Greet expectations

Sometimes I don’t see what’s right in front of my nose. Nothing exemplifies this like the greeting cards that are tacked up on my refrigerator, which -- I realized just the other day -- date back to 2014. At several points I must have taken them down to clean off the fridge, then tossed ’em back up without thinking, a kind of reflex only involving the lizard portion of my brain. That, folks, is what you call oblivious.

In my defense, though, they’re greeting cards, which don’t typically attract a lot of attention. They’re not diamonds or rabbits or even a square pizza; these things are unusual, and you tend to notice them no matter the circumstances or location. “Look Ethel, is that a rabbit eating a square pizza? And he’s wearing a diamond necklace! Egads!”

Greeting cards are pretty mundane items, all told, and yet there’s an entire industry built on them. This has always been slightly puzzling to me. The basic idea behind a greeting card, of course, is that you want to send a message to someone, usually in acknowledgement of an event or milestone: Congratulations on finally passing that kidney stone, I’m so sorry for the loss of your pet catfish Rasputin, etc. So you browse the racks at your local drugstore, find some art and some words that vaguely express your sentiments, and say, “Yep, close enough.”

It’s extraordinarily rare to come across a card that’s perfect, absolutely perfect, so “close enough” is the prevailing sentiment when you finally make your selection. Which means the whole Hallmark business model is based on people shrugging and going, “Meh.” I’ve rustled up more enthusiasm buying tube socks.

This apathy tends to show up on the insides of these cards as well, where truly heartfelt sentiments are in short supply. A genuinely touching card is a rare event, like a 100th birthday party or a coherent Pauly Shore movie. The precisely worded, poetic message crafted by the greeting card writer is often followed by a quickly scribbled “Miss you!” or “love xoxoxox” from the sender, which leaves you with a hollow artifact you might look at once or twice more and then toss. Or, if you’re like me, you stick them on your fridge and leave them there until they start to decay like some slow-rotting apple core.

Every once in awhile you get a good one. When I was in high school I had a girlfriend (amazingly) who gave me a birthday card with a pretty lengthy, handwritten missive on the inside, in which she expressed heartfelt sentiments that made the prewritten message seem like stilted fortune cookie text by comparison. It’s the first card I can remember that I actually wanted to keep, and I did so for a long time -- in fact it’s probably still in an attic somewhere, steadily collecting mold alongside old paperback novels and a 1997 copy of Game Informer magazine. Never mind that the relationship ended in spectacular fashion when she left me for a dude on a motorcycle. It’s still a nice memory. I learned two things during that time: Greeting cards can be more than just a piece of cardboard, and I need to buy a motorcycle immediately.

Unless you know somebody who’s willing to write something genuine, the best cards to get are the ones with money or gift cards in them. Not to be materialistic or anything, but if you’re not going to put a little elbow grease into the message, then at least slip in a bonus; it’s unexpected, and it gives the recipient the same feeling they’d get if they hit up three cherries on the slot machines. My aunt was pretty good about this. Every year on my birthday, from the time I was a child, she’d slip a $10 bill in the card and tell me to go nuts, usually in a thick French Canadian accent. Of course she kept this up until I was about 30 or so, and at that point, $10 didn’t really make many waves in my bank account. Adjusted for inflation and cost of living she could have gotten away with dropping me a hundred-spot and throwing in a case of Heineken for good measure. But it was sweet, and always appreciated. The gesture was what mattered, although heck, 10 bucks is 10 bucks, and at the very least it helped pay for those tube socks.

I always preferred gift cards to money, though. The starkness of plain ol’ cash is kind of intimidating. There are too many possibilities and inevitably I end up overthinking it and spending it on something stupid and foolish. I got 50 bucks from my grandfather once and blew it on a giant wall-sized poster of Saturn, thinking I would re-decorate my apartment with some kind of space theme. Never once did I consider that my decorating skills are on par with a lobotomized rhesus monkey who’s high on angel dust. Gift cards give me a mission, a focus. Greeting cards even come with little slots for them now. This is smart. These companies finally realized that people don’t want trite little haikus -- they want a trip to Best Buy so they can buy a tablet computer the size of a solar panel.

My family doesn’t buy me cards anymore, and they know not to expect them in return. I’m not saddened in the slightest. Whenever there’s an event, like a wedding or a holiday, I either pick up the phone or show up in person. Sentiments worth sharing are worth sharing in our own voices. A greeting card can only be a pale imitation of what we really want to say, and even if we’re not glib or eloquent, there’s more poetry in the gesture than there is in spending seven bucks at a drugstore.

Not that there aren’t exceptions. Those cards on the refrigerator aren’t outstanding in any way, but they’ve got longevity going for them. Maybe I’ll keep them there. One of them’s got a snowman on it, but  if nothing else it lends the place a little charm.