The (almost) worst gift ever.

Brown and padded and oddly personal.

On Mondays I open the new post box and write directly into it. No planning. No editing. Apologies ahead of time.

When I was in second grade my mother’s friend came to dinner. He brought a wrapped gift.

Photo by Ekaterina Shevchenko on Unsplash

Exciting, right? You wish you could go back in time and open it with me. So imagine this is a youtube unboxing video (if you don’t know what that is I urge you not to waste your time figuring it out.) I shimmy the bow of of the package and want to tear the pink paper but I have an audience so I slide what could generously be called a fingernail under the glossy tape. There is no actual box in this unboxing so we immediately see what is inside. A brown, floral, padded, corduroy (fill in the blank here because you are probably not going to guess it.) Journal. It was a brown corduroy journal. And did I mention it was in brown tones?

Thanks.

Years later I learned this Judith Viorst.poem that I still remember.

I wanted small pierced earrings, gold

You gave me slippers, gray

My mother said that she would scold unless I wrote to say

How much I liked them

Not much.

I didn’t have my ears pierced but the rest of the poem was spot on. In fact corduroy slippers might have been better.

Did it sit on my red shelves untouched for years? Nope.

Did I begin to write in it and find an outlet for pent up creativity that then over the years made me my best version of myself? Hell. No.

Did I bring it to school and pass it back and forth with my friend and write lists of boys that we liked first second and third best and did it get stolen because my friend was a very popular twin and everyone wanted to know who she “like-liked” Yes. But that was later.

Did my mom force me to write in it every night for ten minutes because anyone can do anything for ten minutes? Bingo. That’s the one.

Writing tip of the day: antagonists don’t have to be people, they can be setting, or weather, or corduroy journals. Not sure how I came up with that example.

I just broke my rule about sitting at the computer on Monday mornings and just writing without stopping because I was pretty damn sure that I still had this journal and its brethren (marimekko car pattern, also padded, some sort of fish pattern, you guessed it...padded) in a dusty sour box in our game closet but when I went to check this happened to the pull cord.

If any of you wants to use my fingerprint to open the heavy vault door to an enormous cavern of gold bullion you could try.

But still I dragged out grimy boxes into the clouded light of the Denver morning that is MISSING THE PROMISED SUN. And found only files. Taxes. Manuals to TVs that are never being made again, my college application (handwritten?!), about 700 HUDs (why are they the wrong size? The writers of the HUD were all “we need a little more space so lets keep going on this endless scroll of triplicate paper like the 1950’s version of the ten commandments and when we are don we will be done and those poor property buyers and selling can just deal with squinching and folding the trailing tail into whichever place they store important documents)(Also- the vaccine cards? Why that size? Staples had a sale on rectangles that were neither index card size nor credit card size nor business card size? And the government thought…we are spending a lot on that covid shit lets just pick these cartons up for .99 cents and yes please we would like help with it out to our car.)

So the journal? It is probably in the basement but I don’t go there.

I can recreate the inside though:

And so we get to the reason of this whole post. Monday morning came and I all could think of writing is:

For those of you that can’t read my “grown up” handwriting it says:

Monday

I am making myself write a blog post with no idea for a topic. I hate this. I don’t hate myself because I am a grown up and have worked very hard to recognize that haring situations and reactions are not the same as hating myself.

And also not to use the word hate.

It is not sunny.

OK people. Here are today’s comment prompts

1. What WOULD you like in a brown floral corduroy…with padding.

2. Worst gift you have gotten (not that this was the worst I am totally saving that for another post)

3. How illegible is your handwriting. Please rate my illegibility on scale from 1 (doctor’s prescription) to 10 (Steve’s mother’s which you don’t know but can probably extrapolate from the scale) then rate your own and we will have a sense of who won this game. Winning is subjective.