Telegram

This is in today's New York Times:

February 8, 2006
Appreciations
The Telegram
By VERLYN KLINKENBORG

I've received exactly one telegram in my life. It arrived on New Year's Eve a couple of decades ago. The message was congratulatory — it quoted J. D. Salinger — and so was the medium, which had a sort of "all the ships at sea" feeling about it. In fact, the telegram was just a piece of paper that looked a little down at the heels, as if it had been a ragged night for the telegraphers. But it arrived with a sense of its own occasion, which went a long way toward enhancing the occasion it had been sent to celebrate: a wedding.

The last telegram ever delivered appears to have been sent by Western Union — whose very name seems to say "telegram" — on Jan. 27. It's easy to understand why the practice of sending telegrams lapsed. They simply could not compete with telephones, express delivery services, e-mail and text-messaging — which, in its compression, bears some curious analogy to the telegram. But knowing that the last telegram has now been delivered is somehow a little like knowing that the last martini has been drunk or the last dinner jacket worn. I would like to believe that there will always be a world where telegrams come directly to the door, throwing a note of suspense into the air.

How many movies turn on that moment! The doorbell rings. A uniformed boy says, "Telegram!" or, "Western Union!" He hands over an envelope in return for a tip, and the plot rounds the corner. Only the telephone has rivaled the telegram as a plot point. It's hard to imagine that e-mail will ever play as large a role in Hollywood.

It is probably as well, though, that the telegram has gone its way. We are out of the habit. Hardly any of us could manage opening the door, tipping the boy and slitting the telegram's throat with the air of familiarity — even aplomb — that one sees in the old movies. In these days when information flows like a river, when e-mail comes and goes no matter how we are dressed or what change we have in our pockets, the telegram has become too singular, too momentous.
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

I too remember the only telegram I've ever received. (When I was a kid, someone sent my parents a Candygram—anyone remember those?—but that hardly counts.) On the morning of our wedding day, almost 25 years ago, we arrived at the church to find waiting for us an honest-to-gosh telegram, congratulations from my then-boss in St. Paul. He and I didn't often see eye-to-eye, but I've always said he had class.