Inside Verse
All day I write feelings for strangers. This is where I write my own.
Yvette Dennett · greeting card writer · Kansas City · since June 1997

In this edition:
For Someone Who Is Doing Better Than She Thinks (September 26)
Dear Kyla (September 23)
Fan Mail (September 15)
Labor Day (September 6)
An Invitation (August 22)
Lullaby, More or Less (August 1)
Season's Greetings, 2000 (July 12)

Back issues: January to June 1999 (a baby, a retirement, a choir) · 1998 (the year it ended) · 1997 (the beginning, all centered)

If you know me from work: hello. Please don't tell Editorial I spend my evenings writing things nobody checks.

Sunday, September 26, 1999
For Someone Who Is Doing Better Than She Thinks

Cheryl gave me homework on Thursday. Write a card. Not for Kyla, not for Dad, not for a stranger in a drugstore aisle. For me. "You've written one for everybody else in the world," she said. "Find the person."

I laughed, because that's Barbara's line, the one she's written in the margin of half the things I've ever handed her. Then I went home and didn't laugh, because it turns out the person is the hardest one to find.

I worked on it Friday night and all of Saturday and after church today. I went through every occasion we make. Birthday: no. Get Well: closer. Sympathy: too much. Congratulations: not yet. Thinking of You: too vague. Encouragement, which is a real line we sell, for people going through something: that's the one.

It's not rhymed. Barbara would put a check mark next to it, I think, and maybe a pencil note: "Who sends this?" The answer is: someone who finally can. Here it is.

(Cover) For Someone Who Is Doing Better Than She Thinks

(Inside) You were brave on days nobody saw.
You kept walking back into the places that hurt
until they hurt a little less.
This card is just to say:
it counted.

I wrote it out by hand on a blank card, the plain cream kind with the deckled edge that I buy in boxes of ten, and I signed it, "Love, Y." Then I addressed it to myself and put a stamp on it and walked it down to the mailbox on the corner. It'll come back to me Tuesday, probably. I'm going to open it like I don't know what it says.

This journal turned two in June, and I forgot to say so. When I started it I was engaged and centering my paragraphs. A lot has changed. I left-align now.

Thank you for reading. If you've written me over the last two years, I've read every one of your letters, the way you read a card you're keeping. Choir's at seven on Wednesday. Darrell's driving.

Thursday, September 23, 1999
Dear Kyla

The duck card is written.

It sat on my refrigerator, blank, for seven and a half months. Every few days I'd take it down and look at it and put it back. Last night after rehearsal I came home and took it down one more time and wrote it in about a minute, standing at the counter, without thinking. I'm not going to put all of it here. It belongs to her. But the last line is:

I couldn't find the words for you, so I'm going to spend the rest of my life looking. Love, Aunt Yvette.

I'll give it to Deanna to put away for her. She can read it when she's old enough to roll her eyes at it.

At my appointment this afternoon (Thursdays now, since summer), Cheryl said we can go to once a month. She also gave me homework, which I'll tell you about when I've done it.

Wednesday, September 15, 1999
Fan Mail

The company gets letters. People write to us, which I didn't know until I worked here: to complain about a typo, or ask where to buy a card they saw ten years ago, or, sometimes, to say thank you. The letters go to someone downstairs, and once in a while, if they're about a specific card, they come up to Editorial, and if you're very lucky, they come to you.

Barbara put one on my desk this morning with a yellow sticky note that said "Yours. Read it sitting down."

It was from a woman in Indiana whose husband died this spring after forty-six years. She said she got more than two hundred sympathy cards, and she read them all, and most of them said he was in a better place, or that God had a plan, and she knew people meant well. But one card said only that there aren't any right words, and that someone was thinking of her, gently, and would be for a long time. She said that was the only one that didn't try to fix it. She keeps it by her bed. She wanted to thank whoever wrote it.

