Comics, and a card from July 21, 1987

In 1987, pop culture was a more unifying force across generations and classes than it is now. Considering how tribal people are in this day and age, that may seem hard to believe, but, hear me out. Imagine your grandma, your aunt, your dad, and every classmate in every grade of your school reading the same comic strip every Sunday that you read. That was the power of the Sunday funny pages in the pre-internet age.

Neither Tito nor I were huge comics fans, but we both were familiar with the big guns of the newspaper "funnies." He knew them and liked them better than me because his family subscribed to the local paper and mine couldn't afford it. I only initially knew them second-hand through newspapers I ran across at work or at my maternal grandmother's house. When I got older, I spent more time at the local public library where I'd kill time on occasion by reading popular comic book collections (e.g., Peanuts, Garfield, Cathy, etc.) while my mother did something boring.

Many of the greeting cards that I bought and sent to Tito featured the comics that were popular in that time. The reason I chose the designs that I did wasn't because I had an affinity for those comics, but because they expressed something I felt at the time. This Cathy comic was especially relevant in the early days after our relationship started and I was getting love via expensive telephone calls.