How to Write a Killer Thank-You Note

Remember these things before you start.

• Never write in pencil or in pen that smears.
• Make certain to spell everyone’s name correctly.
• Spend more time talking about the other person instead of yourself.
• Try to be as genuine as possible; that is, mean what you’re saying, or else sound like it.
• You don’t have to write in calligraphy, but you do have to be legible.
• Don’t address all your envelopes first: you will put the wrong cards in the wrong envelopes, and that’s embarrassing.
• Always put the stamp on last.  If you make a mistake, you won’t have wasted it.

Here is the Divine Four Sentence Formula:

Dear [Person],

1. Thank you very much for the [specific description of item, i.e. generous graduation check, orange crocheted potholders, Brave Saint Saturn CD.]
2. Your generosity makes [event for gift-giving, i.e. graduation, Christmas, birthday] feel special.
3. This sentence is a description of how you will use the gift, i.e. I’m going to use the money during my trip to Massachusetts, The potholder will make my kitchen look distinctive, I love listening to the CD in my car on the way to work every morning.
4. Thanks again! Or, See you soon [be specific, i.e. at grandma’s house on Friday, next Christmas, at the park].

Best, / Love, / Cheers, [avoid Sincerely, as it sound stodgy,] You

I know it’s rather a lot of writing, but with this formula, or restrained variations of it, you can never fail.  Trust me, I’ve written more than sixty thank-you notes in the last three months.  I’m heartily sick of them, as you might imagine.  I really am grateful for what I’ve received; I just wish “Thanks a bunch” could be more easily communicated, you know?  I’ve been tempted to write,

Dear Relative, Thank you so much for the twenty dollars.  It was a very generous birthday gift.  I’ve already spent it buying cards and stamps to thank everyone else for their cooler presents.  Thanks for helping me be courteous.  Best, Kelly

No!  Down!  Bad, sarcastic Kelly.  Go to your room and think about what you’ve done.

The Pleasure of My Company

Steve Martin’s second novel is as hilarious as he is, although not quite as hilarious as his wonderful memoir, Born Standing Up, which is significant coming from me, who almost always prefers fiction on principle. But The Pleasure of My Company is a book for a summer afternoon, light, comic, and requiring as much time to read as it takes to finish a tall glass of lemonade.

Martin’s main character, Daniel Pecan Cambridge, suffers moderate OCD whose quirks include, but are not limited to, counting and alphabetizing, requiring 1125 volts of light in his apartment to be on at all times, and a phobia of crossing curbs. He is also hilariously inept at reading body language and becomes involved despite himself in the lives of Philipa and Brian who live upstairs, Elizabeth the realtor of the apartment complex across the street, Zandy the pharmacist at Rite Aid, and Clarissa the intern shrink who visits Daniel on Tuesdays and Fridays at 2:00 pm. If the book is a touch sophomoric, it is, at 163 pages, not sophomoric for very long.

It ends as you would expect a comedy to end: transitioning from disorder to order, from separation to connection, from confusion to understanding…and it ends in marriage. Funny, charming, witty [it references Zeno’s tortoise], and also involving magic squares, The Pleasure of My Company is pleasurable company indeed.

The Enchantress of Florence

Before I water down this great work with my own thoughts, I feel that I should reproduce here for your edification the author biography on the inside cover:

Salman Rushdie is the author of nine previous novels: Grimus; Midnight’s Children (which was awarded the Booker Prize in 1981 and, in 1993, was judged to be the “Booker of Bookers,” the best novel to have won that prize in its first twenty-five years); Shame (winner of the French Prix de Meilleur Livre Etranger); The Satanic Verses (winner of the Whitbread Prize for Best Novel); Haroun and the Sea of Stories (winner of the Writers Guild Award); The Moor’s Last Sigh (winner of the Whitbread Prize for Best Novel); The Ground Beneath Her Feet (winner of the Eurasian section of the Commonwealth Prize); Fury (a New York Times Notable Book); and Shalimar the Clown (a Time Book of the Year). He is also the author of a book of stories, East, West, and three works of nonfiction. He is co-editor of Mirrorwork, an anthology of contemporary Indian writing.

If you are unable to tell from his astounding winner-of list, Salman Rushdie is a God of the Book. I am shocked and ashamed to say that The Enchantress of Florence was the first book I have ever read written by this deity, but that perhaps it will add to my redemption that I will be reading the Booker of Bookers very soon.

I first coveted this book when it arrived as a customer’s special order. I stood behind the counter at work and melted a little at the beautiful cover, then teased myself by reading the inside flaps [this was one book I could not wait until June 2009 to buy in paperback] and the first sentence.

“In the day’s last light the glowing lake below the palace-city looked like a sea of molten gold.”  So many ‘l’s to appreciate, drawing out the sentence long and seductively, with the long ‘o’s in molten gold sending a positive shiver down the spine.  Who thinks prose is not poetry has not read Rushdie.

One of my favorite plots is A Stranger Comes to Town; this book has two towns and two strangers. The story of the Enchantress, a woman of many names and mysterious beauty, is told by a traveler who comes to Sikri, the red capital of Akbar the Great, the emperor of the Mughal empire. The stranger, self-styled “Mogor dell’Amore” or the Mughal of Love, and who also happens to wear a really awesome coat, slowly enchants the city of Sikri with the story of a woman who enchanted the city of Florence. The double story lines interweave seamlessly and, in what may be the truest praise of all, keep one guessing until the very end.

Full of court intrigue, with all the sex, profanity, blasphemy, and violence of the wealthy and powerful, The Empress of Florence contains not only adventure but philosophy – as any reader can expect from a book with Machiavelli as a supporting character. With elegant, vivid history, urgent questions into the nature of power and individuality, and the charm of not one but two (or possibly three) imaginary women, this novel is a literary achievement: the awards it must win will not suffice for the enchantment of reading it.

