I'm up in Minneapolis again. Fargo is butting his head up against the screen of the laptop and the static electricity is pulling kitten-hair off his head. I'm on the floor, the television is on, and we're watching skating.
Fargo seems to like skating. He sits in front of the set when a woman with a sequinned outfit is performing, watching her go back and forth. After last week's skating adventure, I'm that much more respectful of the abilities of these women to do what they do. They just seem to get younger and younger.
I'm going to write less from here this trip than I did over Christmas. I want to spend more time exploring, and I think I'm going to wander around Minneapolis a little more than I have lately. The last few times I've been here, the extent of my travels has usually been to the store or to the gas station. This trip, I've already gotten food, and the Mercedes-Benz has a full tank of diesel fuel.
It's later now. Fargo continued to watch the skating, while I went through a box of things I found down in the basement, stacked next to the water heater. It looks like my parents never threw out a single Christmas card they ever received. When we got them, my mother would tuck them into the wood trim around the door to the kitchen, sort of forming an archway of Christmas greetings. After Christmas she took them down, and I guess I always assumed they were thrown away. They weren't. My mother saved the envelopes and put the cards back in them, then put them in this big box.
The cards pretty much stopped coming this year. I think one or two showed up, but one of them didn't count because it was one of those "thanks for being such a great customer and buying all that expensive oil" cards from the oil company that services the furnace. They're really sending a card to the furnace, and incidentally to whoever it warms.
The people who sent cards changed a little over the years. There are cards here from as far back as 1957 or 1958, before my parents were even married, but they're addressed to them both, individually. Starting in 1959, they're addressed to that sort of opaque entity, "Mr. & Mrs. Lawrence," wherein some of my mother's identity got lost. From there until around the time I was born, most of the cards seem to be from people my parents knew in Maryland, people roughly their own age... the cards are pretty friendly and even a little goofy. But I noticed a progression that as other people seemed to have more and more children, the cards seemed to get more and more stiff, more terse, as if they were being written by someone who had way too many other things to do and was addressing cards by rote. More than a few times, there were cards from "families" that abruptly stopped after a few years, and in one or two cases they resumed, but with one different adult name. I have to assume that whoever sent the card got divorced and one or the other of the partners remarried. More often than not, the cards just sort of disappeared. After I was born, and then after we moved here, the character of the Christmas cards changed. Many more cards from "professional colleagues" rather than people who seemed like personal friends. A lot more of those dreadful "form letters" people send out at Christmas.
I hate those things. I don't even read them. My parents felt the same, and said so. Once in a while my father would read one aloud, though, one particularly bad one here or there. He wasn't one to be scornful, usually, but this was an exception.
I remember one year he and my mother sat down and wrote a parody of all those bad Christmas form letters, something that read like:
Well, here at the Lawrences, we've had an up and down year. Jeanne was awarded the Nobel Prize for Beet Farming, but since she's not allowed to cross streets by herself she couldn't attend the ceremony in Stockholm. We had a lot of excitement in July when a B-52 armed with nuclear warheads crash-landed in the back yard, but the Air Force hushed it all up and rebuilt everything and we're fine now, except for a faint glow from the clothesline and three-headed mutant toads in the garden.
They never actually sent that one out, but I always thought they should. There's a copy of it in this box.
Something else I always hated once I found out people do it is when they keep lists of who they got a card from, so that they could decide whether to send them a card next year. You should send cards because you want to, not because you're keeping some sort of tally sheet.
Growing up with my parents made me see a lot of things as ridiculous, if only because they didn't do those things and seemed to get along fine. My parents could remember from year to year who they wanted to send cards to, who they didn't feel a need to send a card to, and the world continued to spin.