“Love Letters” to Me

My

'thing' with the mail began in the fifth grade, when I entered an essay contest. Our teachers informed us that if we won, we would be sent a letter of notification. So every day after she came home from work, I forced my mother to take me to the post office and check the mail.

I didn't win that contest. But shortly afterwards, I entered another one, and the ritual began once more.

To this day, when Mom comes home from work and we've briefed each other on the day's events, I'll ask her if she checked the mail.

Most of the time, it's just credit card solicitations and the odd notice from the bank. There's an ad circular for the Dayton Mercantile every Tuesday; The Times shows up on Wednesday. National Geographic comes once a month; Muse, once every two.

My cousin and I have an on-and-off pen-pal relation­ship. Her envelopes come adorned with perfectly ex­ecuted doodles, their flaps tipped with freeform hearts or ominously labeled "Pre­pare yourselfhellip;". There's al­ways a paperclip inside, and I never fail to laugh when I pull it out. It's a secret sym­bol of sorts, representing our family bond, our fiery individualism, our love of writing, and an inside joke.

I love her letters. They provide interesting reading material and keep me busy writing replies. Of course, when she's in the middle of finals week or I'm up to my eyeballs in extracurricular commitments, we stop. And once we stop, it takes us a while to start again.

Right now, though, most of my letters aren't from banks or cousins - they're from colleges. We have to open our mailbox very, very carefully in order to prevent a recruitment-mail ava­lanche onto the post-office floor.

It's not that I'm a teen­aged Einstein. Ask any oth­er junior who lacked the foresight to withhold their contact information from the PSAT form. There are over three thousand places of higher educations in the United States, and they all want a piece of us - every stinkin' one.

The messages inside the envelopes all follow an iden­tical template: Dear Emma,

You are truly the most in­telligent person on the face of the earth, but even ge­niuses such as yourself need a little help. That's why we'd like to send you 17 Nearly Foolproof Tips for Choosing Your Perfect College, an in­credibly helpful and totally nonbiased guide prepared by our friendly admissions staff, who are most definitely not paid on commission. In your search, be sure to con­sider (name of college here), which not only boasts one of the "138 Most Beautiful Campuses in Southwestern Wyoming" (Southwestern Wyoming Gazette) but offers a 20-to-1 student-to-faculty ratio.

To claim your FREE guide, please send all your personal contact informa­tion (plus that of your rela­tives) to us using the en­closed form. Yours, (Dean of Admissions' "sig­nature")

I call them "love letters". Pesky as they may be, they provide a much-needed morale boost at the end of a long day. And sometimes they even call me "Ms."!

Just one more reason to keep bugging Mom about the mail.