You hate to be the bearer of bad tidings — especially when you’re delivering them to the person who might be the ultimate bearer of good tidings.
But it’s probably necessary to come right out and say it:
Larry McManus, this may not be your year.
I take no pleasure in telling him this — the fact is, I agree with just about everything he stands for.
McManus, 54, loves the idea of writing letters to people — not e-mails, but real letters, ones you write by hand and to which you affix a stamp, letters that the recipients eagerly open up. Even better, McManus is perhaps America’s leading proponent of sending letters to people just to say thanks, just to say “I appreciate what you’ve done for me,” just to say the person has been a force for good.
To repeat: This is most likely not going to be a satisfying year for him.
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His big week is coming right up. He launched the idea in 1996; he called it “National Write a Letter of Appreciation Week,” to be observed the first week of every March. It was to be a week “to encourage everyone to take a few minutes of their time to write a letter of appreciation or thank you to a person or persons who have gone out of their way to be kind or helpful to you. It’s a week for persons to quietly celebrate the good deeds of other persons, a time to quietly and sincerely just say thanks. . . .
“Opening a mailed letter is similar to opening a gift. You don’t know what’s in it. . . .”
It was a wonderful idea, and McManus justifiably received praise for it. The editorial page of this newspaper said: “To Larry McManus, it seems that a certain coarseness has crept into our culture and that increasingly we live in a thankless world. . . . Larry McManus became a point of light, and by his example so can we all.”
I agree with every syllable of that.
Which is why I hate to tell him: Wait till next year.
Actually I did tell him; I called him at his home in McHenry to congratulate him for his visionary kindness, and to ask him if he realized that National Write a Letter of Appreciation Week 2002 is almost certainly going to tank.
He seemed surprised. “I don’t think it’s going to fail this year,” he said. “We really need it now more than ever.”
On that second part, I concur. But a key to the spirit of National Write a Letter of Appreciation Week is that some of the most effective letters are sent to people who may barely remember you, if they remember you at all — people who may not even realize they have made your life better. Then one day they open their mailbox, see a personal (and probably handwritten) envelope from someone whose name means nothing to them. . . .
Do you see where I’m going with this?
Those are precisely the kinds of letters that Americans, after the anthrax attacks that followed Sept. 11, were warned not to touch. Those are the kinds of letters that citizens were encouraged to notify local law enforcement, and even the FBI, about. The anthrax attacks were eventually solved . . . .
Oh, that’s right. No, they weren’t. We don’t talk about them as much, but we still don’t know who was behind them. Contingency plans are being worked on for smallpox.
And here comes the nice Mr. McManus — suggesting that this year, we might want to send thank-you notes not just to people who have helped us personally, but to “our military people [who] are again in harm’s way.”
You can imagine that the Pentagon may do something less than backflips of joy over the prospect of that: sealed letters from all over the place being mailed off to servicemen and servicewomen who may only dimly recognize — or not recognize — the names above the return addresses.
None of this is Larry McManus’ fault; nothing feels better than a word of appreciation coming out of the blue, and is there a soldier or sailor alive who wouldn’t be grateful to hear that someone is thankful for the courage and effort being put out?
But. . . .
Mr. McManus, there are two things I want you to know:
I think that this is not your year.
And I really — really — hope that I am wrong.
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Bob Greene comments on the news of the day Thursdays on the “WGN News at Nine.”