Pen pals, remember them? No one does that anymore. You want to correspond with someone? Go look on the internet. You can find someone there--and you don't even need to pay for a stamp.

When I was a kid in the 50's and 60's, life was more isolated. The price of airplane travel was prohibitive. Take a family vacation? I never knew what that was. During the summer my family would rent a locker at the public
beach for $10. To save money, we split it with another family. Every day like clockwork we went to the beach. That was the summer vacation.

I was a lonely kid growing up in a household where the parents' marriage was less than ideal. There was lots of arguing--and sometimes worse. Bringing even my best friends home could be--well--uncomfortable.

I found an outlet in pen pals. There were services that would match you up with adolescents of the same age and sex, but not all were legitimate. At one point, when I was in junior high, my name ended up in a publication in
Pakistan. I have no idea how that happened, but I received lots of marriage proposals from young men looking for an American visa. After opening a few of these, I steamed off the stamps for my stamp collection, and tossed the
rest of the letters in the trash unopened. After awhile, thank goodness, the letters stopped.

The pen pals that lasted more than a handful of letters were in Canada, Europe and Japan. At age 16 I took my first trip in an airplane to visit my Canadian pen pal in Saskatchewan. It took 3 propeller planes to get there. I threw up on one of them. Then my pen pal and I discovered we had nothing in common. Scratch one pen pal.

I grew up. There are two pen pals, one in France and one in Japan that I eventually met and still hear from occasionally. It is mostly a Christmas card thing. The last correspondence I received from the Japanese woman had
a bad e-mail address. I no longer know how to contact her.

Time moved on. Busy raising children and working, I forgot about my pen pals.

Then, several months ago I received a letter forwarded from Harvard Law School, where I received a degree in 1971. A Romanian woman had written looking for me. She claimed to have been my pen pal. There was an e-mail
address.

I e-mailed her. I didn't remember her at first--and I was a little suspicious. And then, Sanda--that is her name--reminded me that we had corresponded in
French. Bingo! It all came back. An e-mail came with an attachment--my January 30, 1968, letter to her telling her I had been admitted to Harvard. I couldn't believe it. The letter had been found in the family home in
Romania when it was cleared out after Sanda's mother died.

That letter, which had been saved for 32 years, had enabled her to find me. My pen pal letters, once neatly arranged in a scrapbook, had been discarded many years ago. I can't even remember when.

There was more e-mail. In one, Sanda told me of her difficult life in Communist Romania, where contact with the free world was rare. She felt very isolated and then, she said, my letters would arrive and open up a whole new world for her. To me Sanda was just another pen pal. We take our freedom so much for granted in the US. I never knew how important my letters were. I stared at the computer screen and cried.

In the 1980's, Sanda came to the US on a tourist visa to visit relatives. The Communists were still in power in Romania and she successfully claimed political asylum. Two years after she came, her husband and two sons joined her. They all are US citizens now. The oldest boy is in college at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) . The youngest is a high school senior.

On October 3, 2000, Sanda's younger son had a college admissions interview at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. After the interview, they came to D.C. At 6:00pm we arranged to meet for dinner at the Old Ebbitt Grill. Sanda and her son were already there when I arrived.

We hugged, drank champagne, and talked of our children and how amazing the reunion was. The waiter took photographs with both of our cameras. I had arranged in advance for a special dessert. Around the edge of the plate I had the chef write "Welcome to America a Few Years Late." I wouldn't hear of them paying for a thing.

After dinner, Sanda and her son departed for the five hour return drive to Stamford, Connecticut. It is a drive I have done many times. For, you see, Stamford is that town where I had that lonely childhood, spent every summer
at the public beach and wrote to all those pen pals. Sanda's son goes to a private school. If he went to a public school, however, he would go to the high school from which I graduated in 1964.

And that letter from 1968 that Sanda saved all these years? Of course, Sanda gave it to me at the dinner. It is a letter I will save forever.