"Not tonight, honey... I've got postcards."
vignettes from a postcard cycle.
Midway through the second printing run on this postcard cycle, our three-year old son has started managing our family's time. "Daddy! Today, I want to go with Mommy to the kid pit [kwm: indoor play area at the mall] and McDonalds, and you can go into the darkroom and make pictures!" all with the enthusiastic and helpful smile of a budding mid-level manager in training.
Wife comes in, wants me to help her study. "Not tonight, honey. I've got postcards."
After a few nights of watching me annotate postcards, son protests going to bed and keeps running back to where I'm working, "I want to help daddy do postcards!" We finally convince him to go to bed, and thought the issue had been laid to rest, so to speak. The next morning as he headed off with his grandma he suddenly remembered something and clammers up on a shelf of a built-in bookshelf and gets a box of family photos. With the photos under his arm, he sprints down the hall, grabs his crayons, spreads everything out on the table where I work on the postcards and starts annotating the back of the photographs with his crayons.
Finally, two postcards from being finished, I'm sitting at the worktable, peering down through my magnifier, writing in tiny printing on the back of each card with my wife Dianna sitting next to me, studying. Our precocious toddler is off playing with grandma and it's a sunny, peaceful Saturday afternoon. I've got thirty minutes to do those two postcards while we still have time to see a movie before our childcare window disappears -- way more than enough time. Suddenly, a staccato rapid-fire series of doorbell rings stirs our concentration. At the door, I find a neighbor's elderly mother who got confused and worried when her daughter didn't come home when expected and started knocking on neighbor's doors looking for someone to sit with her. There we sat, cooling our heels, drinking coffee and chatting about this and that while the last two postcards are sitting on the table. Within forty-five minutes or so, her daughter and son-in law came home (or rather, the daughter, son-in-law and the police they called when they returned to find mama gone), and we got everything sorted out.
Later that night, the last two postcards were finally complete and ready to mail. After telling him for weeks that I'd let him mail out all the postcards when they were done, Alec (our three-year old) and I made a late-night run to the postoffice, one of his and my favorite places. The main post office is one of those huge federal office buildings with lots of funky architectural features from the seventies, Terrazzo floors, and row after row of beautiful (to us, anyway) ornate post office boxes.
Alec ran/danced from one end of the post office to the other, gleefully singing random syllables just to hear the echoes. The place has very lively acoustics. Aside from someone in the back corner, poking around one of the rows of PO boxes, we had the place to ourselves. Anyone else coming in would have probably smiled ear to ear as they saw him jumping up and down, receiving postcards from me one-by-one so he could extend up on his toes and pop each one into the mail slot, almost out of his reach. As I called out the city where each postcard was going, Alec lit up, trying to imagine what each place was like.
"This one's going to Palmdale, California."
"This one goes to Aurora, Colorado."
"Des Moines, Iowa"
"Malad City, Idaho"
"Gaithersburg, Maryland..."
-KwM-