I was at the corner ready to make a right-hand turn out of our neighborhood with my two school-age boys with me at around 7:30 in the morning. It’s something that I do during the school year every single morning pretty much without incident.
On this particular morning, where the traffic was a little heavy, a piece of notepaper flew out of a car’s window and was literally buffeted about with the passing cars for about 50 yards until it eventually found itself rolling across the street, into our neighborhood, and stopping 2 feet from my door.
I thought that was pretty remarkable and the coincidence of it actually making it right to my door was just too much to ignore. I asked Jared to jump out of the back seat and get that sheet of paper. He thought I was crazy, but he did.
With visions of a message in a bottle crossing my mind, I asked Jared to read the green-papered note. He started:
Clean Cuts
Lawn maintenance and landscaping
Offering all of these services
It was followed by a whole list of bulleted services available by this lawn maintenance company.
To say that it was a disappointment would be an understatement. I’m not sure what I envisioned, but whatever it was was certainly personal. Inundated with commercial messages at every turn in my life, the possibility that I actually had a shot at eavesdropping on a personal message that serendipitously flew out of someone’s car window was exhilarating. Instead, I got yet another commercial message.
As I think about television programming with their embedded advertising, the media with shorter program schedules and longer commercial insets, the internet with insane pop-ups, banner ads, and the like, e-mail which now appears more and more to have a commercial message on the bottom of whoever is sending it, billboards greeting you along virtually every byway, and even reality TV which masquerades as real people but is in fact pandering to commercial marketing, paid telephone calls, and database acquisition: is it too much to ask for a minor reprieve in a secret moment where an intriguing personal message actually escaped?
I won’t be calling the landscape service. And I didn’t get my secret moment—at least not this time—but hope springs eternal, even if moments aren’t.
Original writing date: March 28, 2007