Inappropriate Cards (today and yesterday)

I left North Carolina late in August, 1986. A change descended as I left the world of fulltime work and home ownership to return to school. Looking back on it all, it was either an act of faith or great stupidity. After all, I was rather comfortable in my life. I'd had a succession of girlfriends, a house with apple trees, a canoe with streams of white water just out of town, my beloved Appalachian Mountains just an hour’s drive away and the beach five hours to the east. I gave it all up to cross the Mason Dixon line and enroll in school in Pittsburgh, a place known for cold winters, smoky steel mills and a pretty sorry baseball team. By the time I’d arrived, Roberto Clemente was long been dead and Willie Stargel had retired. As I left the South with everything packed in a car including a bottle of decent Scotch (given to me by coworkers who said I’d need it to keep warm), I promised everyone I’d send my new address and phone number when I got settled. I’d only been in the Steel City for a few days when I came across a “historical” post card of the city. The photograph, taken on a midmorning in April 1911, looks toward "The Point.” At that time, The Point was a rail yard and the air so smoky that you could only make out the shapes of buildings. This was at the period of history that executives would take an extra shirt to work with them and change at lunch, their first shirt being dirty from the air. The photo looked so dirty, an image a lot of my friends had of Pittsburgh, so I brought a stack of the cards to send out to friends and family. On the back I wrote a simple note, “Having a great time, wish you here,” and added my address and phone number.

Thursday is Inappropriate Card Day—a holiday thought up by Diesel over at “Mattress Police. I want to get in on this holiday while the gettin's good and before Hallmark ruins another holiday in their attempt to commericalize every single day of the year. But there's a problem. On Thursday, I’ll be flying south to Cancun (and then riding through the jungles for a few hours in the back of a van). Before I go, I'm gonna clean out my card drawer in my desk (old dated Christmas Cards, Hanukkah cards, birthday cards, get out of jail free cards, whatever I can find). As I travel and listen to Pink Floyd on my iPod, I'll address them and maybe even write notes in them. There are a few folks who need to receive a such a card. And because I won't mail the cards till I get back in the states, these cards will arrive long after ICD, just like my Christmas Cards (which generally arrive at their destination sometime between New Years Day and the Fourth of July).

Surprise someone and send out your own inappropriate card! This is a great opportunity to clean out desk drawers and recycle. Didn't Obama say something this evening about going green? And just imagine the look on the face of one opening your card and thinking “WTF” (can someone explain to me why folks always seem to think of the World Tennis Federation on such occasions?).