Magic Marker

Take a magic marker with you to the post office. Keep one in your car. You can do some truly magic things with it. Yes­ter­day I used mine to return a recruit­ing let­ter to AARP. On the back I wrote: “Go Away.” On the front, I scrib­bled through the com­puter bar code and every­thing but my name. At the top I wrote: “I am only 28.” I wrote my emo­tional age. AARP thinks I define myself by my bio­logic age or how many times I have rid­den this planet around the sun. They do not know me. They only know a com­puter num­ber about me. From that they make all sorts of wild assump­tions about me — none of them true.

I do not plan to retire, but I do plan to die. Other than the Hem­lock Soci­ety, I do not think there are any sec­u­lar orga­ni­za­tions that hon­estly address this one key aspect of real­ity. Also, I resist all mea­sures that cat­e­go­rize me by gen­der, skin color, age, tastes, etc. (Check out Paul’s Let­ter to the Gala­tians on this one). I only embrace one human cat­e­gory: Made in the image of God. Con­se­quently, I am not much of a joiner. I send money to health causes, but almost noth­ing to all the rest. I give heav­i­est to the one “orga­ni­za­tion” (and I use that word very loosely) that accepts me just like I am…warts, sins, hang-ups, age, defi­cien­cies, and all (the church uni­ver­sal). I think it solves the death issue best anyway.

In the mean time, I have found that any­thing you write with a magic marker gets imme­di­ate and seri­ous atten­tion. Write large (and you have to with a magic marker). The let­ters make you look like you mean busi­ness. Some­one bumps your car in the park­ing lot and you don’t have a piece of paper? Just take your magic marker and write on the side of their car what they did (peo­ple will think you are writ­ing your phone num­ber), and drive away. They are called “magic” mark­ers because they will write on any­thing, and you have to write so large that it dis­torts your hand­writ­ing and makes it vir­tu­ally impos­si­ble to trace you or prove that you wrote what you wrote.

Who says there is no more magic left in life? There is plenty of magic and you can buy it by the case. I do not carry busi­ness cards — an 8 1/2″ by 11″ piece of paper and my phone num­ber in 6 inch let­ters gets the point across just fine…and it is not some lit­tle card they eas­ily lose either. My magic marker habits are an exten­sion from when I used to write on the walls of the house with a crayon…and that got imme­di­ate atten­tion too!