If you've been paying any attention at all, you'll know that my mother has, in the past couple of years, become a Jehovah's Witness. As a result of this conversion, she's developed a rather entertaining way of sending me things in the mail carefully timed to arrive around a holiday, but not close enough that the package might feel uncomfortable caught up in the holiday traffic. Sort of like how elementary school classes with a Witness kid won't let anyone celebrate anything, in case the kid were to feel left out.
You might assume that I've just received a package from her, and if you were to assume that, you'd be right. Contained therein were any number of entertaining things--some 'literature' on the 'history of the bible' and a box of grits, for example (no, I really do love grits).
But interestingly, tucked inside a cookbook were a few pictures of my dad right around the time they got married, when he was eighteen or so. The pictures are fuzzy and often reddish, and he's scrawny and grinning with face-eating glasses and a pack of smokes. I don't have an awful lot of pictures of my dad, which is a pretty impressive feat considering that both my stepmother and myself are always within arm's reach of a camera. I'm glad she sent them, that they're not going to sit and collect mold in her crawlspace anymore. He's not anyone to her anymore, after all, but he's the only dad that I've got.
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