The present was bacon.
Not one package. Bacon of the month.
My dad forwarded the order confirmation the morning after Christmas with everything in capital letters.
MERRY CHRISTMAS.
ENJOY THE BACON.
LOVE YOU SON.
That was Norm.
I replied with the same amount of enthusiasm. This was awesome. Thank you. Love you.
The first shipment would start in January. There was a certificate attached, which made recurring bacon official enough to count as a program.
It was a very good gift for me. Useful, excessive, funny, and impossible to misunderstand.
Norm knew how to land a present. It did not have to be fancy. It had to make the person laugh and feel known. A subscription that kept sending breakfast to Brooklyn managed both.
The email survives because most ordinary family moments do. A forwarded receipt becomes the record. The addresses, phone numbers, order details, and butcher-shop footer take up more space than the actual exchange.
The actual exchange was better.
My dad was excited to give it. I was excited to get it. We both said love you.
Years later, after Norm was gone, the small messages carried more weight. Not because we knew they would. We did not. They mattered because they sounded exactly like him and exactly like us.
There are larger family stories in the archive and harder ones still to write. This is not one of them. It is a happy email from my dad about meat arriving in the mail.
No polished tribute could improve the all-caps version.
Merry Christmas. Enjoy the bacon. Love you, son.
That was the whole gift, plus a new box every month.