Comfort in Consistency

Yesterday my friend Haley made fun of me for drafting e-mails.

"Doesn't everyone do that?" I said.
"I don't draft e-mails," she said. "No one does. Not like that."

Currently there are 991 drafts in my mailbox. Most of them are earlier drafts of letters that have already gone out, but I guess it's a nauseating number for anyone who writes on impulse & clickity-clacks send, who isn't phased by a minefield of technical errors, and who is less concerned with expressing their ideas most effectively than just getting them out there.

Perhaps it's the affliction of a writer-to-be*, but there's nothing I brood over more than a letter to a friend. In a rational world, how much you care about someone and how long it takes you to write them should be inversely related, but neither writing nor I is rational. In other words, if I haven't written you back yet, it probably means I like you a lot.

In addition to my letter-ary ineptitudes, I tend to be late with all holiday dispatch. This Halloween I told myself I'd rise above and send McKenzie's sisterly box of surprises early enough for it to arrive before the holiday. Six days would be ample time for a Priority Mail parcel to reach South Florida from Atlanta, so I'd penned in the deadline accordingly. The package included a short coloring book I'd made and a ton of chocolate because there's never any of that stuff in the White House. When we had sweets, like my grandparents' annual shipment of tin foil-wrapped Cadbury ghouls, they'd never last longer than a few days.

A week had passed, Halloween had come and gone, and the package still hadn't arrived. Go figure, I thought. When I'd finally gotten a box in the mail on time, it'd gotten lost. I was a failure as a sister.

Then one Thursday afternoon, while toiling over a stack of headlines long enough that my brain was more baked than the Jersey Shore, the phone rang. It was McKenzie.

"Hey dude!" I said.

"Hi, Courtney. Today there was an entire tube of Hershey's, and Dad and Mom finished them off!"

*writer-to-be: term coined by Skyler Dobin, Copywriter

The Place Called Halloween

Halloween had always been a favorite holiday growing up. My big sister Morgan and I would start building our costumes weeks in advance, often in collaborative duos like pizza and coke, Angelical Cats complete with full fur headpieces and even a homemade cell phone/beeper combo.

In the days leading up to the event, I’d proudly neglect the remnants of glitter and spray paint lodged in the crevasses of my fingernails. Just like Dad’s grease-covered hands after putting together bicycles in the garage, and my grandpa’s rubbery plastacine stink after a day in the studio, my markings reminded me that I was creating something.

I’d pass time in spelling class sketching my character’s imaginary script along the margins of my composition book, and fantasizing what theatrics could make Morgan’s and my costumes stand out. All the strange obsessiveness paid off; we'd have a great time and always win the costume contest at City Hall.

While McKenzie’s Halloween occurs in the same house and neighborhood, hers is a completely different holiday. She doesn’t have a partner with whom to raid Dad’s prized collection of electronics boxes to build a cardboard body suit. If she does steal a box, she can’t blame the absent sibling when Dad asks where his box went. She doesn’t have a sister in the top bunk with whom to stay up late brainstorming costume ideas from November to October, or a resident friend to trade candies with at the end of the night.

McKenzie in her Halloween costume "from the computer"

This morning there were no last-minute costume adjustments; Dad took Kenz fishing instead. Today she reported that she’s "going to Halloween at five," (Halloween is a destination rather than an event), and she will wear the costume she and Dad got "from the computer." At Halloween, she’ll find Joseph, who’ll be dressed as a gremlin “but not a scary one because [McKenzie isn’t] afraid,” and Parker and Kylie, who hadn’t picked out their costumes as of the time Kenzie last spoke with them.

The fab four will run around the same cold tile-floored auditorium space we’d looked forward to visiting each year. They’ll put candy worms in their punch and brave the haunted house maze as many times as possible before their parents tire, then on the way home they’ll collect silver dollars from the big house at the end of Codrington Drive.

The next day Mom will add a Baby Ruth from Kenzie's pillowcase of loot to her lunch bag, on which Dad will have carefully scribbled a cartoon reflecting the last night's events.