I can take a hint

Last week, my grandmother had cataract surgery. Trying to be a good and thoughtful granddaughter (read: make sure I get included in the will--just kidding), I sent her a "thinking of you" card. Yesterday, in my mailbox, I received the following:



The letter was just the typical Grandma letter--difficult to read not only because her handwriting is a bit tough to decipher, but because of the interesting stream-of-consciousness style of her prose. If my grandmother were a bit younger, I might attribute it to Adult A.D.D., but since she's 94 and not as nimble as she once was, I'm thinking maybe her hand simply can't keep up with her brain... By the time she gets to writing the end of the sentence she had in mind, her brain has already moved on to the next thought, so the pen picks up there instead. I've probably presented similarly challenging experiences to the friends who've had to listen to me criss-cross and tangent my way through the stories I tell, so I'll take these letters as a sort of cosmic payback. Really each letter is kind of a puzzle, and I should tackle it as such and enjoy the challenge.

What amused me, then, was not the letter, but the inserts that accompanied it. As I've yet to install any decent image editing software on my home computer to effectively add descriptive callouts and captions on the picture above, I'll just itemize for you what was included:

1. A dollar bill. This is not new. The dollar-as-positive-reinforcement-for-writing is actually something my grandma's been doing for years. In college, friends used to joke that if I wrote her more often, I wouldn't need my part-time job.
   


2. A sheet of stickers. Every letter and card I've ever received from my grandma (including this one) has at least one sticker on the envelope (usually featuring a puppy-dog or a smiley-face or a flower or some other happy girly thing). Presumably I'm to use the stickers she sent (which were actually, I'm pretty sure, a gift from my little sister last Christmas) on my own envelopes. You know... on all those letters I send. To her.
   


3. And finally, my favorite: a row of self-adhesive address labels printed with my grandma's name and address. I'm no fool; I see her motive. Maybe I'd write to her more often if she just made it a little bit easier for me!
   

My mother may have mastered the art of Catholic guilt and manipulation, but clearly she had a mentor.