The Letter to Myself

My uncle Carmine drove a bread truck in Erie for thirty one years, and he kept a stack of postcards in the glove box. When I was maybe ten I asked him who he wrote to. He said, mostly myself.

Carmine had the same thing in him I had, only he got to it earlier. Whenever the itch came, a game he heard about, a horse a fellow swore by, a loan he wanted so he could get in on something, he would pull the truck over, write it on a card, and drop it in the next mailbox addressed to his own house. Then he would finish his route.

Two days later the card would come. He read it at the kitchen table with his coffee, and most of the time he laughed, or winced, and fed it to the stove. He told me that in all those years he could count on one hand the cards he still agreed with when they arrived. By then the game was over, the horse had run, and the hurry had gone wherever hurry goes.

I did not take his advice for a long time. On the road they called me The Closer, and a closer does not wait on the mailman. I made my decisions hot, in the room, with my heart going, and I paid for most of them for years.

Here is what Carmine knew. An urge always says now. That is its whole argument. It never says Thursday, because it knows it will not last until Thursday. What you want at eleven at night with your thumb over a button is not what you want at breakfast, and the breakfast fellow is the one who has to live with it.

You do not need a postcard anymore. Write it on your phone, in a notebook, on the back of a receipt. I want to bet this, right now, because. Then sleep on it and read it in daylight. If you find yourself writing those notes more nights than not, 1-800-MY-RESET is a good place to read them out loud.

Hot ideas cool off in the mail.

Sal