Peter, Marcy, Jed, and Jay

This letter, handwritten in pencil on three-hole-punched lined paper, is one of the few surviving letters from our family to Marcy’s mother, Ethel. I’m not sure why there aren’t more of those, given that Ethel liked to hold onto things. Possibly we just never wrote her very many letters.

Anyway, I guess this is sort of a companion piece to the letter that I wrote to George and Helen on the same day, covering mostly the same topics.

January 22, 1979

Dear Grandma,

Thank you very much for the twenty-five dollars. Marcy is using part of it to treat us to the show of the “Barber of Seville”. Joaquin and I really enjoyed the capsule version of it at school and so we decided to go to the long version.

We got a lot of other presents, too.

Last Thursday, my teacher took me to a violin solo. I really liked it. It was five pieces of music written by five different composers.

I am having a good time at school. A report card is coming up in February.

I have read a lot of books lately, and most of them are either science fiction or fantasy. I did a book report on a science fiction book.

Also, everyone in my class is separated into groups. Each group made a newspaper that was supposed to be from Columbus’ time. My group just finished the newspaper today, and everyone else already finished.

Love,

Jed

Notes

The notes on the previous letter are relevant to this one, too. I don’t have any further notes for this one, except to say that I’m still reading mostly science fiction and fantasy, and that it is not particularly surprising to me that my group was the last to finish the school project.