Mail From Dad

**In honor of Father's Day, I am reposting what I posted last year on this date. Update: I got the job!**


It’s Father’s Day, so I wanted to share something that happened to me last week.

I have watched enough medium shows and read enough books about the afterlife to recognize a sign when I see one. How many times has Theresa Caputo, the Long Island Medium, told someone that their loved one was with them when they were wearing something of theirs, or doing something in honor of them? It happens all the time. Or someone will find pennies from heaven that they know came from someone they lost? Or every time they see a butterfly, they feel it is their departed loved one sending them a spiritual hug? These themes come up over and over again, enough for someone like me to have zero skepticism.

My dad used to sit outside a lot, and he always called cardinals “red birds”, so when one flies by at a time when I need to feel some reassurance that everything is going to be okay, I take it as a sign from my dad.

I have a tie tack that was my dad’s. It is an elephant standing on a ball, which is significant because when my dad was a kid, he survived the horrific circus fire in Hartford, CT. His mom had told him not to go, but he went anyway. (This story was told to us often as kids to reinforce how important it was to obey our parents if they told us we couldn’t do something) Lucky for him, they were up in the top row of seats and his friend sliced the tent with his pocket knife so they and others could escape tragedy. So this tie tack is my lucky charm. I wear it when I need strength to be at my best.

I wore it to a job interview, as I would normally do, and while I was waiting for the interviewer, I touched the elephant and whispered to my dad to help me out. The interview went amazingly well, but that’s not what this story is about. It’s about what happened later that day when I checked the mail.

{Now, for those of you who don’t know much about me, my husband and I moved to Rhode Island a year and a half ago after living with my mom in Connecticut for five years. We had moved in while my father was still alive to help my mom out as he was suffering from Alzheimer’s.. He passed away six months later.}

Anyway, as I was going through the stack of mail so that I could toss the junk, there was a mailer from a Rhode Island furniture store that we had never heard about in Connecticut. Naturally, my husband and I had changed our address with the post office over a year ago, and my last name hasn’t been McCue for 13 years. That’s what made this so cool. The Cardi’s Furniture mailer was sent to my Rhode Island address to “Donald McCue or current resident”.. This address has nothing to do with my father, and our mail forwarding had stopped months ago. There is no conceivable way that this should have happened, so I know it was a message from my dad that everything was going to be okay.

On Friday, driving home from my third interview for the same job, a cardinal flew across the highway right in front of our car Seems like a good sign..

Thanks for the mail dad, and Happy Father’s Day from “The Poor Kid”