The Birthday Card

Hi Folks!

Well I ran in to Mrs. Barlow when I went to the grocery store the other day. Kate lives over in Hooverville, about a mile and a half from the railroad tracks that go by Travis Lake. We both tend to go to Charlie's Market. Charlie started it about fifty years ago. Weren't too many places around at that point. A body had to travel an hour just to get to a reasonable sized place to pick up food for the next week. There was one place in Biggsbee... but no one really liked to shop there. They tended to crowd the shelves, moved products around from week to week depending on how much the vendors paid them, and just plain charged too much for thequality of the stuff they carried.

One day, after a particularly bad day of shopping at the Biggsbee store,Charlie figured he could probably do better than that and started up his own place. It started out real small at first... and even now it's smaller by far than the Biggsbee store... but that was alright. He got his stuff local when he could, always had good quality stuff, and the prices... although a bit high... were well worth it for the nature of the food he carried. It wasn't too long before all the local folks started to shop there. It served a double purpose, most of them sold one thing or another to Charlie so it just seemed right to buy their groceries from him as well. Everybody made out. The farmers got a good price for their goods and shoppers always knew they could trust what they bought.

Charlie's son Gabe runs the place now. He and his wife do their best to keep up what Charlie started all those years ago. They're pretty successful at it too. The store expanded a couple of years ago to carry a line of home and garden products. Still carry mostly local stuff even in that section of the store. Can't beat something that's been made by neighbors. They always have a big incentive to make sure it's the best they can produce. After all, their reputations are on the line. Nothing worse than being known by your neighbors as producing a shoddy product. Like I said, it's good to know you can trust something you've bought.

Anyways, there I was with Mrs. Barlow shopping in the produce section. She was perusing something that looked vaguely like a mix between a potato and a radish when she just up and started talking about her son Bjorn. That's not a name you hear too much nowadays but seems she was real fond of tennis a while back. She even had to have it on the TV in the birthing room and you guessed it... when they asked her what the baby's name was she just blurted out the first thing she could think of. He's been Bjorn ever since.

Well it seems that Kate had a birthday a couple of weeks ago and Bjorn had forgotten all about it. Or so it seemed. No card, no phone call... why he didn't even drive the few miles between his house and his mom's to wish her a happy birthday. Kate was understandably upset. Didn't do nothing of course... wanted to see how long it would take before he realized his mistake. Had the will out and pen ready but held off writing him out until she could see what his excuse was.

Didn't take too long for her to find out. A couple of days later she got a card in the mail. Well she saw right away that it was from her son. Next thing she noticed was that the envelope was covered all over with what looked like postmarks from places

from all around the world... London, Paris, Singapore, Malawi, even Brisbane. She was fascinated just looking at all of them. Well she opened up that envelope... being sure not to disturb those postmarks. That envelope looked like a collector's item if ever there was one and she wanted to keep it as pristine as possible to go along with her stamp collection. Did I mention that Kate's a philatelist? Yeah she's go a real fine collection... real fine. Why she even has a Penny Black that's only has a cancel mark on the edge of the stamp. Not quite pristine but good enough to get a second look by a lot of folks.

Well she was real careful as she pulled the card out of that envelope. She said it was cute... had some sort of pun about sheep and wishing her a wonderful Baathday. But it was the letter inside that really caught her attention. It was from Bjorn... started out real nice with an apology for maybe being a mite late for her birthday. Seems though that there was nothing really he could have done about it. He'd gone to the post office a full month before the big day and mailed this card to her. Wasn't his fault that the machine in the post office had confused the zip code with one for Adelaide, Australia and sent the card there.

Well, after it landed there things just got worse. Seems the folks in Adelaide thought Hooverville was located somewheres along the east coast of Australia and sent that card on off on the next leg of its journey. The folks there packed it in with mail that was headed for Indonesia and sent it off on a slow boat to Jakarta. After that it was pretty much the same. All along the way somebody thought that it should go somewhere that it shouldn't until that card had been more places than a travel writer in January. It finally reached somebody in San Francisco who circled the address and put it back in the mail one more time. So that was the story why the card didn't arrive in time. Kate was real touched by the story, especially the part where he'd said that he'd wanted to put forty bucks in the envelope with the card but couldn't because he'd already sealed the envelope before he remembered he hadn't put those bills in. She loves that boy to a fault... didn't have the heart to tell her... well you know. Helped her with her the rest of her shopping... even carried her bags to her car for her. She never stopped talking about how proud she was of Bjorn... how he'd always been such a clever boy.

It did remind me that I've got a few birthday cards to send off myself. Better get busy... never can tell how long a card is going to take to get somewhere...

Anyways, that's it for now. 'Til next time. Jon