I wrote that in August of 1997, the week I spent on sympathy. I didn't know it had ever been made into a card. It went forward without my hearing about it, the way things do, and it's been sitting in drugstore racks for a year, waiting for her.

I wrote her back on my own stationery. Barbara said that was all right. I won't say what I said. I'll say it was the easiest letter I've ever written, and I cried at my desk, and Joe brought me the rubber chicken without a word, and just left it there.

Monday, September 6, 1999
Labor Day

Dad's first Labor Day as a retired man. He celebrated by laboring: he built Mom a bench for the backyard out of cedar, which took him all summer, and today was the unveiling. It's a very good bench. It's level. It has no wobble. He sat down on it with Kyla on his knee and looked so pleased with himself that nobody had the heart to point out it's facing the garage.

Burgers, Mom's potato salad, Deanna and Rodger and the baby, Grandma, and me. And, briefly, Darrell, who came by for dessert because Mom invited him at church, without asking me, because she is my mother.

Since I'm sure someone will ask: the dinner a week ago Saturday was nice. It was very nice. We went to a little Italian place in Brookside, not the one I used to go to, and talked for three hours, and he walked me to my door and said goodnight and that was all, and I was glad that was all. We're going slow. We both have reasons. He was married once, briefly, years ago, and doesn't talk about it much yet, and I understand that better than anybody.

He and Dad talked about trains in the backyard for forty-five minutes. Dad says he's "all right." That's practically a blessing.

Sunday, August 22, 1999
An Invitation

The choir's been off for the summer, the way it always is, and today was the first Sunday back. We sang badly and happily. Half the sopranos were still on vacation in their heads.

Afterward, in the parking lot, Darrell asked me to dinner. Not coffee after rehearsal. Dinner, on a Saturday, on purpose. He'd clearly practiced. He said it very fast, all in one breath, looking at a spot just over my left shoulder, and when he was done he let out his breath like he'd been underwater.

I write invitations for a living. I've written "You're Invited!" a thousand ways, cute and formal and funny. This was the best one I ever got, and it was eleven words, and he stumbled on two of them.

I said yes. Saturday. I'm not going to make it into anything more than it is. But I said yes.

Sunday, August 1, 1999
Lullaby, More or Less

Kyla is six months old this week, almost. She has two teeth and opinions. She can sit up if you prop her, and she laughs at exactly one thing, which is me pretending to sneeze.

I babysat last night so Deanna and Rodger could go out to dinner for the first time since February. They were gone two and a half hours and called three times. Kyla and I were fine. Around nine she got fussy and wouldn't settle, and I walked her around the living room, and without thinking about it I started singing to her. Not lullabies. I don't know any lullabies all the way through. I sang her the hymns from choir, the alto part, because that's what I know, low and slow.

She went to sleep on my shoulder in the middle of the second verse.

The duck card is still blank, on my refrigerator. But I thought, standing there with her, maybe I didn't need to write her any words. Maybe I just needed to borrow some good ones and sing them low.

Monday, July 12, 1999
Season's Greetings, 2000

Christmas in July, round three. This year it's a strange one, because the Christmas cards we're writing now are for Christmas of the year 2000, and every time I type "2000" it looks like a typo from a science fiction movie.

The humor department is having the time of its life with the millennium. The New Year's cards that go into the stores this December are half about computers crashing at midnight. Joe has written, by his own count, ninety-one Y2K jokes in the last two years, and says he will be relieved when the world either ends or doesn't so he can go back to writing about birthdays.

Me, I'm on the regular Christmas line. Warm, bright, home, peace, joy. Same five words, three Christmases in a row. But something's different this year, and I think it's that I believe them a little more. Two years ago I wrote about home and peace like they were things I had and would always have. Last year I wrote about them like a person pressing her face against a window. This year I'm just writing about them. Some days I have them. Some days I don't. That seems about right for a card.

Wishing you a little light in every window,
and someone to share it with,
and a year that's kinder than the last.

Barbara put a check mark next to it. I'll find out in a year if it's a card.