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Show To Everything There is a Season Checking the mail is an enjoyable ritual. On legal holidays, it feels strange to bypass the mailbox and sometimes we chek anyway just to see whether something some-thing might have been accidentally acci-dentally left over from the day before. Often, we are disappointed by an empty box but it doesn 't diminish our enthusiasm. We never voluntarily let a day go by, whether we are expecting mail or not. And when there is something special, we're not ones to tuck it in a pocket to read at home. Personal or not, the envelope is open before we're out the door and salutations from our neighbors fall on deaf ears. With our nose buried in news from home, we have more than once tripped off the post office porch. So imagine our surprise this week when we found our box jammed with mail and the hint of a parcel pickup slip tantalizingly visible between be-tween a number of large envelopes. Could it be the holidays were not yet over? Fumbling too quickly to get at the contents of the box, we could feel our popularity soaring what could all this be? Letters from long lost chums? Irresistible job offers? of-fers? International recognition recogni-tion at last? A quick run through of the return addresses was all that was needed to dash our spirits to the ground. Fifth Circuit Court an ongoing correspondence concerning a parking ticket near the Salt Palace, Utah Power, Mountain Moun-tain Fuel and the phone company devastatingly coordinating coor-dinating their announcements announce-ments of ' 'unavoidable ' ' rate hikes. The Fund for The Animals, the Sierra Club, the Audubon Society, the Whale Protection Fund and the . Wildlife Defense League all describing various atrocities and demanding contributions contribu-tions to prevent certain extinction. Duly subdued by a picture of a baby harp seal being clobbered in Antartica and the onslaught of bills, we still held out some hope for the parcel which turned out to be an unordered book from a book club. Not a , postcard or a letter in the whole lot. The next day, the box was similarly overstuffed but we managed to hold our speculation specu-lation in check. Good thing too because each piece was a variation on the same theme: Subscribe now at half the newsstand price! You have been selected for this special offer! Sure. Funny, we thought, how the format never varied, a form letter from the publisher of Modern Mo-dern Photographer, American Ameri-can Photographer, Camera Arts or Photography Today, a cute card with a punch out token to be placed in the Yes, bill me later slot and a final desperate Don 't Say No plea. Aside from the photography magazines, we received pitches pit-ches from Time, Newsweek, Geographic, Mother Jones and a few we were too tired to look at. Some did contain intriguing gift offers, but we were determined not to be weak. Only two envelopes actually ac-tually made it home, one from Robert Redford, and, of course, the Reader's Digest Sweepstakes cards. Bob, we are sorry to say, only wanted to remind us to resubscribe to Rocky Mountain and the letter looked suspiciously mass produced. As for the sweepstakes cards for $60,-000, $60,-000, the Cadillac Seville and the $20,000 bonus for immediate imme-diate reply well, we sent them in. Didn 't everybody? NC |