Weather is Here, Wish You Were Beautiful

While I was away visiting Dragonia, I kept in touch with my son by writing and sending him postcards, mailing one out to him almost every day (except for Sunday, when there was no mail.)  I filled them with text, sometimes descriptive and sometimes humorous, and also did tiny pen and ink illustrations on them if a subject presented itself.  It took some effort to keep up with–   not only because it required me to find a time to do it each day, and remember to do it, but also because postcards are not terribly easy to come by these days.  The traditional kind with colored illustrations only seem to be available at tourist destinations, or in retail locations that have geography-themed sections.  (Living for so long in the shadow of the City of Mists, where a rack of them sprouts in front of every store like a sumac tree, I was perhaps unaware of this.)  And if you go to the US Post Office to purchase them, their selection is limited to one:  a thin, flimsy white rectangle with preprinted postage of a koi goldfish, that feels like it would wilt in your hand if it got damp.  But I found them.  I detoured Dragonia to any location I could think of that might have them, and I hunted them down, and I sent them out, fairly confident that it would be something Jack would enjoy.  I had done the same thing on other trips I had taken, up to festivals in Canada–   even going to so far as to buy all the postcards ahead of time, and draw a picture with one piece on each postcard, so that the complete picture would only be visible when he had all the cards.  He had been delighted.

Yesterday, however, during an otherwise pleasant conversation at a local bar, my ex-wife Weaver took the opportunity to slip in the aside that she had been prepared to “flame me” upon my return to Shadetree for having “gone off into my own little world” for two weeks, without ever calling Jack or her to see how he was doing.  (And also for responding “snidely” when she sent me a text message that pinged my phone at what, in the Golden Realm, worked out to 6 AM.)  I looked at her, justifiably I thought, like she had six heads, and cited the postcards.  She responded with a meandering soliloquy that worked out in aggregate to saying that the postcards were not an acceptable substitute for a phone call, and that Jack found them of dubious interest anyway.  She mentioned one postcard in particular that he had dropped into the recycling bin at the Post Office directly after reading it.

“It’s not 1910,” she quipped.