Diary I am exhausted but need to be at work instead of fleeing frozen Denver.. It's Christmas Eve, but thanks to Oliver and Jordan, we will be working nonstop today. I can only hope that I can remain conscious enough to keep the loveable luddites away from my laptop. But before that can happen, I need to finish ruminating on the rest of what I am now potentially calling the 'Postal Ball Fiasco'.
Generally, when a girl spends way too much on a dress (a dress so pretty and fancy that I am going to refer to it as a frock in fact), spends time at a salon getting her hair, make-up and nails done and has been looking forward to some social interaction for weeks, then a fiasco is not expected. But if this was not a fiasco, it was certainly a farce.
Instead of dancing, dining and metaphorically getting to let my hair down, Jordan presented us with another lost letter, and we made an early exit from the Ball. Next year if I am still in Denver, I am going to save myself hundreds of dollars and wear jeans and a hoodie to the Ball. That dress spent about an hour at a Ball, had a very troubled dance, and then became workwear (formal edition). Never has a girl spent so much for so little!
The curse of this Christmas just got better and better (or should that be worse and worse?). Not only did it contain Oliverian oddness of the choreographic variety, blighted Ball hopes of the postally interrupted kind, but also a lost letter of the worst possible sort. A girl from Wyoming wrote a Christmas missive, not to Santa, but to God. Well isn't that deliciously ironic?
So, back to the DLO we trekked. Festivities at an end, we did what Postables do, decipher dead letters. Eight-year-old Hannah needs our help, and even though I was trying to smooth the ruffled feathers of our fearless leader, I meant it when I said that Oliver O'Toole could deliver a letter to anyone, anywhere. Oliver may be behaving badly, but I must say, Jordan is a brave man. He faced down one of Rita's brownies and didn't even flinch. He didn't react either, when Oliver decided once again that he was not the sophisticated section leader he pretended to be, but was in fact a child, capable of rolling his eyes so far back in his head that he could (as the author who is joining me for my holiday reading. Janet Evanovich said) 'see himself think'.
If Oliver was not at his best, then I suppose neither was I. I shouldn't have let Oliver know how much this letter was affecting me. He, and it, burrowed under my skin and made me terse and ill-tempered. Maybe it was my surprising lack of technical success, but I think the letter was much more likely. Whatever, we gleaned enough from Hannah's letter to make our way to Denver Mercy Hospital, hoping to find a little girl who wanted her mother to get better so she could see her as a shepherd in a Christmas pageant.
When this night began, I was ready to party. I was not expecting to don the most ridiculous Christmas decorations and walk through the halls of a hospital singing Christmas carols. (I definitely wasn't expecting to cause a service dog to become catatonic at the sound of our singing.) I didn't expect to find a little girl, her worried father and very ill mother. I absolutely did not think that planning a Christmas pageant was in my future. Yet here I was, trying to hard to help answer a child's letter to God. I couldn't help thinking what difference it might have made if I had an Oliver O'Toole ready to answer my own letter to God as a child.
Diary, before I head out for the day, I am worried about Oliver. He seemed to be telling Jordan that he was going to be alone this Christmas. Surely, he has a family member or Church friend he could spend Christmas with. I mean I know I am spending Christmas alone, but that is by choice. I know I am not really fit company for anyone at Christmas. I am best on my own. But Oliver for all his supposed love of solitude needs better company than Dickens and some Christmas ghosts.