Interlapse

The lapse of time between two events.

In November of 2006 I designed and printed a 5.5"x8.5" postcard to announce my holiday studio hours and crafts shows for my jewelry design business. Some of these cards I mailed, others I left at various cafes and still others I had available at my studio. Today, more than 13 months later, I received one of these postcards in my studio mailbox. What made this interlapse all the more intriguing is that I was not the sender of this postcard. Someone's father had used my postcard - which doesn't have a lot of extra room on it - to send a greeting to his children, or to a child and his/her partner. How do I know the person was a dad? He wrote, "Jeanne, Warren, Thanks for the all the goodies. Dad."

And someone else - possibly the dad's partner or another family member - had written a longer message on the lower right of the postcard, beneath the addresses. Yes, there were two addresses, the first one scratched out to make way for the second. There were also two stamps, one on top of the other - a Purple Heart stamp (2007) over a Ronald Reagan stamp (2006). If I were to assume that this person is like me and chooses stamps that reflect their values or tastes, then I would conclude that this person is a Republican who values the military, was once enlisted him/herself or is close to people who did. I am also going to assume that the dad was not the person in charge of communicating via this postcard - what kind of a dad would be so cheap that he'd hijack a jewelry designer's marketing collateral for his own purposes, scrawling in the margins? And I imagine that the dad would know the correct address for his child(ren). I am betting that this other person, who signs the card just as "B", had the bright idea of encroaching on my marketing real estate and using it to deliver his or her news.

The presence of two stamps suggests that the postcard was mailed once, with an incorrect address, and then returned...to whom? and to where? And when it was returned mysteriously to the sender, whose address is not on the card, this person then put a new address and used a fresh stamp, eclipsing most of Ronald Reagan's face, sending the postcard on its second journey.

The handwritten date on the postcard is 12/22/06. On 12/29/2007 it was stamped by a postal machine. My hypothesis is that the senders wrote the postcard in 2006 and put a stamp on it. It sat around for a year, by which time postal rates had gone up, so they plopped a second stamp on top of the first, rather than bothering to go to the post office and pay a few extra pennies for supplemental postage. And by this time the addressees had moved, so the original address was crossed out and another one inked in. But this second address was still not correct and on 1/15/08 it landed in my mailbox. If you have other theories, please let me know!