September 18, 2008
Dear Everyone:
In the summer of 1988, “Alice” and “Kelly” got
married. (Happy Anniversary,
guys!) A little while later,
I received a carbon copy of a letter from the two of them to “Kelly’s”
parents. Apparently,
“Kelly’s” family had a tradition of writing letters to each other.
I’m thinking one reason I got a copy was because it was typed on
an electronic typewriter which had once belonged to me (I recognized the
typeface) and which I had evidently passed on to “Alice”.
A week later, “Frankie”, who was living in
This started me thinking, “Well, heck, I could do
this.” I didn’t have a
typewriter, but I had a computer on my desk at work.
(It was an
IBM 286.)
I didn’t know much how to use it (yet), but knew enough to get to the
mainframe. And, once on the
mainframe, I could use
VM
Xedit (an early form of
word processing) to
type and print a letter, during my lunch break.
So I wrote a letter and sent it to Mother and Dad,
“Frankie”, and “Alice” and “Kelly”.
And another. And
another. Later, when
“Jeannie” complained that “Alice” told her something I’d written about
her, I said, “I can let you look at my file copy.”
“You keep a file copy?
Why am I surprised?”
So I printed another copy for “Jeannie”.
And soon added “Richard” and “Marshall” to the distribution list.
Then I decided that 29¢
(the cost of First Class
Postage at the time) was a small price to pay
for family unity and added “Byron” to the list.
And later, friends.
At one point in time, I was going through about 14 stamps per week.
It’s hard to believe that I’ve been doing this for
20 years. Harder still to
believe that I have that kind of self-discipline.
I’ve written about silly stuff and serious stuff.
The annual pilgrimage to
1989, when “Jeannie” gave me her roll top desk in
preparation for moving to
1990, when
Saddam Hussein invaded
Kuwait, and the
US-led response, which resulted in police barricades and angry
protestors around my office building in downtown
San Francisco.
Blissfully unaware that Company had no operations in
1995, when I finally bought myself a computer and
could start writing letters at home instead of during my lunch break.
Many movie reviews.
1998, when we lost Dad and then “Byron”, and had to
fight to save Mother’s annuity.
2001, when the
attack on the
Five years ago when the
Shrub in the
White House
declared war on
Hard to believe it’s been 20 years.
In other news…
At work things are kind of in limbo because of
Hurricane Ike. All the
employees in “Hobby”, “Sugarland” and “Baytown” were told to evacuate
the company buildings by noon last Thursday.
So far, very few have been allowed back in.
Consequently, many meetings had to be cancelled.
Suddenly those of us in
It won’t last.
They’re opening most of the offices on Monday.
Then everyone will be twice as busy trying to catch up again.
Ain’t life grand?
Love, as always,
Pete
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