How to make a grown woman cry...Part one

The doorbell rang around midday. I'm usually alarmed by the sound, as I don't have any friends here in my suburban-sprawl-can't-walk-any-damn-where-but-in-a-circle-around-the-subdivision-dwelling, and the sound usually means an interruption of one sort of another. When I got to the door, however,there was no one, but lying against the glass storm door, was a sizable package. I love finding big, cardboard, priority mail-stickered, black Sharpie-lettered boxes resting on my front porch. When my mom was alive, I would pull into the driveway, half expectant and half hopeful, straining to see if anything had been left for me by the mail carrier. She always sent regular packages filled with Belgian chocolates and cookies and clothes for my son. My cabinets are just beginning to be diminished of these delicacies, and my son has just begun to outgrow the latest clothes that had been sent. In truth, I don't know if I will ever be able to open the last box of those damn chocolates. And it took me quite a while to quit looking for the packages as I pulled into the driveway.

Tears welled up upon seeing my father's handwriting on today's package. It was heartbreakingly neat and unfamiliar. In my thirty years, I can recall only two occasions that he personally shopped for me. (Not to demean him, of course--he financed everything that my mom sent.) On my eighteenth birthday, my mother wasn't exactly speaking to me for one of my few adolescent crimes, so he gave me a birthday card and a little leather purse. On the inside of the card, which I still keep, he had written, "18 candles is a forest fire." The other time was when I was nine--my father had been stationed in Korea without our family. He sent me a mink blanket, a green satin kimono with exquisitely colorful embroidery, earrings for my newly pierced ears, and a brass pig--all in one wonderfully huge box.

Okay, more tomorrow. It's midnight, and I'm tired.