Postcards from the edge

"Inviting People To Laugh With You While You Are Laughing At Yourself Is A Good Thing To Do. You May Be The Fool But You're The Fool In Charge."*

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I lay in bed last night and thought about the postcards I used to make.

Back when stickers became really popular, when you could go into gift shops and find them on spools in the back, I bought bunches and bunches of them, along with various-colored postcards. On one side I created a little bit of weird art. On the other, I put a line  shortways down the middle. On the upper left-hand side, I gave the weird art a name. They were kind of like little stories. Some of them were series.

My favorite series—the one I was most amused by, although I was amused by all of them, I thought they were hilarious—was the elephant and balloon series.  On each of these there would be an elephant about an inch square, and somewhere there would be a balloon.

There were balloons with baskets for travelling.
There were balloons for a birthday party.
Sometimes there were multiple balloons, many, many balloons, and in my favorite, there was one tiny, tiny balloon way off in the farthest corner from the elephant, drifting away from him.

I cannot explain these postcards.

I can't explain why they were funny, but I wasn't the only one who thought so. Pat thought they were hilarious too.
They were a private joke, I guess.

But I used to send them to people.  To my family. At one time or another, everybody got a strange postcard, usually with a bit of poetry as the message. Not my poetry; I was still writing doggerel then, when I wrote it at all, and I certainly wasn't subjecting people to it. The postcards were enough. The poetry was kind of a reward.

I don't know if anybody kept them. My mother, maybe. My father. He did keep things; he had all the letters I wrote him from Texas the year my mother and I spent three weeks with my aunt and cousin there.

But I imagine that, with the rest of my family, this merely solidified my position as family idiot.

Not that anybody actually thought I was stupid. I was just smart in that useless way of knowing things that  nobody needs, or having ideas nobody is interested in.

Both my parents were like that, to more limited degrees.

I enjoyed making the postcards and sending them, but I wish I'd known then the real message I was sending. It would have given me time to prepare for being outcast.

It would have prepared me for having my pointless humor analyzed and for requests for explanation for things that, to me, are self-explanatory.

It would have let me grow into being a weird-o even in my family.

I don't recall my family ever saying anything about these postcards from my crazy, but I'm sure there was talk and laughter. I was being both silly and earnest at the same time. I was telling them a joke, but they were laughing at me.

(I don't know this. I'm extrapolating from what happened later, everything that happened later.)

I was never a person to be taken seriously. I didn't know what they knew. (I still don't. What they know is how ugly the world is. I don't want to know that.)

I'm feeling sad and unspecial in every way.


*Carl Reiner