My grandparents also send the very best. A pink card with embossed gold vase filled with pink and red roses, surrounded by embossed garlands. For your Valentine Birthday. You have no idea how long I have put up with red roses and sweet hearts for my birthday, not to mention the occasional lacy doily. Good thing I became a Deadhead. Now the roses mean something anyway.

An old friend from graduate school gave me one of my favorite birthday presents: a black heart on a gold chain. I broke the chain one night drunkenly pulling a turtlenect shirt over my head. The thing went flying, and neither chain nor my black heart were ever seen again. There's some kind of message there.

A birthday card from "Mother and daddy." I am 20 years old. Mother writes, "Daddy will get and send you an alarm clock tomorrow. We hope you have a very happy 20th birthday, honey. I hope someone bakes you a cake. I hoe to get one off to you too - today was dollar day and I had to shop for necessities for the boys - but I'll try to get one sent for the weekend..." A Hallmark Valentine birthday card, with roses, bleeding hearts, and forget-me-nots. My mother always cared enough to send the very best.

Oh - more politics. Weird politics. Republican politics from 1963. Some brochure consisting of clips from various midwestern or farm publications hailing Congressman Paul Findley (R-IL)'s "Fight for Freedom in Agriculture." Apparently, he is credited with almost one-handedly defeating Kennedy's farm bill. Looking at it today, I have no idea (a) what it means or (b) why I have it. The brochure calls it "Mr. Kennedy's worst domestic political defeat." There is a column clipped from The Prairie Farmer entitled "Washington as it looks from here" written by one Jim Thompson. The future governor of Illinois? That Jim Thompson?

Re-elect Everett McKinley Dirksen, United States Senator. A pamphlet. The back page shows how to vote straight Republican. I was not old enough to vote in 1963. Not for another year. Back then, the voting age was 21. I think it's 18 now? I don't remember when it changed. I do remember that the first election I voted in, I did register Republican so I could vote against Barry Goldwater in the primary. Looking back now, I almost long for the days of Republicans like Goldwater and Dirksen. From what I hear, so do some Republicans.

Dirksen was in Congress from 1932 to 1948. In 1950, he challenged Majority Leader Scott W. Lucas "on the issues of centralized government and the drift toward socialism." He won. A blurb reads: "He has consistently and vigorously opposed government control whether in Federal aid to education, farm programs, compulsory medical care under the Social Security system, or in any other field as a threat to freedom." On the other hand, a director of the AFL-CIO writes to express "to you...the appreciation of our organization of your votes in favor of cloture and in opposition to cutting off further consideration of the Mansfield-Dirksen bill to ban discriminatory use of literacy tests to deny the right to vote to Negroes and Spanish speaking Americans in violation of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution."