Birthday gifts with subtle hints
Mike Dougherty

My brother Andy recently gave me a great birthday gift, a personalized Louisville Slugger baseball bat. He joins me as a longtime baseball fan and lover of baseball memorabilia and tools of the trade. It was a wonderful present.

It was for the 54th anniversary of my birth, which occurred in the old St. Vincent's Infirmary at 10th and High streets in Little Rock. (It's a parking lot now near Arkansas Children's Hospital.)

My brother is firefighter-paramedic in Memphis, but he's still just a kid (44). He apparently believes, though, that giving me a great present, being younger and supposedly in better shape allows him to be clever at my expense, too.

Along with the box that housed the baseball bat (wrapped in blue, snowflakecovered paper), he also handed me two sets of stapled papers. One was titled "Combat Conditioning: Functional Exercises for Fitness and Combat Sports." The other was called "Combat Abs: 50 Fat-Burning Exercises That Build Lean, Powerful and Punch-Proof Abs."

Granted, I always have wanted a Louisville Slugger with my name on it. (My first Hillerich & Bradsby product made of ash was a 28-inch model that I received when I was 6, the birthday before I played for the Zook's Concession Stand team at MacArthur Park - I remember that Bobby Thompson was our 14-year-old manager, but I can no longer remember which major leaguer's name was burned into the barrel.)

But does knowing that's the case entitle Andy to drop such subtle hints as including an exercise program with the gift - especially one that leads off with an exercise that's called the Farmer Burns stomach flattener?

Maybe. I do know that my round belly will test the Farmer Burns theory to the maximum. There's nothing flat about me.

He did deliver the gift early, though, while he was down here to help my dad move some furniture from his grandmother-inlaw's house. (She's moving in with some younger relatives in Texas.) Then he surprised me over the weekend by showing up with another gift when he came down to help celebrate my mother's birthday. The new one was a bit more suited for fat guys in the newspaper business, though: "Newshound," a table game about "the story behind the headlines" of current and historic events. Thanks, Andy. I'll get started on those exercises so I can swing the bat without getting winded

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Letter writing often has been a subject for my ruminations. It is a pastime that has been tested in recent times with the advent of, first, more affordable longdistance telephone calls, and then the ease of e-mail in the Internet age.

I often have complained that correspondence by letter is much more meaningful than electronic mail that may consist of just a few lines. What often happens, though, is we wind up doing neither. E-mail is easier, but we reach the point where we don't bother even to do that because it is always just a minute or two away - almost too easy.

Some people keep relationships with old friends or "occasional acquaintances" alive entirely with "forwards," a series of recycled jokes, stories, poems or mantras that promise wealth or happiness if the e-mail is forwarded to a certain number of people within a certain number of hours. Some are cute or occasionally clever, but is that really communicating?

It's true. Take a closer look at how often you write something original in your e-mail relationships with certain people. Many, I'm willing to venture, consist entirely of "forwards."

We gave up the wonderful practice of exchanging letters for that?

Another aspect that we forget to consider is how wonderful it is to hold the letter in our hands and read it at a leisurely pace. If it's from a loved one, we can go back and read it again. Added value is derived from being able to "discover" it again when you go through a box of memorabilia or souvenirs or clean out an old drawer. The memories come flooding back again.

Where would historians or biographers be without letters to study before writing books about important people? Do politicians and other "important people" write letters anymore? What are those writers going to do when they try to study emails by George W. Bush? Well, never mind - let's think of another example ...

Last week, in my quest of finding stationery that is proper for use by men, I stumbled upon a well-established company, American Stationery, that has a Web site. It had a wonderful slogan: "Celebrating the Joy of Letter Writing Since 1919."

That is great marketing.

Come on, join me. Pull out the old box of stationery and write a couple of pages to someone who means something to you. It will feel good, and the recipient will never forget it.

Mike Dougherty is the editor of the Saline County Voice. His column appears weekly.