Praying Madonna
Here’s where it all started.
Kindergarten, 1978. I appear bottom right, displaying the bangs I cut “all by myself.” Standing as far away from me as possible, top left, is the future father of my children. In red, Antonella Calabrese, who would stand up for me as my dutiful bridesmaid. Next to Doug, my arch nemesis, Jerry Beach, plotting his revenge after I dismembered his G.I. Joe. The more things change…well, you fill in the rest.
My mistake.
Yesterday Eva whipped off all her clothes (a commonplace event) and jumped up and down on her bed—an activity with potentially hazardous results for a child not yet potty-trained. “It’ll be OK,” I assured myself. “Even a hamster won’t pee in the same corner of the cage he sleeps in.”
As day turned into night we cuddled up for her bedtime story, and I discovered toddlers are nothing like hamsters.
Run those figures by me again? On second thought, don’t.
Three weeks later, and my Christmas cards are still coming back to me. At least the USPS was clear in its explanation: seems their length (dimension parallel to the address) divided by height is less than 1.3 (including square-shaped mailpieces) or more than 2.5. Kind of makes me regret bailing out of that MIT course in computational geometry. Who knew I’d need it every time I open the mailbox?