Gift duplication, and a July 22, 1987 greeting card

I had pen pals all over the world, but most of them were in the United States. At the highest point, I had 20 people who I kept up regular correspondence with. The core was a smaller number and this group engaged with me more as a friend than just a fellow KISS fan. I'm still in touch with a handful of them to this day, but mainly through Facebook.

With so many of them, one might expect that birthdays would be a cornucopia of presents. I had little to complain about in that respect. Some people would send me a KISS picture. Others would send me items which were more oriented toward who I was as a person.

More than one of my pen pals paid attention to my saying that I liked impressionist paintings and responded by sending me a gift of note cards with said paintings on them. One of them was from Dina, as mentioned in a previous post. Another was from Jo. They were identical boxes of blank cards. This happened despite the fact that Jo lived in Pennsylvania and Dina lived in Alabama.

This happened because shopping in the 80's was a more uniform experience than it is in the current culture. I've remarked on this before, but our cultural touchstones were far fewer than they are now because we all had access to far fewer people, places, and things. We had three TV networks and PBS with a handful of other channels that ran re-runs of ABC, NBC, and CBS shows. It was much easier to have things in common and talk about shared experiences then because we all shared similar ones.

Stationery was a popular gift choice among our pen pal network for obvious reasons. If we wanted to get something, nearly every one of us went to the local Hallmark store at our respective malls. Unsurprisingly, they didn't carry a vast array of note cards with Impressionist paintings so both Dina and Jo bought me the same gift. It was for this reason that Tito ended up with two cards with the exact same design in a short period of time. Well, there was that and the fact that I'd forgotten which of the four designs in the box I'd already sent him.