The San Francisco Chronicle recently published Sam Whiting’s story of Mica Jarmel-Schneider who decided, as his bar mitzvah project, to collect baseball gear to send to kids in Cuba. The start of this adventure was, of course, his generosity. The plot thickened with an astonishing adventure all because Mica never got a thank you note.
This compelling story was the impetus of a conversation with San Francisco’s Myrna Aronoff on the topic of thank you notes, those seemingly small gestures that are definitely love letters and important for so many reasons that range from simple courtesy through political consequences to emotional importance. Myrna, a particularly expressive, loving and enthusiastically grateful woman has, as a grandmother, come to some conclusions about thank you notes, too often considered a kind of a relic, but a modern necessity all the more so in a society that purchases gifts online and directly from stores and sends them via mail.