TO-WIT: GREETINGS
I don’t want to go into too much ancient history here, but let me just tell you that I hate greeting card stores. I mean, I don’t just dislike them. Its not that they just make me uncomfortable. Its that I really really hate them. I’d rather suffer the plague than go into one.
You want to know why, don’t you? Well, suffice it to say that a long long time ago, in a lifetime far far away, I was married to a woman whose card shopping rituals made the Holocaust seem like a romp in the park. She would earmark entire weekends to go card shopping, she’d spend two days at the neighborhood mall, and she’d come home with one, count ‘em, one card. Then she’d spend the entire next week reading and rereading it, pondering it like Ulysses, only to return it the following weekend and begin her quest anew.
It took her so long to buy one card that the event she was hoping to commemmorate frequently passed before she could make up her mind. If Hallmark had not invented the “Sorry I forgot your _______” card, people might have stopped talking to her years ago.
As every spring approached, with its attendant flurry of bar and bat mitzvahs, she began to quiver like a spaniel in heat. The local vet recommended that I put her down, but after thinking about it, I concluded that that was a bit too harsh. She was, after all, the mother of my children and they would probably have missed her.
Had the local mall housed only one, perhaps two, card stores instead of four, our marriage might have survived. But it didn’t, and it didn’t. Yes, I know, it’s a long way to go to tell you why I hate greeting card stores, but after all these years I just had to get it out. Live with it.
Nonetheless a friend of mine recently divorced and I wanted to buy him the best congratulations card I could find. Yes, as I stood there in the store, I recognized the irony. I even cracked a smile. But as I stood there reveling in old memories, I was struck by a curious thing.
There, among the work product of the world’s most failed and least gifted writers, I all of a sudden noticed that something was missing. There were cards there celebrating literally every walk of life, parents, teachers, doctors, auto mechanics, pets, the infirm (“So sorry you caught …”), even criminals (“So sorry you got caught”), yet there were none, none at all, for lawyers.
How could this be? Are we not also valued and productive members of society? Don’t we rate up there with cats and octogenerians? Of course we do. And if there aren’t folk out there clever enough to recognize a fertile market and cater to it, well, then perhaps I missed my calling in life. When cut, lawyers can bleed with the best of them, and
© 2005, S. Sponte, Esq.