This is an email I sent to my daughter 2 weeks before her wedding.

 

Well, your wedding dress now has a story to go with it.  See, about 10 AM I went to the bedroom and worked out on the bike, then I took a shower. For maybe 5 minutes.  Then I walk back to my office and notice a package out on the front porch.  Cool, I think.

It's the Dress!  But it's from FedEx and I've been told it's UPS.  And then I see it:  the 'We were here and You weren't' notice from UPS stuck on the front door.  The only thing I can think of is:  I am a Dead Man.  So I grab the slip (it's still warm from the driver's fingers)  and do what any redblooded half-crazed Bohunk Dad would do.  I jump in the car and start driving like a maniac in basically random patterns, stalking the UPS truck.  After only about 20 minutes of this I realize that it's crazy. 

So I call the 800 number on the slip.  They can't tell me anything, except that they will try to re-deliver it Thursday morning.  "But the truck has to be close by," I say.  "Just tell me where it is."  "We don't have that information."

 

Even a Dead Man has to eat, so I go over to the Kroger store.  But once there I realize I probably didn't lock the front door so  once again I'm driving like a nut only this time with the shopping cart, going through the store getting half the stuff on the list.   The weird half.  Lots of breakfast sausage and paper towels, for some reason.  And when I'm walking through the Kroger parking lot I see,  out of the corner of my eye:  A UPS Truck!  So I throw the groceries in the car and drive like Kyle Petty on crack through the maze of parking lots until I see the truck park outside the Sprint store.  The driver goes inside.  I follow him inside.  There he is, talking to the Sprint salesman, who must be his buddy.  I explain my situation, probably talking way too fast.  When he

hears "my daughter's wedding dress" he understands right away that he is talking to a Dead Man.  But maybe he can save my life.  He says he doesn't deliver in our 'hood, delivers out of a different distribution center entirely, but he makes a call.  Then he gives me the unlisted number for the Durham Center dispatcher and tells me to forget where I got it.

 

So then I call and get a woman called Geneva, who doesn't ask me where I got the secret number or anything, just what the address is.  And my cell phone number.

At 11:55 my cell phone rings.  "The driver with your package will be at 3200 Pickett Road at 12 o'clock."  That's it, she hangs up. It's like a spy movie. So now I'm flying out of the garage again (leaving the front door unlocked again) and driving 60 miles an hour down Pickett Road.  At 3200 there's no sign of a Brown Truck, but again I start driving randomly and see the Brown Truck turn into Durham Academy.  I chase him down in their parking lot, coming to a  sliding stop in a cloud of dust and flying gravel.

 

"Are you looking for me?" he says, smiling.  I tell him: "Geneva says you might have a package for me."  "Oh yeah," he says. "Four-eleven."  (Our house number) So I sign for it and as I'm stepping out of the truck, now drenched in sweat and happy to be Alive Man again, he says, "Congratulations on your daughter's wedding.  I hope everything is great."

  

I am now sitting here looking at the package.  When I change rooms, it goes with me.  I ain't letting that sucker out of my sight.

*In Hammett's "The Golden Horseshoe" the Continental Op contemplates a sign reading Only Genuine Pre-War American and British Whiskeys Sold Here. "I was trying to count how many lies could be found in those nine words and had reached four . . ."  When I worked as an ad agency copywriter I had a very large version hanging in my office.