Greetings From…

I found the card while going through my father’s belongings, shortly after his death. He’d probably received it back in the 1960’s, and he’d kept it for the next 35 years or so until he died. It was yellowed and curled from exposure. Dad hadn’t archivally preserved it, he’d just held onto it as a keepsake of his friendship with my Uncle Phil.

Phil wasn’t really my uncle, just a great friend of my father’s. He had been my father’s friend since long before I was born and probably as far back as the days before World War II when my mother and father first met in Cape May, New Jersey.

Phil, or “Fisher,” as they called him, and his wife Shoelace (Aunt Shoe to us) were a part of a circle of my parents’ friends who stayed close throughout the entirety of their lives.

Like all of my parents’ friends, Phil and my father joked a lot with one another. That was their way of telling each other they cared. And they cared a lot. Through decades of good times and bad, they stayed close, never losing touch.

I remember watching them interact in their later years at my father’s 75th birthday party. Phil was getting ready to leave. My Uncle Brent, another great family friend who was also not really my uncle, was helping Phil with his coat. As Brent guided Phil’s arm into one sleeve, my father deftly tied the other in a knot.

They were three men in their seventies, still acting like kids, still in love with life.

The card Phil sent my father so many years ago sits on my desk now. It was a simple one that spoke volumes about the culture of the time. On the cover, it read: “Always Remember, if you ever need a friend…” And on the inside, it finished the thought with the line: “…pick up a fifth on the way home.”

Far from a touching message, it could have been construed as sarcastic and insensitive. But to my father, and later to me, it became an invaluable keepsake, because below the inside copy of “…pick up a fifth on the way home,” Uncle Phil had added the words, “and call Fisher.”

Three simple words, without even as much as a signature. That was all he wrote. But in those words, Phil epitomized a lifetime of friendship and, in doing so, created a keepsake my father held onto for the rest of his life.

Greeting cards are but an instrument for expression. Yet, if played well, they can become the glue that binds us to those we hold dear.