Why does 'Barack' keep e-mailing my wife?

Originally published Jan. 9, 2011   One of my new year resolutions is to stop going through Joyce's email, looking for private notes from the president.


Ever since he got elected, President Barack Obama has been e-mailing both of us, usually about once or twice a month. I can tell they're personal letters because he always uses our first names, and he always signs them, "Barack."



(Truthfully, he's not that great a letter writer. All he ever talks about is Congress and politics and hope and stuff. How are the kids? Did he get a flu shot? Is the dog trained yet? He never says.) 


Joyce says they're canned letters, and he probably writes the same thing to everybody.



Like I'm going to believe that.



It's true that the letters he writes to her seem identical to the ones I get, but I detect a quiet emphasis on certain phrases, a use of punctuation that hints at something more.



I guess we must have made some kind of impression when we met then-Sen. Obama at the Bell Restaurant in the spring of 2008. He hugged her right in front of me that day. I thought about asking him to step outside, but the Secret Service guys and Sen. Claire McCaskill were right there.




Michelle has only written to me once. I didn't write back — It's not fitting to have a private correspondence with the wife of one of your friends, although Barack doesn't seemed to have learned that fine point of etiquette, since he keeps writing to Joyce.



You would think he would at least mention it when he writes to me, something like, "as I wrote to Joyce yesterday." Unless in his mind there's something going on that I shouldn't know about.


I'm not really worried. Joyce doesn't like tall, good-looking guys. But it bothers me that Barack would jeopardize our friendship over what can only be an infatuation.



I'm not saying that the President of the United States is pursuing my wife. I'm just saying that if another fellow were writing her personal notes all the time like he does, and if another fellow had hugged her in front of CNN and the Washington Post like he did, I'd probably have something to say about that.



Of course, I don't mind being on a first-name basis with the President of the United States. I admit I'll name-drop sometimes in the middle of a conversation: "Yeah, Barack was telling me the same thing last week." Stuff like that.



***
I confess that I am probably the reason for the failure of the Lottery Pig. The porcelain, porcine creature sits, dejected, atop the shelf over my boss's desk. On Tuesday, everyone at The Daily Record who bought a Mega Millions ticket rubbed the Lottery Pig for luck.



Whenever I touch Joyce's scratch-off tickets, they lose. I buy them and carry them out to the car using a napkin to avoid contamination. It irks the clerks at the convenience store. They think I'm afraid of germs or something. I've stopped trying to explain.


But I rubbed the Lottery Pig Tuesday, rendering it ineffective, and none of us won hundreds of millions of dollars.



If only I could figure out some way to use my powers for good.


Ken York's column appears in The Daily Record, Lebanon, Mo. It is reprinted here with permission.