When my father died, I spent a week at the family home with my seven siblings going through the belongings that my parents had accumulated in the decades spent in the small home.  Somehow, the task of sorting papers fell to me.  Among the many souveniers of his grandchildren’s accomplishments and manuals for long-ago replaced appliances, I found a folder filled with complaint letters.

He apparently appointed himself the product police.  He wrote to any compny, any time.  From a dented can of soup to aspirin bottles short a few pills, my father patroled his consumer purchases, scrutinizing each.  Any slight defect prompted a carefully typed letter to the manufacturer, with a copy kept in a growing file.  He created the copies with carbon paper.  He stapled replies to the original letter of complaint.

I browsed through the folder.  The companies  gave all appearances of taking his letters very seriously, sending coupons, rebates, or substitute items.  The small items of compensation came by way of parcel post or padded envelope, or slipped into a number 10, with a canned letter of apology.

I let the folder drop onto the desk in the front bedroom.  I suddenly recalled an episode from childhood.  I had found a bug inside a cylinder of Wyler’s chicken bouillon cubes. “Write a letter,” my father told me, and so I did, on loose leaf paper in a careful hand.  Several weeks later, a large box arrived from the manufacturer, filled with containers of bouillon, soup, and other items , along with a personal letter from the Customer Service director.

And thus began a lifetime of complaining, unwittingly validated by the Wyler Soup Company’s earnest response to an a eleven-year-old Missouri girl.

I’m still navigating my way through this uncomplaining life.  I know there is a balance to be maintained, between tolerating abuse and protesting irrelevancies.  I’ve known this balance existed my whole life, and only now find myself craving the steadiness that such level-headed reaction brings.  I’m reminded of a saying used by my friend Katrina Taggart:  “Don’t pet the sweaty stuff and don’t sweat the petty stuff.”

I think about my father, alone, indignant, just wanting to have a little acknowledgment of his own importance.  I’m sure that sentiment permeated his complaint letters and drove his need for compensation.  The thought makes me more than a little sad.