Death by Catalogue

Chris and Tommy are at the age where going out to the mailbox to get the mail is a treat. It’s really something to look forward to. They know the name of our regular letter carrier (it’s Keith) and they say hello to him if they’re playing in the front yard when he delivers our mail.

When they bring in the mail, every piece is a treasure, an important communication, one to be examined carefully, to be savored. Before MBW can have a look, they’ve already gone through the stack.

“Look, mom, we got five letters!” Chris will say.

“Mommy, mommy, we got three magazines! And I’m three!” Tommy will shout.

They’re really bills and catalogues. But why spoil their excitement?

One night at the dinner table Chris turned to me and said, “Dad, isn’t it great that every day Keith drives by our house and gives us letters and stuff?”

“It sure is, Chris,” I say.

Ah, the innocent joy of getting the mail.

In addition to the mailbox in front of our home, I have a PO Box at the local post office. I have a small side business and I direct mail for that business to the PO Box. I’d say, on average, I’d get about one or two pieces of mail a week there. So almost every Saturday I’d take the boys over to the post office and get the mail from the box. I’d let Chris and Tommy each have a turn putting the key in the lock, pulling the box open, and taking out whatever mail might be in there. That was an extra special treat.

Notice I said that I USED to get one or two pieces of mail a week there.

My mom passed away last spring. I’m the executor of her estate. One of the first things I did was to have her mail forwarded to my attention. After some thought I decided to have it sent to the PO Box, to help keep it separate from our regular mail.

I was expecting to get her bills, a magazine or two, and an occasional personal letter. And I did, in fact, get all of those.

I also got about 8 million catalogues.

My mom was wheelchair-bound for the last 22 years of her life. I always knew she did a fair amount of shopping by catalogue. It was so much easier for her to browse the pages of a colorful catalogue, buy what she liked and have things delivered to her door versus going out to the mall and trying to carry her purchases on her lap as she wheeled herself around. Of course it made sense she would receive some catalogues.

Often she used to send me pages she’d torn out of a catalogue and ask me to pick things the boys might like for Easter, their birthdays or for Christmas.

I guess I simply had no conception of the number of catalogues she received.

It started slowly at first. About three weeks after her mail started arriving in my PO Box the catalogues came. Two arrived one day, five a few days later, seven or eight the following week.

Two months after it was a deluge of catalogues. 10, 12, 15 a day. Almost every day.

And it never stopped.

Last night it was cold, gray and raining like crazy where we live. For something to do, I took the boys out to McDonalds to play in the indoor play space. On the way we stopped at the post office. I let Tommy have the first turn opening the box and taking the mail out. He turned the key, opened the box and tried to put his hand in the box to get the mail.

He couldn’t get his hand in the box.

“Dad,” he said, “the box is too full. I can’t get anything out!”

I looked inside. The boxed was crammed completely full of catalogues.

I wrestled a few of the catalogues out, let Tommy and Chris pull out the rest, and then we continued to McDonalds. While they were running and climbing around the play space I counted the catalogues that arrived just that day.

There were 22 of them.

I spent the next 20 minutes with my cell phone calling each of the catalogues and asking to be removed from the mailing list. Most of them were gracious and willing to take my mom’s name off the list. But each one of the operators said the same thing:

“Sir, we’ll be happy to take you off our list. However, our catalogues are printed and addressed up to six months ahead of time. You’ll get two or three more catalogues before the change will really take effect.”

That’s great.

And of course it’s the holiday season. Yes, right now. Don’t believe me? Go to your local Costco – the Christmas items are already out for sale.

What that means for me is that even though I’ve been frantically canceling all these catalogues, they will continue to arrive in ever increasing amounts until at least 2006. Christmas is the biggest season for catalogue sales, and I’m sure those ‘pre-printed lists’ run all the way through the holidays. They wouldn’t want to miss an opportunity to get their stuff in front of a deceased shopper over Christmas, would they?

It makes me a bit sad to see these catalogues roll in. I know my mom, if she were alive, would be happily flipping through them, pulling out pages, getting her ideas ready for Christmas purchases. I can almost see her, sitting in her wheelchair by her gas fireplace, shawl draped over her shoulders, her favorite classical music playing as she looked for gifts that would delight her grandchildren. She would often tell me how much she enjoyed trying to find that special gift that would surprise and delight the kids.

She was almost always successful.

Go ahead. Call me a wimp, a baby, a momma’s boy. I miss her. And it will be hard this Christmas when those special gifts for the boys don’t arrive. The boys won’t know, I don’t think. But I will. And I won’t be able to call her Christmas night and tell her how excited they were as they opened her packages. I won’t be able to describe the expressions on their faces. And I won’t be able to send the photographs to her and show her just how happy she made them.

So the catalogues will keep coming. And every day I’ll go to the box and let the boys take them out. Maybe by next March things will be back to normal – at least in terms of the volume of mail we’ll get there.

In the meantime, Chris and Tommy get the pleasure of running the house with wide eyes and huge smiles.

“Mommy, guess what? We got eleventy-two magazines at the post office box today!”

It’s great to be The Family Man.