He explains here:

This is a bit of family history, uncovered while sorting through boxes of paperwork.

My grandfather wrote this letter, to which he actually stapled a piece of asparagus. We have a copy of the letter. I don’t recall the outcome, but I think it was positive.

January 22nd, 1946

E. Pritchard Inc.
Bridgeton, N. J.

Gentleman:
We had your cut spears asparagus for dinner tonight and they are
so incredible that I know you could not believe a description of them with-
out a sample before you, and so you may know I do not exaggerate, one of
these faggots is enclosed.
It seems that these must have been especially bred for toughness,
for even ordinary uncooked asparagus does not approximate this in tensile
strength and indestructability. I have never eaten bamboo, but I imagine
it could only be as tough as this if sufficiently aged.
Seriously, we have enjoyed your catsup for years and am taking the
trouble to write you since I am convinced that you must be unaware of this
product which masquerades as a food under your brand name. One can of the
stuff could undo $1000. in good advertising.
Yours very truly,

(name/address)

(This letter was written when the notion of a “faggot” as a strong piece of wood was not an innuendo.)
— Peter Seebach

As I recall, someone showed up on our front porch a few days later with a propitiatory box of groceries. I thought it was Del Monte, but by 1946 Pritchard had been bought by Hunt Foods, now Hunt Wesson.

From Google:

Google Books, Pure Ketchup by Andrew Smith
p. 37 In Red Bank, N.J., Naider and Baird made tomato puree. One its salesmen, Edward Pritchard, began experimenting with making ketchup from puree in about 1878. When Naider an Baird failed, Pritchard opened a factory in New York, selling “Pride of the Farm” and “Eddy’s Brand Catsup.” In 1913 Pritchard purchased B.S. Ayers and Sons and moved to Bridgeton, New Jersey.

p.121 Almost simultaneously with the Del Monte corporation, ketchup production by Hunt Foods dramatically increased after its acquisition of the E. Pritchard Company in Bridgeton, NJ, . . .[exact date not clear from the excerpt, but likely in the 1940s].

Only a small miscalculation . . . we headed east out of Denver on Interstate 70, but we should have been on Interstate 76, which angles upward toward I-80. By the time we figured that out (just before we got to Kansas) we were about 120 miles south of where we wanted to be. No problem, except that made the trip too long to finish in one day, so we stopped in Grand Island, Nebraska, overnight., No problem with that either, except that it meant on Sunday morning we were west, rather than east, of a huge pileup on the Interstate, where a semi had lost control, flipped itself around and ended up with the trailer facing the wrong way in the inside lane and the cab crossways straddling the construction barrier between the two directions of travel. As we crawled past it Peter kept saying incredulously, “How did they DO that?”

Yes, they did close the highway in both directions for hours, but we were between the nearest exit and the accident by then.

The furniture arrived Saturday, Aug. 4, and I was reunited with it Aug. 6, when we could get all the paperwork signed. So far, so good, although the movers managed to lose all the little pegs that support the shelves in the bookcases, and so I can’t unpack the book boxes until the shelves are in place, and I can’t unpack much of anything else either because there are so many book boxes that nearly everything is under at least one of them. I ordered the pegs online, and they are supposed to arrive today.

I’m pleased with my choice of living quarters, a senior-living place called Millstream Commons in Northfield. After many months of very peculiar means occasioned by difficulty shopping and (especially) cooking, it is a great luxury to have regular meals prepared and served.

The food is good, the cat is happy, my condo in Denver sold for its full asking price even before it officially came on the market, and Peter and his household are in negotiations to buy a house in Northfield. All much to be thankful for.

Moving’s a drag, I don’t have to tell you, but since people do it all the time, there’s a thriving market in services for people who are moving.

Movers do not, however, move cats, except sometimes inadvertently.

What do I do with Houston on a 15-hour car trip?

I started, a month or more ago, by getting out the cat carrier and setting it on the floor near my chair. It’s an old-fashioned contraption, stapled together from plywood and wire mesh, but it is sturdy and serviceable.

After she got over that, I put her food and water bowls inside it.

This ploy engendered great — and of course well-founded — suspicion on her part. She’d stick her head in long enough to pick up a bite of Friskies and then back out of the carrier to eat it, casting sideways glances at me the whole time.

You don’t believe cats have a theory of mind? Then why are they so good at getting what they want from humans? It’s not as if they practice slavish sycophancy, like some other animals I could name.

My next-door neighbor and I went out for lunch one day, and on our way home, we stopped at PetSmart and bought a pretty blue harness and leash. After Houston got over the food and water bowls, I put the harness on. She spent half-an-hour or so rolling around on the floor, trying to rub it off, and then gave that up as a waste of effort.

Finally, when I was expecting people, I snapped the leash onto the harness and tied her to the bathroom door handle. She did not like this, but she wasn’t desperate about it and I knew, if she did not, that she was safer if I could put her somewhere and be sure she’d stay put.

And when the great day came at last, Houston was ready for it. Peter came out to Denver Saturday on an early morning flight, he loaded the car, and Houston’s carrier was the last thing in. We tied her leash to a piece of the car, and just before we pulled out, we opened the door to the carrier so she could reach food and water and her litter box.

Worked a treat, if I do say so myself.

And very dignified and governmentish it looks, too, with those deeply chiseled letters in the stone facade. Where they’re moving from worked OK, I guess, but it looked as if the postal service had bought it from some outfit trying to unload surplus farm outbuildings.

So why can’t I mail a letter there?

See, I was waiting for the light to change when a car pulled up to the curb. The driver got out, holding a fistful of letters, walked briskly across the grass strip between the street and the sidewalk and then the 30 feet or so to the dropboxes — and at that point the light changed and I drove on .

Didn’t it occur to the people who designed this building and spent millions on it, that not everyone is able to carry out such an apparently simple task? I use a walker, so I have to park the car, unload the walker from the trunk, maneuver it over the curb, push it through grass that tangles the wheels and the brakes, and then walk to the dropbox. And do it again backwards — although getting the walker *into* the trunk is much harder than getting it out, and I’d probably have to wait until someone happened along whom I could ask for help.

I’ve only ever found one Denver post office with a dropbox that is reachable from the driver’s seat. Given that very few cars without drivers need to drop off mail, on the driver’s side would seem to be the logical place to put mailboxes. And given that for the past year, since the Rocky Mountain News moved into its new building, no one has been permitted to drop outgoing personal mail (with stamps) into the official outgoing mail, I have been driving halfway across the city two or three times a month to pay my bills.

People just don’t think.

Retirement. Moving. Is it just that I’m older now, and disabled, or are things really more complicated than they used to be? Fifteen years ago, when I lived in Northfield, Minn., an editor in Los Angeles offered me a job as an editorial writer, an offer I accepted on the spot. Within two weeks, I’d given up my apartment in Minneapolis, my graduate program at the University of Minnesota, my job at the Minnesota Daily, my half of our house in Northfield, my marriage and the cat, and was on my way to California.

“Change is always difficult,” people intone sententiously. No, it wasn’t; it felt wonderful.

(This column ran in the Rocky Mountain News July 7. Read more..)