A Card for All Seasons...

Richard Ostrofsky
(January, 1999)
The other day, in the greeting card store at Billings Bridge, I experienced
one of those small epiphanies in which Reality is suddenly made clear to us.
It seemed appropriate to Christmas, which is after all a birthday celebration,
and I knew at once that I wanted to share it with you in one of these
columns.
It was as if the abyss of Time opened before me, and the whole human
life-cycle, in all its variety and fundamental sameness, was revealed to me
as a simultaneous presence instead of a continuum. For there, in that store,
were greeting cards for every event and milestone of a lifetime from cradle
to grave – in fact, from congratulations to expectant parents to the unveiling
of a monument and laying of flowers on a grave – all present together in a
kind of eternity. For children, there was a special card for every birthday,
marking their progress toward adulthood. For adults, the birthday cards
were more generic, but still with special ones to mark the passing decades
instead of years. There were cards for baptisms and bar mitzvahs. There
were cards for engagements and for weddings, and also for separations and
divorces. There were cards of congratulation on a hiring or a promotion,
and of commiseration on being laid off. Cards for going into the hospital
and cards for coming out again. Cards, in fact, for every change of status
and festival known to anthropology. Truly, a card for every phase and mood
of almost any human life.
As Ecclesiastes put it long ago, “For everything there is a season, and
for every activity under heaven its greeting card:
a card to be born and a card to die;
a card to plant and a card to uproot;
a card to get sick and a card to be healed;
a card to break down and a card to build up;
a card to weep and a card to laugh;
a card for mourning and a card for dancing;
a card to scatter stones and a card to gather them;
a card to embrace and a card to abstain from embracing;
 a card to seek and a card to lose;
a card to keep and a card to cast away;
a card to tear and a card to mend;
a card to love and a card to hate.”
(It is not well known that the Hebrew word translated as “time” by my King
James Bible really means “occasion for ritual salutation” – or in modern
English, “occasion for a greeting card”. And yes, there really are cards to
hate, if one can judge by some of the barbed humor.
What struck me that day was how well the greeting card companies
understand their business. It was not just that they had all the occasions
pegged; but that they had worked out all the permutations of sentiment
appropriate to each occasion – from funny to cute to solemn, from
sympathy to sarcasm, from the mawkish to the ironical. Insurance
companies manage to know a great deal about our life expectancies without
knowing or caring when we will die. But the greeting card companies have
worked out the whole structure and sequence of life, indeed the shades of
meaning of all its great and minor occasions, without knowing or caring
about anyone’s individuality or circumstances. They have the whole human
soap opera down pat.
I am admiring, not complaining. As a man who makes his living buying
and selling books, I am in much the same business myself. “A book for all
seasons” might be our motto, or that of any good bookstore, but our wares
are amateurish gropings from a certain point of view.
Like greeting cards, books and bookstores too embrace and celebrate the
human condition as a whole. But with a great deal of self-important
prolixity, truth be told; with far less sureness for the structure of it all. The
writers of books are obsessed with detail. The designers of greeting cards
see life whole and bare – in the design that God laid down for it.
Tolstoy begins his novel Anna Karenina with the famous
statement: “All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is
unhappy in its own way.” The greeting card people go one better:
They know that all lives, whether happy or unhappy, are alike in their
essentials. The basic occasions of happiness or unhappiness are the
same for everyone; and there are just a few acceptable ways to meet
and respond to these occasions. The best way I know to experience
this elemental pattern of life is to go down to the shopping mall and
buy a card for someone.