Mailing Cake

My oldest daughter was away at school. When she called to wish her younger sister a Happy Birthday, she lamented, “I didn’t get any birthday cake.”

I cut a slice of cake as thin as I could. I put it in a Ziplock plastic bag and squished it as flat as I could. The sandwich bag was placed in an envelope. I wrote “HAND CANCEL” in big letters and mailed it. (This was in an era before electronic processing of mail was a standard thing. I wouldn’t dare do this today since it could really mess up one of those electronic machines.)

I got another phone call from my college daughter. “The cake arrived,” she said. “I ate it. It was good.”

We all remember this cake story. It turns out that I was mailing more than a piece of cake–I was mailing a memory.

Memories are an essential part of bonding  with other individuals. Creating a memory is a fickle thing. Sometimes the things we do and think will be remembered slip into oblivion. But other little things that we don’t concentrate on become the memories we treasure and share over and over again.