Table of Contents
RIVERHEAD BOOKS a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. New York 2009
Acknowledgments
This book is dedicated to six people who saved my life. Lisa Pollak, Ira Glass, and Adam Chromy saw my work and gave me a crack at a writing career, and Im forever grateful. But I would have been homeless while writing the book if not for the additional generosity of Jocelyn Beaufort, Tracy Rowland, and especially Sherry Weaver, who together put me up for seven months while I was living on unemployment in New York City. Since Im an imperfect guest and an indifferent house sitter, I am in awe of their goodness. Let this acknowledgment be your thank-you card.
Prefatory Apology
My dear friends from Hallmark, let me be blunt: there were too many of you. Not only have all your names been changed, but youre likely to find that some perfect zinger you remember saying has migrated to someone elses mouth unfairly. Im sorry. Its what happens when you try to whittle a copious phone list of vibrant personalities down to the seven or so characters a casual reader can keep track of. Just think of this as the movie version.
Id particularly like to apologize to Alex, Jen, Christina, Maria, and all the rest of the Friday Foodies group, none of whom rate even a single mention. A good seventy percent of my socializing involved you wonderful people, and yetin retrospectnone of it was directly relevant to the story arc that it turned out I was living. What can I say? The time we passed together was too happy to be dramatically interesting. Its your own fault for being so goddamned nice.
These caveats aside, the story that follows is true, subject to the hiccups that always attend a reconstruction of this sort. Names have been changed, and theres a composite here and there. I didnt keep a journal, and I cant always remember whether something happened in April or October, and just because someone told me that Mary Smith once worked as a clown in Latvia, it doesnt mean its factually proven; its just what I was told, and have tended to believe, because I enjoy believing interesting things. That said, I made calls and visits and double-checked the best I could, and so the details of this book should ring true to anyone who worked alongside me at the time. While I have compressed time or burnished the odd adjective, I have not invented any of the incidents herein. Im afraid I didnt have to.
A Note on the Cards
Most of the greeting card sentiments in this book are my own creation, for the simple reason that everything I actually wrote for Hallmark is its copyrighted property now, and it was easier to simulate what a card might say than to get permission to reprint what a single specific card did say.
That said, I cant promise there wont be overlap. If I mention a sample card that says, Nothing florid, nothing sappy... just a wish for a day thats happy! I cant guarantee that Hallmark doesnt have something similar on file. In fact, I bet it does. Probably so do American Greetings and Leanin Tree and any major card company you could name. Any reasonably bright lemur could author such a thing after a single weekend at a card-writing seminar, and probably in the same thirty seconds it took me. In such a case, Im not infringing; Im simply trafficking in clichs. You might as well brace yourself now.
On the few occasions where I quote an actual existing card, I have tried to cite its author accurately according to my memory and have tried to limit such quotation to minimal, fair-use snippets.
PART ONE
Welcome! How I Got the Job
Recruitment Day
MATTHEW HAD BEEN GETTING THE PHONES ALL MORNING. He and I were the two twenty-six-year-old gofers at the PREVENT program in Tucson, Arizonaa military drug-awareness program with a terribly tortured acronymand in early July of 1994 wed worked together for over two years. So although we were both supposed to answer phones and route calls, Matthew knew that when I was on a creative side project, he had to take up the slack. Today was one of those days.
My side project was this: write a birthday card for our coworker Dr. Steves son Elliott, who was turning three. I was sitting at my worktable with a twice-folded sheet of typing paper in front of me, my notepad beside it for composing, and I was tapping my pen on my rhyming dictionary, wondering what approach to take. We didnt have a rhyming dictionary in the PREVENT office, but I always carried one around in my backpack. I also had a real dictionaryMerriam-Websters Tenth Collegiate , in hardback, which had served me from my undergraduate years through my MFA. It lay at my feet now, packed alongside a large movie guide, a TV reference, plus two or three other books I happened to be reading. As a result, I could answer almost any trivia question that ever came up in any conversation, and I could compose crossword puzzles anywhere. My backpack weighed about thirty pounds, but I was a portable genius.
There were basically three options for any card I wrote: funny poem, prose joke, or cartoon. Funny poems were my favorite, but I figured a three-year-old could best appreciate a cartoon. But a cartoon about what? What did three-year-olds like? Trains? Candy? Elephants? Balloons? Balloons, I noted on my notepad. Not only were they fun, they were really easy to draw.
Even as I did this, I wondered why I was doing it. No one had asked me to. I was supposed to be answering phones, and I had already spent an hour just staring and tapping and getting up for water, and Matthew was being nice about my lack of working, but my guilt was mounting. This was a huge waste of time for such a silly project. But I also knew that Dr. Steve and his wife would really love the card. My cards were always a huge hit around the office. And my job was so boring, it was a thrill to have any excuse to do something I was actually good at.
Elliott, Elliott. What rhymes with Elliott? I jotted a few lines:
To birthday-baby Elliott:
Although at times youre smelliott,
When you look glad
At mom and dad,
It turns their hearts to jelliott.
FIGURE 1
Silly and amusing in a trivial way, but definitely not worth the time I had already committed. (Also, the glad-dad rhyme was forced, too easy, and more than a little trite.) Now my pride was engaged. I needed something good.
I flirted briefly with a classic joke that had entertained my fiance, Jane, back when we had just started dating. It involved cutting a window out of the card as exampled in Figure 1.
So that the final card looked like this (turn now to Figure 2).
I nixed this idea, though. It was amusing for adults, but for a kid it might be actually traumatizing. Handing that to a coworkers child would be not only bad karma, but a potentially disastrous career move.
The problem I kept coming up against was that the kid was three. What good is three? He couldnt really appreciate anything at all. I have only one memory from the time I was three:
