I Know Where You Live, But Not Your Address

                When I was a kid, only the fanciest wrapping papers had the cutting grid on the inside of the paper.  I remember ending up with one roll of Hallmark paper and being so impressed by the grid on the inside.  My mother is really good at just eyeballing straight lines, having wrapped a few thousand presents in her lifetime, while I just try to buy wrapping paper with linear patterns, so I can follow snowflake to snowflake or something.

                Imagine my surprise when my big roll of cheapy paper from the after-Christmas sale from last year turned out to have a grid.  I felt like I should be raising my pinky while cutting it out or something.  Apparently, this is now something that is common.  Nifty.  I might look competent yet.

                It's a bit ironic that someone who wraps people for a living has trouble wrapping presents.  The simple answer is that paper does not have bias, nor drape, and it does not forgive anything.  Also, gifts don't have fittings.  I'm moderately decent at it, and everyone is surprised by most of their gifts, so I'm clearly occasionally getting this right.

                In an attempt to do all the stuff I never have time for in an ordinary year, I have been collecting all of the addresses I need to send out holiday cards.  I recognize that I will lose track of an address book, so they're all going into a document that is formatted for labels.  Is it slightly less personal to send out cards with the addresses pasted on?  Totally!  Is it way less personal to not have sent out a single Christmas card in the last decade?  Absolutely!  I guess there will always be ways I could be better, but I'm doing my best to show up, and that's worth something.

                I have been chasing addresses for a while, and I have learned a few universal truths:

1.  Some people are unlisted for really good reasons, like wanting to have a life outside their clients.  Search their spouse's name if it gets desperate, or swallow the embarrassment and call them.  They have most likely misplaced your address, too.

2.  Every person I know has a name twin that practices law or psychiatry in New Jersey or Maryland.  My mother-in-law.  My shop manager from grad school.  Kiddo's school friend's father.  It's uncanny.  Either there are a lot of lawyers and psychiatrists on the Eastern Seaboard, or there's something universal about all of the people in my life.

3.  The one listing you actually need is going to be behind a paywall at some point.

4.  If you inherit a property, many of these address websites will decide you moved.  My friend who lives in the next big town over has lived in that town for fifteen years now.  Her mother, who lived in SoCal, died last year.  Guess who is now listed as living in SoCal?

5.  Most people don't move nearly as much as you think they do once you hit your thirties and forties.  When we were in college, my grandmother would add a date to her notes of your address and phone number, so that she could always be able to figure out which was the most recent.  She also had no problem calling us to confirm our current whereabouts, as she was not interested in following our birthday checks in the ledger for three months while they passed from former roommate to former roommate.

6.  If it gets really desperate, and they have a common last name in a small town, just put their name and the town on the envelope.  It'll find its way.  Or it'll land at Grandma's, and then your mother will call and tell you to just call her next time, because now the whole family knows that you don't know Second Cousin Enid's address and couldn't figure it out through PI-level research.  This will not save your mother the time you were attempting to save her by not asking in the first place.

                My father-in-law had the right idea.  He amassed a database of every address he had ever been given, with spots for birthdays and anniversaries and notes about connections.  It was wonderful to email him an address query and hear back half an hour later with addresses and phone numbers and (sometimes) favorite restaurants.  I fantasize about having something similar, but then I imagine somebody finding it when I become incapacitated with something dumb like choking on hot cocoa, and it all turning into a Harriet the Spy situation.  People can take "Have been calling spouse Not-Bob for six years.  Find polite way to figure out spouse's name!" the wrong way so easily.  True story?  Fuzzy and I have been calling our neighbors Roberta and Not-Bob for years, and were considering launching some kind of sting operation involving "accidentally" opening their mailbox instead of ours, but then, I drove by one day, and their open garage had a sign in it that said, "Roberta and Ronald, in love since 19xx," and we had our answer.  It turned out that they had been planning a similar operation, because they had been calling us "Kiddo's Mom and Dad" for an equal amount of time.  They have a new dog.  We do not know the dog's name.  We have been told the dog's name three times.  We may have to get a dog whistle and utilize it until they yell at the dog.

                Or we could just ask.