I Can Be Such a Card
Most of my friends know that I have become the repository and caretaker for many of my family’s postcards. They have been gathered by family members over the past several generations. I have postcards from my great-grandparents and grandparents who have saved them and passed them on to my parents. I have also inherited postcards from my wife Cindy Morrison Beck’s family. A lot of them were sent to Cindy or our kids Amanda Beck Yoder, Andrew Beck, and Anna Beck Prinkey over the years that their Grandmother Retha Johnson Morrison travelled with friends all over the United States and Canada. A few of the cards I own were either gathered by me, for me, or sent to me from friends when they were visiting other countries on mission trips or while vacationing. There are some that I purchased while I was in the United States Navy or while traveling on vacation with my family or friends. How many do I have? I’ve never counted them, but I have two boot boxes filled with cards. I have to be honest, several of the saved items are not postcards, but photographs of the local area that were made into calendar tops.
What sent me down this trail of thought was finding several past Christmas cards, thank you cards, and birthday cards. I’ve decided not to keep them. My office/computer room is already cluttered enough. Just to show you that I am ecologically conscious, I don’t plan on tossing them into the garbage to be burned or to fill a garbage disposal site I am passing them on to a friend. She will recycle them. She uses the photographs on the front of old cards, crop them, and then she will glue them to cardstock making a new Christmas card, thank you card, birthday card, special occasion card, or a card with a blank interior so a person can write their own greeting message.
To extend the “I can be such a card” theme, I often would tell a story or joke while I was working at Frick Hospital in Mt Pleasant, Pennsylvania. I hope it made the work day pass much more quickly for my workmates. Even today while shopping I will tease another shopper or cashier just to make them smile. My motto is, if I don’t make someone smile, I might as well stay home. No one likes dealing with a grumpy old man. Unlike a physician that I used to work with, Dr. Vandyk, when someone would wish him a Merry Christmas, he would mutter the Scrooge-like saying, “Bah Humbug!”