When the holiday season began to wind down I checked the little recipe box that contained the names and addresses of people on our Christmas card list.
Every year a few new names are added. Every year a few more names get moved to the back of the box in question mark section. They are people we haven’t heard from for a few years despite sending them cards. They got pulled from of the alphabetical section because it is a question whether I’ll invest money on them in the future.
I find that discomforting. No doubt some of them passed away over the last few years and no one from their family sent a message with the sad news. To not know what happened to people who once put a tickle on our heart is rough.
I’ve read that like the big formal Christmas dinner that almost demands getting out the generation’s old good China and best silver, caroling from door to door and other traditions, sending and receiving cards is beginning to fade away.
Those who know more about these things than me say it is too time-consuming to hand address the cards, too expensive and much easier to write a letter on the computer, use an AI app to be sure it is free of errors, then send it out en masse. Over and done for another year, and if someone does not respond, we hardly notice it. I am sending and receiving fewer cards than in the past.
As long as I’m coming across as an old curmudgeon, I’ll pivot to another gripe: I did not get one paper calendar in the mail. In fact, I didn’t find many freebies anywhere.
Finally, I found one at my favorite hardware store, where the woman behind the counter suggested I take two. Apparently, no one else was eager to take them home and she wanted to clear off more horizontal space.
My calendar is right where all good calendars belong. Two magnets are holding it to the side of the refrigerator, just enough out of sight that it might be months before I flip the pages.
In the past, most merchants and businesses handed out calendars as in-the-face reminder to renew your insurance with them, have your car fixed at their service station, and for Roman Catholics nice little icons of a fish on every Friday to not break the rules by settling into a pot roast that night.
Why bother with a paper calendar when your computer or wristwatch will give you the information? The only reason may be it’s a tradition.
That, and because I never managed to get one from Danny Lundstrom when he still owned the Oslo Corner Gas, Diner and Grocery Store. He always had calendars of swimsuit-attired Norwegian models touting Norsk Hanson’s Prime Lutefisk.
As a youngster I could never figure out why they always wanted to keep their Norsk calendar on a wall in the barn and then save them for decades.
Back to the Christmas cards. Until recently, it bothered me when a year or two lapsed since I last heard from someone. Were they dead? Had their minds drifted away with the fairies and they now resided at Groundhog Day Village where each day is the same as the last because continuity is a good thing?
Even more worrisome was I had said or done something, perhaps of which I was not even aware, and they took a black marker to cross me off their list.
Recently I spent an hour or so talking about this with a wise fellow who asked what I thought about the shepherds who turned up in Bethlehem, or the two fellows walking from Jerusalem to Emmaus on Easter afternoon. “How come we don’t know their names?” he asked.
I rattled off the stock answer that the four gospel writers did things differently and were not interested in every little detail.
That answer didn’t work with my friend. He explained that in life we have friends in two categories. The bigger category are what he called “friends along the road.” The smaller but more important one is the “friends of the heart.” That made a lot of sense and I liked his explanation. Then he told me to go for a walk and think about it.
I thought about it for some time. Decades ago when I was in elementary and junior high school, I had a lot of friends of the first category. I wouldn’t know most of them if they walked up to me and shook my hand.
I had one friend of the heart and we still stay in contact. In high school it was the same story: even more friends along the road but only a couple of the heart and one of them died last summer.
That pattern has continued from public schools to university to my professional life. People come and go. We move far more often and to more distant places than our predecessors. We change jobs and sometimes careers, leaving behind coworkers.
Just as importantly, we do not seem to place the same value on long-term friendships as in the past. Most of the time it is disappointing, if not painful, when they move on and out of my life. It is also reality.
It is likely some of the people who counted on us being friends of the heart were disappointed when we turned out to be friends along the road.
