My Valentine’s Repentance and the Mocking Man

By Jennifer Tucker

Yesterday my husband received his annual holiday missive from strangers. He was thrilled. This feeds his periodic foray into law-breaking and easy disregard for other people’s personal correspondence. Can one be a holiday-card voyeur? Is it a disorder? If not, I’m thinking I might shoot off a note to the American Psychiatric Association or some such organization. You see, this all started innocently enough. We had just moved into our house. It was a little over four years ago in late 2001. It’s easy to remember because our son was just a few weeks old at the time, which led to a kind of near-nervous breakdown state on my part and immense, corresponding pressure for my husband. That must be it. It was the pressure.

That first year, many cards came to our home for the previous owners. In all honesty, I blame myself. I should have marked them “no longer at this address” and popped them back in the mail. But I let them sit. They piled up unattended and sad. To say I was overwhelmed with the care of my son and my home-based internet job is to make light of how difficult those first few months were. We had found out the only heater that worked in our new (and yet quite old) home was in the front room; a room with large, beautiful, original windows that simply breathed in the outside air like a screened porch rather than a closed room. With the exception of a more recent addition of the master bedroom, the house had little-to-no insulation. For two L.A. county natives and their offspring, it was like hacking it out in a Montana winter at the edge of the frontier. My son and I would hole up in our bedroom all day with a space heater and my computer. When my husband came home from work he built a fire in the family room and we migrated there in sweaters and blankets.

I’ll get back to the matter at hand. My husband somehow saw past the fact that opening someone else’s mail is a crime and he decided to read the Larry and Darla’s holiday cards. That is their names, Larry and Darla. I’m not kidding. He figured, no harm, no foul. They can’t be very good friends if they don’t know they moved. We also made determinations that Larry and Darla were our polar opposites. They received a great deal of literature from the National Rifle Association and Republican fund-raising operations. Our neighbors also told us the previous owners were slightly odd. For example, Darla demanded that no one park in front of the house, which seemed unkind and placed a kind of strange restriction on each of our neighbors. I must also tell you that we can easily park five cars in our driveway and seven if we use the garage. The house was also full of the kind of things my husband and I hate; crafty stenciling, lacy acrylic curtains and syrupy wallpaper borders in the bathrooms. Larry and Darla were clearly not “our” kind of people; except perhaps in taste for classic bungalows dating to the 1920’s in need of love, care and extensive repair work to the roof, the plumbing, the heating, the cooling, the electrical, the windows, the flooring and the yard.

That first year, Larry and Darla’s friends, or FOLAD’s for short, sent the normal cards and several of them contained holiday letters telling all about the sender’s year of achievements and heartbreaks. There were probably about ten of them that first year, quite a few at least. Clearly Larry and Darla had failed to mail out change-of-address cards. My husband saw this as license to snoop. He liked to read them out loud to me and wonder what drove these people to reveal such strange and personal things in this mass mailing format. I’ll be honest with you and this isn’t pretty. He mocked them, openly and with glee. These poor unknown senders of holiday cheer, these unsuspecting FOLAD’s. It gave my husband some kind of perverse pleasure to think that even though we were struggling to make it in our self-inflicted little-house-in-the-prairie-cum suburb, at least we didn’t send out notes like these to perfect strangers. Albeit they didn’t know they were sending them to perfect strangers, and in fact they weren’t. They were just temporarily address-challenged.

The next two years brought several cards again. My husband religiously read each one, which I might add he failed to do to those actually addressed to us. He was always disappointed when there was no enclosed letter to mock. This was showing an ugly side of my soul mate. I was getting a little scared. Where would this mockery lead? What kind of man had I married anyway? A mocking man. Hmmm.

So very thankfully in 2004 we received only one card and a letter of little interest. Things were looking up. I thought that the Christmas of 2005 my husband’s law-breaking temptations had finally left us when no cards arrived addressed to Larry and Darla. But like many other times, I was wrong. There, I admitted it. I can do that. Actually, I’m pretty good at it. As in, “You’re right, I’m wrong, I’m sorry”. That line has saved my behind more than once, I can tell you.

Anyway, yesterday we unexpectedly received a holiday card from a FOLAD. Inside it said “Merry Christmas, or Valentine’s Day, or Whatever”. Little did these unsuspecting folks know that when they sent Larry and Darla their “News of 2005” that my husband would intercept their annual update, complete with clipart and photos, for his own twisted purposes? My husband yelled from the other room, “We Have Pictures!” He was so excited to see the faces of the FOLAD’s. Of course, they can’t be that good of FOLAD’s if they are still send mail to an address that hasn’t been Larry and Darla’s home for four years. I am, or course, weakly trying to justify our trespasses.

Said letter contained all kinds of strange things too. The FOLAD’s referred to something called “Kendall the Wonder Visla”, “gutting the interior of their new RV to manifest a Disney theme”, meeting their “Swedish sister” and reference to another family that lived with them for six-months. Did they take in Katrina survivors I wondered? No, that can’t be it, the timing wouldn’t mesh. Were these FOLAD’s really kind and wonderful people even though they had some connection to people that so badly stenciled grape clusters over my patio door and painted my living room a shade of pink only a five-year old girl could love? Just because the FOLAD’s refer to their son as “sardonic” and have added a custom license plate to their RV that reads “MCKYMBL”, can they be all that bad? Does their letter deserve the handling it receives in our home?

No, I don’t think they are the bad ones. I think we are. They may have what we consider bad taste but we have bad manners, which is inherently worse. You know, I didn’t make any New Year’s Resolutions this year. I don’t as a practice because the resolutions never seem to last the evening and frankly I’m usually asleep before midnight anyway. But I think I’ll make one now. Even better, I’ll make a Valentine’s resolution. That way I can repent with originality. Here goes …

I resolve to send all mail back to Paul, Steve, Cindyellen and Kayla.
I resolve to resist the temptation to hear the latest dish on their holiday musings and my husbands riff on their homespun-isms.
I resolve to obey mail laws.
I am sorry Dear Robinson’s, even though my husband isn’t. You’re right. I’m wrong. I’m sorry.