Abandoned by Fickle Brochures

This is the season of the overflowing mailbox when dozens of full-color brochures arrive in every mail. Not where I live. I have to go to the post office in La Quinta and ask the postmaster for my bills, which is all I’m receiving.

This week I was having lunch with old friends: Helene and Jack Drown and Dr. John Lundgren and his wife. A great deal of the conversation was about the annoyance of brochures. Well do I remember whining about having to unstuff the mailbox in Pasadena when it was so crowded sometimes I had to cut the brochures up to get them out, causing me to bite my knuckles and think unkind thoughts about the senders.

I know that companies buy and sell lists, and if you get on one, you are soon on a hundred.

But they are inconstant and fickle, and as soon as you move to a new ZIP code, they drop you like a hot poker. These are the same people who were telling me about the wonderful men wanting to meet me if I would only give them my favorite color and send $50. These are the same people who told me I had already won a lot in Baja California. At least I had won it for a couple of weekends a year.

Even Ed McMahon has stopped writing to me, and that is something that cuts deeply. Well, he is having a great deal of stress in his life right now, and surely after telling me how rich I could be and join that happy throng of people who are already rich, he will start writing to me soon again.

I have not heard from the Reader’s Digest since I moved to La Quinta, and if you can’t trust the Reader’s Digest, there is very little left.

I have heard from that nice young man in Glendale who takes food to the hills above Pasadena and feeds cats and dogs who have been dumped by savages; how he got this address, I do not know.

But where are the whale people and all the rest of them?

Oh, I know they don’t forward fourth-class mail, or whatever brochures are, and I thought it would be a wonderful relief. Instead, I am bereft, lost without all those pretty pictures. Even if you buy something very rarely, they don’t drop you. But if you move, they think you’ve also lost your checkbook.

Actually, if you’ve moved lately, you know you might as well, because you’re quickly impoverished, what with curtains, carpeting, tile, fences for Peaches who can wiggle her fat self through the bars anyway. She is not really fat,but she would break a rib to get out of an enclosed space.

She used to get a wonderful catalogue showing all the smart raincoats and matching boots I could buy for her. Even some in mink. I never did. I think those must be for dogs who live in very cold climates or who haven’t much fur.

I’m delighted to say that I received my Neiman Marcus Christmas catalogue before I moved, or I might never have known about that pair of horses, which is the gift of choice among the set who used to take the Concorde to London for lunch.

I know people who buy regularly from catalogues, all kinds of nice things, clothes and sweaters and such. They, of course, are not short-waisted people. They are long-waisted and long-legged and look wonderful in anything.

Jean has let me see some of her Christmas catalogues, and did you ever know there are so many kinds of Santa Claus versions? Some with green floor-length overcoats and beanies. I even saw a pink velvet one with roses and lace. He had platinum ringlets for his hair and beard, as shiny and bouncy as Barbie’s. I love pink and roses and lace, but somehow he didn’t look like Santa Claus. He looked rather like a confused old party who had wandered into Frederick’s of Hollywood and the salespeople had sold him one of everything.

Anyway, do not complain about the plethora of brochures. You’d miss them. There are several I cannot understand. Those are the ones dealing with electronic equipment. I am almost friends with my newest food processor, which is about 3 years old now, and I am not ready for the yuppie toys found in young, very now catalogues.

I’ll stick with Hammacher-Schlemmer; I love to look at L.L. Bean, although their things are often a little hearty unless you live with the bears.

Go to the mailbox, the one in the front of your house, not two miles away, and look at all the pretty and useless things and enjoy.