A great discovery on Friday night, a restaurant in Waterville called Freedom Cafe, owned & run by actual black people and serving southern comfort food: collard greens, smothered squash, fabulous corn bread and grits! It's down in a basement and has the look of Valentine's Restaurant on Frenchman Street in N.O if anybody but me remembers that place.
	Melissa and I both came home with flats of pansies in our cars Friday. It's not spring until I get some pansies in the Heron's front flower beds. But in a weather relapse, it snowed yesterday morning, slushy stuff washed away by an all day rain. No matter, we will be in the very warm weather of Louisiana in a few days. I hope there are still some Ponchatula strawberries around and that Nancy Beben planted sugar snap peas this year. Greatly looking forward to festing with old friends and beach time with my family.
I bought a bunch of postcards yesterday and that got me thinking about the postcard as a literary form and how either neglected or undiscovered that is. Maybe postcards have been replaced by email. And we know that when something no longer performs a necessary function, it can become a fetish, or a fashion obsession. Maybe the postcard's time has come. If the postcard is to be a literary form, what will the rules be? A literary form has some rules whether it's meter and rhyme like a sonnet, repetition like a sestina, or character development within a few pages like a short story. A haiku has to set up in 12 syllables and punch though in another 5. The postcard's form is driven by its inescapable characteristics. It's public; a lot of people could read it before it ever got to you. There is a picture on the other side, perhaps a caption or legend for it on the writing side. It's usually a tourist picture, but even if it's a beautiful picture, it's small to begin with and it gets beat to hell in the mail on its way to you. The room to write is about the same as that for the address. The choice of stamps and even more the postal cancellation are not entirely within your control. Postcards are associated with travel and touristing. Given all that, the rules for postcards could be some of these: Layers of message will exist for all readers: something for the postman, something for you. The private within the public: a seemingly public statement will actually contain a very private message. A stream of associations: triggered by the card's picture, the associations, linked one to the next, move as far from the subject of the picture as possible within the space. A commonplace card: a quote with source from what you're currently reading. This works on the juxtaposition of interior/exterior: what you're processing inside your head/your tourist setting. A miniature sudden fiction taking the picture as its setting. Delayed meaning: Message not aimed at the postman or you, but at the people who will read it from the bin in the bathroom where you keep them or at a yard sale many years hence. Ok, now I'm ready to tourist and write some postcards.

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