marker bin. Somewhere.
While 92% of my email is now Junk mail, and while the email I should read often escapes me, one of my good friends and I still email regularly. We used to work side by side, or at least cube by cube. Now we’re both busy moms on different sides of the city. We try to have lunch or coffee once a month or so, and email a few times a week. We give each email fun subject lines. Like, “Tuesday.” And it reminds me that email wasn’t always a sinking coffin ship of guilt and responsibility.
I don’t know exactly when I first started a personal email account. When I left for college, probably. I’m old enough that I can tell my children that I remember when I had neither an email address nor a cell phone. I’m sure this will be funny to them since they both have school emails and personal emails, and have for years, and they are 8 and 9.
I have a pile of letters – real, physical, paper and ink letters – written when I was in college, on summer breaks, when I studied abroad. They make me smile whenever I stumble across them. Handwriting that I recognize, once familiar return addresses that have since changed. 20 S. Main St (my grandfather), Darrow Hall (my high school bestie), Broomfield Crescent (my British bestie), my parents… There’s nothing like a letter. Sometimes I dive into email in the same way. When we lost photos from late 2008 through mid-2009 (back up your files, do it now!), it wasn’t quite as tragic because I’d emailed so many to my mother in that time frame. There they were. Still alive and well.
My first email address collected so many prosaic memories of a person who was just becoming. Traveling, falling in love, making new friends, landing new jobs. That email account was a fatality of my brief first marriage. Maybe it’s partly the English major in me who places such weight on words, but when that account disappeared, I mourned for it. And then perhaps learned from it, because indeed life went on.
Today if I’m maybe looking for a receipt for a specific something, or trying to remember based on years-past email traffic when my cousin’s baby was born, and I order by sender, or by date or by key word, it’s a happy accident to stumble across something that reminds me that email used to be fun. Before texting, I sat down and composed emails. I sent email to friends that I would see soon after, and catch-up emails to friends I hadn’t seen in ages. I sent funny day-in-the-life emails to my parents (at least, I knew that they, in their biased benevolence, would find them funny). Email used to be fun. Just like with the pile of old letters, I love that that record exists.
From 2006:
Aw. That baby was Samantha! Email rocks.
Fast forward to present day, and I’m mostly just glad that MySchoolBucks sends three notifications when school lunch balances are low, and while I‘ve never opened one single email from the Colfax Marathon, I appreciate that they haven’t given up on me.
And if you’re reading this, and waiting for me to respond to an email, I apologize. Maybe just send me a text until my list app becomes standard issue.