Something more than just bills and catalogs

Big A and I received an interesting piece of mail on Wednesday. It was a generic 'Thank You' card that you buy a box of 20 of and inside, was just a question mark (or an ear...there was a dot in the middle of the rounded section of the question mark) and a $25 gift card to Olive Garden. No return address on the envelope. No discriminating stamps from the post office since all the mail goes through Detroit. Big A thought the handwriting could be that of his 6 year old nephew. While it was really bad like a child's can be, it didn't seem to me to be from one. The first thing I thought of was it came from one of Big A's Chaldean relatives.

When we had sent out Christmas cards, we included his uncles Khalid and Jamal. In them, Big A wrote in the little Arabic that he has learned to date. Uncle Khalid sent us a Christmas card shortly after and in it was a short message written in English and then a much longer one in Arabic. Luckily I know someone that speaks it so I brought it to her for translating. It was a lovely message regarding the history of Arabic, the excitement of learning that Big A was trying to learn it and how happy he was to have heard from him and hopes that he will keep in touch with them. I use to always harp on Big A to go visit his father's relatives more often but he never does so over the years, I've given up. It was an interesting experience the one and only time I had been to Uncle Khalid's house. Somehow word spread that Big A was there so pretty soon, all of his male cousins start arriving at the house and they give him real hugs and kisses (not the usual one armed hugs that natural born American males give each other) and some how, Aunt Salma and all the wives of the arriving cousins cooked up this big feast and this was just a surprise, pop in kind of visit.

When I saw the gift card, I immediately thought of Uncle Khalid and dug out the Christmas card that he had sent that Big A kept to learn more Arabic from. There were some similarities such as the 'a's were all sort of written sloppy but the 'y's were completely different. The Christmas card had two straight lines to make the 'y' whereas on the envelope, it was more rounded and done all in the same stroke.

Other than pondering who it was from, I thought that was a really neat idea to send someone something like that anonymously. I think I may have to try that some day.