Sadly, the customer with excellent taste has not yet picked up this masterpiece.  I only hope she regrets the time she left it languishing unread in our special orders cabinet.

Le Morte d’Art

The other day at work, a young man comes in and asks me to recommend a book that’s set in the South, “like To Kill a Mockingbird.” It turns out that his girlfriend likes to read, and enjoyed Harper Lee as well as The Jungle by Upton Sinclair.

I was, of course, overcome with delight. Here at last, I think to myself, will my degree in English help serve humanity by broadening and wisening the minds of my generation.

The books I recommended for being set in the South, or in the 1920s-1940s were:

1. A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor.
2. A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest J. Gaines.
3. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston.
4. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith.
5. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
6. Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred D. Taylor.
7. Mockingbird, a biography of Harper Lee.

The books I recommended for being like Upton Sinclair were:

1. Oil by Upton Sinclair.
2. The Road and No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy.
3. Animal Farm by George Orwell.
4. The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver.

These books were naturally limited to what I knew we had on the shelves, and what I could think of in the space of five minutes. I may have ever so slightly overpowered the customer with my enthusiasm, because he said, “I guess I’ll think about it,” wandered around for about two more minutes, and left.

I was truly disheartened. I thought I had made some excellent recommendations (“If she likes X, then she’ll like Y, and here’s why.”)  I rarely ever take things personally at work because I know it makes no sense, but I do like to do a little suggestive selling.  (“Oh, you like Frances Mayes.  Well, have you heard of Marlena de Blasi?  She has a memoir of travels in Italy too, and it’s great.”)  But I was pretty glum after all the beautiful books, which I held out eagerly for reception, were all rejected.

So I consoled myself thinking of all the stupid things the customer was going to buy his girlfriend now.  I bet he’s going to get her a CD when she could have had Gatsby.  Or probably he will buy her a butterflies bookmark from Wal-Mart with a tassel that will break.  Or maybe some chocolate so that she’ll gain weight.  Or maybe he’ll eat the chocolate himself and gain weight, and his girlfriend will dump him for having no perspective and get her Ph.D. in American Literature.

Needless to say, it can get pretty slow at the bookstore sometimes.

Passage

I am a firm fan of Connie Willis, and her novel Passage did not disappoint me.  At first I was a little surprised to find that the book was not speculative fiction; the other books that I have read of hers (To Say Nothing of the Dog and Uncharted Territory ) have been distinctly sci-fi.  And although this book certainly had elements of the fantastic, namely sequences of near-death experiences (NDEs), it was definitely contemporary realism.  Nevertheless, Willis has again proved herself adept at writing characters who are people.

Dr. Joanna Lander, a cognitive psychologist, is researching NDEs at Mercy Hospital, which is a hilarious maze of cordoned-off stairways, broken elevators, and floors that do not connect.  A neurologist, Dr. Richard Wright [insert pun about Dr. ‘Right’], has discovered how to simulate NDEs, and asks Joanna to assist him in interviewing the patients and assessing the information.  Together they struggle to discover what the brain is doing when subjects see a long dark hallway with a light at the end and a feeling of warmth and safety.  In the comical process, during which they do their best to avoid Mr. Mandrake, a quack convinced of messages from the Other Side, and which the Titanic, memory, and metaphors feature greatly, Richard and Joanna try to learn what is at the end of the passage.

If you want to find out, you’ll have to read the book.

–A review on the back cover which greatly amused me:  “…a wit with a common touch who’s read more great books, and makes use of them in her work, than two or three lit professors put together.”  For once, a reviewer actually got something Wright.  Oops, confabulation.

Not Much

This is just a post to put something new up.

I read Passage by Connie Willis, and liked it enough to order her Doomsday Book. I bought teak wood oil and oiled my teak wood dining room table, with immediate and pleasing improvements. I went to work and scanned the barcodes of our entire mystery/thriller section, to see whether any copies were to be returned to the distributor for the month of July. I scrambled my last egg and ate it, and now my grocery situation is truly dire. As soon as I have an opportunity, I must buy food, unless I want to eat tomato sauce, rice, and Ranch-flavored croutons.

And the days plod on towards July 20, although not fast enough for my taste. I am lingering in a highly unpleasant limbo (I begin to appreciate the penance of those characters in Dante Alighieri’s Purgatorio, and of Sisyphus), and I believe I would like to get married and move to Texas now.

In the words of Morwen: None of This Nonsense, Please.

[Note: The pomegranate has no significance, except that it looks delicious.]

September, April, June, and November

I am getting married in thirty (30) days.  Pardon me while I fail to contain my excitement:

thirty days oh my goodness I can’t believe it’s only one month I think I’m going to explode with waiting wouldn’t it be so nice if we could just skip the next four weeks and get on with it but if we skipped them how would everything get done I would so rather just move now can’t I just move now because I would much rather be with my favorite person ever than not for another whole month (the cake and the flowers and the dress and the pictures! so many trappings of celebration) and I’m going to be so nervous and I can’t believe it’s coming up so fast and isn’t it Portland yet and excitement anxiety general stress nervousness apprehension anticipation and bliss and bliss and

Ahem.

Meanwhile this weekend I will be celebrating the marriage of my cousin Greg to his bride Theresa.  I will be a bridesmaid, so as to have an inside view of how the days before the wedding really go, although I’m afraid after my eyes are opened, I might want them shut again.

Finished A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray: disappointing.  Began Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard: couldn’t make it through due to the confirmation of my belief that plays should be viewed and not read.  Began Passage by Connie Willis: it is most promising.  I am officially a fan of Connie Willis.

And on that note, off I go to Enid, Oklahoma.