It’s been a few years now since
my sainted wife and I received Christmas cards, or since I got a birthday
card. Forget about those “thank you”
cards altogether.
Rather, my incoming e-mail box
often contains a rather generic e-card which is supposed to suffice for a paper
card. Be it for a birthday, Easter,
Thanksgiving, Arbor Day, or everyone’s favorite – Ramadan – they are rarely in
hard form.
I, too, am guilty of sending
those spiffy e-cards. You know the ones
I’m talking about; those cards are the ones, for example, that you click on the
window to activate it. Then colorful
flowers pop up from the window boxes, attracting flying birds and bees. All the while, serene violin music is
played. The occasional Yellow Labrador
is smartly seated nearby, awestruck by all the animated activity.
Those cards are cute but, they
are too easy. You are not expected to
simply have a thought to send a card to someone else. Instead, you are expected to climb into the
SUV, schlep yourself to the nearest store to pay $7.95 for a piece of printed
cardboard, then dash off to the United States Post Office location, to find a
stamp. I refuse to pay that much for a pound of steak!
Honestly, I have no idea how much
a postage stamp costs today. I fact, the
last time I purchased a stamp, it cost me 38 ¢.
Having to deal with anyone at the Post Office is akin to waterboarding,
to me.
Most of those USPS creatures are
arrogant, snotty, and ignorant; don’t get me started on the bad ones. Hence, the reason the USPS loses billions and
billions of dollars each year. But I
digress.
So, for a dear friend I consider
to be like a son to me, I went on an arduous trek to the store to buy a paper
birthday card. This promised to be
relatively easy because I intended to personally hand the card – along with the
greatest gift ever – to him without the benefit of postal employees.
At the local Tallmart, my sainted
wife, in an effort to expedite our visit, directed me to find a card. She needed to do other shopping, after which
she would meet me in the produce department.
A quick 27-minutes later, I was
still attempting to find a category of card that suited him. You see, I came across cards for Father from
Son, Father from Daughter, Daughter from Uncle, Mother from Out-of-wedlock-baby,
Aunt from Milkman, and even Donald Trump from Illegal Alien. None, however, were from one male buddy to
another.
They even had cards from one gay
person to another, transsexuals to straights, and one from a Republican to a
Democrat.
Suddenly, I realized why it was
so difficult to send paper cards over e-cards.
All the hoopla had the earmarks
of a part-time job making small rocks out of big ones.
So it was that my pal got his
eight buck paper card and greatest gift ever, for his birthday. Perhaps he should save that card because,
like the Tyrannosaurus Rex, those cards will soon become extinct. And for good reasons.
