on Twain & correspondence

To send a letter is a good way to go somewhere without moving anything but your heart.  ~Phyllis Theroux
Today’s a rainy day, and we just returned from the library with a new armload of bliss (aka. quiet reading material for the three-year-old). It’s the ideal time to catch up on my correspondence. I adore sending and receiving mail. Ok, especially receiving mail. 
Now that I have perfected the “no junk mail” routine, I selfishly hope snail mail will never disappear, even as I know it is a needle in our sagging economy’s stack of needles we need to reconsider. I admit to being a fair-weather postal service fan; I’m nowhere near as diehard as a friend who frequently blogs about and volunteers with the USPS. In fact, if they do decide we can only receive mail a few times a week, I’ll grow even fonder of it when it comes.
I probably needn’t worry about mail though, given our government’s typical response to such issues. Example: we need to get rid of the 1-cent coin because it costs more than a cent to create one? I have the solution! Let’s spend a ton of money we don’t have commemorating the penny by releasing a bunch of new ugly designs of penny. Brilliant!
Unlike with the penny, I am a big fan of when the post office comes out with new stamp designs. The letter above went to my cousin John, who is currently in Iraq helping us get one step closer to being able to depart (for good, I hope). I am in love with these Twain stamps. I am really looking forward to being able to read the Mark Twain classics to the girls some day. 
I will never forget it was a Twain collection of short stories, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches, that got me through the ghastly 23 hours of flying from Atlanta to Beijing when I was 13.
Do you have a Twain favorite? How about a favorite stamp?