Thank you to you know who.

It arrived in Wednesday’s mail. The Mrs. found it in the mailbox that evening when she got home. The unmarked, indistinct package wrapped in brown paper bag addressed to me with me as return addressee stayed in the mailbox outside until Thursday morning – the Mrs wasnt about to bring in a suspicious package like that inside our home – when she remembered it was there and told me to get it as I walked out the door on my way to work.

The small package sitting there on the passenger’s side of my truck baffled me on the way to the office. What the hell is it? It’s postmarked in Tampa, who the hell do I know in Tampa? Why the hell is there no real return address?

The anticipation too much for me, I opened it while stopped at a traffic light. Carefully. Slowly. Just in case some white powder started leaking out. Or I set off a trigger or something. Maybe it’s a small bomb. Maybe it’s Anthrax. Maybe Ill keel over right now, in my truck, here on Miller Drive and 87th.

It was a black compact disc case. I opened it.

Inside was a compact disc with a post it note that read:

No soy CD. Soy DVD. (Im not a CD. Im a DVD.)

The worry and anticipation just got a little worse from then on. I was certainly intrigued, but I was certainly not going to insert that disc, from an unknown source and mailed to my home address with my home address as a return address, into any computer. I just wasnt going to take a chance on it being a bomb or Anthrax for my computer.

So the damned thing sat there next to me, on my desk at the office, all day long. Mocking me. Whispering to me all day “Come on, play me. Aren’t you curious? Dont you want to know what I am?”

I had a couple of errands to run on the way home. The DVD in the black box with no writing in the brown paper bag wrapping addresed to me and vicariously sent by me waited patiently in the truck as I made my rounds.

I finished my errands, got home, put away the groceries I had just picked up and started on dinner. Id promised the Mrs some comfort food last night. Beef stew made from scratch. I chopped all the veggies: carrots, celery, potatoes, malanga, calabaza, mushrooms, green peppers, onions and forgot, for the moment, about the mocking DVD.

As all the stuff simmered in the big pot and the house beginning to smell like culinary heaven, I caught a glimpse of the black cd case wrapped in brown paper bag addressed to me and vicariously sent by me sitting there on the kitchen counter behind a discarded supermarket bag. Enough waiting, I thought. I set off to find out the contents of the DVD.

I reconnected the DVD player that had been disconnected since Cuba Nostalgia. Opened the little tray, opened the black box that came in a brown paper bag wrapping addressed to me vicariously sent by me and unpeeled the Post-It note from the disc. I inserted the disc into the DVD player, pressed play and anxiously waited for it to begin.

I knew what it was from the moment the first images came on screen. My eyes welled up.

As I sat there with tears in my eyes and the DVD continued to play, I picked up the brown paper wrapping once again and noticed that it had some printing on the inside. It read, simply, “Thank You.”

“No,” I thought. “Thank you.”