An Unexpected Gift

I have a friend, you know who you are, who worked in a card store on Canal Street in college (or maybe HS, but I think college).

I'd go and visit her, and she's let me swipe some free cards and stuff them in to my school bag on the way home. I took a variety of cards which I thought I'd need all the time, birthday, Mother's Day, etc.

One morning, we were rushing to give my Father a Father's Day gift and I ran in to my stash to get the Father's Day card I'd taken. My whole family heard me yell out a "OH NO"!!! "He's black". I had gotten my father a card with a black father on the front. How I still laugh now. I don't recall if he noticed or not, but I remember my sister and brother laughing.

Friday I'll be in Milan and on a whim I got a ticket for the Opera- Le Contes de Hoffman (Tales of Hoffman). I'm not an Opera fan, have only been once, and do not speak Italian, but I wanted to experience a performance in the famous La Scala--which we saw on tour last summer. Something tells me I learned a song from that Opera when I took piano lessons as a kid. I looked at the pile of piano books which have been sitting on the floor beneath the piano for about 10 years now for that song.

What did I find instead? About ten cards-- several mother's day, high school graduation (about 3 of them--must have been a big year for graduations), father's day and son's birthday. What a great surprise, they'll come in handy now.

Thanks Shirley--it was you wasn't it?