Kathie Gagne died 4,756 days ago.
Mom was forever sending me greeting cards with newspaper clippings, often Snoopy comics or other quips from Reader’s Digest or Scientific American that she thought I’d like. The creases in this letter tell me that it was at one point folded into one of those cards, but the card and whatever joke was included are lost.
It’s also funny now to think of how concerned she was about me getting my taxes done correctly every year.
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I loved getting letters from mom, especially in the Spring semester of my freshman year of college. She knew that I was really having a hard time trying to decide what I wanted to do with the rest of my life and wrote me constantly. This (pretty typical) missive is full of gratefully distracting tidbits about her life and what was happening back home.
I can’t at all remember anything about the “key thief” she mentions. I guess someone had stolen one of the dorm access cards or something like that. My first year at UF was just one year after the Gainesville murders and security was a huge issue hanging over the campus; parents were terrified but most eighteen year old kids know nothing of fear. I remember a lot of eye-rolling among my friends whenever we talked to our scared moms and dads.
Here’s a letter mom wrote me towards the beginning of my second semester away at college. I have no recollection of what I might have done to my leg that worried her so much. (I probably wiped out on my bike riding to class.) The “Steve” she mentions was (is?) probably Steve Secunda, the chiropractor she saw for years.
Here is yet another letter mom wrote me during my freshman year of college. This one came shortly after Christmas break and we must have been discussing my car insurance and how I was going to use my financial aid to pay it.
Here is a short note written on silly Garfield stationery. The cat is sitting on a beach next to a thought bubble reading, “Wish you were here.” I have no idea what P.T.S.O. is or why she was writing about me as if I was suffering from crushing depression. I guess it was just after I’d come home for Christmas break; maybe we’d gotten into an argument.
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Every now and then mom would send me a care package at college. It was usually some cookies she’d baked and assorted groceries, like boxes of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese and Oodles of Noodles ramen. Man, I used to appreciate getting those so much.
Somewhere towards the middle of my first semester of college I got really distraught because I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life or what the point of it all was. Fairly typical freshman stuff, I would think. Mom wrote me this letter of encouragement (?) just after Thanksgiving.
Mom wrote me this letter a few weeks before my first Christmas after leaving for college. The first page is just a long line drawn down the center of the paper: a joke about “dropping a line”.
Reebok, Salty Dog, Little One, and Fingerpuppy were our four dogs.
Puppyshit was the name of my rust-colored 1980 Toyota Corolla-Tercel.
Here is another greeting card that – surprisingly, after 25+ years – still contains some things mom put inside it.
It’s a Ziggy card. On the front he is sitting at a desk alone in a big room and above his head is printed, “Now that you’re grown up and on your own, there’s something you oughta know…” and inside it says, “It’s too darn QUIET around here!! Miss you lots Love you lots”
There are two pieces of faded newspaper clippings. One is from the Friday, November 22, 1991 Daytona Beach News-Journal. It’s a single-frame Family Circus cartoon showing the little kid walking to the mom with his hands outstretched over the caption, “I need a hug, Mommy. I used up the last one.” (I have always loathed Family Circus.)
The other is an article from the Wednesday, November 20, 1991 issue with the headline, “Scientists spot mystery space object approaching Earth” above which mom wrote, “Just Something Else to Worry About!!”
This is perhaps the only actual letter I ever received from “Nana from Florida” – Anna S. Albanese – my maternal grandmother. She’d send me greeting cards all the time, but never with much more than her signature and a word or two.