← Columns

There’s something about bending over together that brings a community together.

The Source

There’s something about bending over together that brings a community together. When Ben Franklin came up with the idea for a postal service over 200 years ago, he never envisioned me stooping down to drag letters out of my post office box. Maybe he did. We’re fellow Masons, Ben and I, and perhaps he was refining some bit of Masonic ritual. Our postal service used to be the wonder of the world and perhaps it’s still the planet’s best despite the rising rates and the competition from the guys driving the funky brown trucks. And disregarding the sucking sound produced by email and Facebook upon the US Postal System’s income and the occasional Pomeranian nipping at the mailman’s ankles, the post office continues to be a model of speed and efficiency. But here’s the deal: you folks with at-house delivery are missing something. I grew up in a go-to-the-post office town then lived a bit in Jacksonville where our friendly mailman would bring the letters right to the door. For the last 30-some seasons I’ve been back in a post office box town and I love it. Yes, yes, there’s a certain convenience to having the circulars, bills, and political ads delivered to a neat little tin box on your doorstep, but you really miss something by not having a central gathering point for the town each morning. I have a friend who had season tickets for the Football Cardinals. He said that the only way to move his seats closer to the field would be for some other season ticket holder to die. He said that he certainly didn’t wish any of his fellow Cardinal fans any harm, but whenever someone closer to the field would have a cardiac or get smashed by a Budweiser truck, the phone lines would start buzzing with talk of “Where were they sitting?” As the dearly departed moved upward, my friend moved down…toward the field, at least. The same thing happened to me and my post office box. Oh, nobody died. The tiniest rentals are on the very top in Arenzville’s single wall of P.O. boxes and the mail containers graduate up in size as you move down toward the floor. If you want a really big P.O. box you must do some stooping. Being new in town 30 years ago and non-Lutheran to boot, I was relegated to a tiny top box...sort of like the right field bleachers at Busch Stadium. Then one day a friend of mine called. “Hey Ken. I’m moving up to one of the huge boxes. You want mine? I can put in a good word with the postmaster.” He did. I moved. I’m now the proud owner of the choicest piece of real estate in the postal business…straight ahead and eye level. If someone sends me a live rattlesnake I can see it before I reach in. The poor souls with the top and bottom boxes won’t survive the attack. But it’s the very act of coming together each morning, walking into the post office and seeing our town’s inhabitants in varied degrees of stretches, bends, stoops, wiggles, and spreads that truly makes us a village. Some people spend years trying to gain a real knowledge of each other, but when you walk into the local post office at 10 a.m. to see a friend from down the street who’s slipped her husband’s Carhartt jacket over her house coat and who is at that moment bending over to retrieve the latest circular from J.C. Penney’s…well, you learn something that a seminar on interpersonal relations could never teach you. At that moment…right between box 173 and the “Outgoing Mail” chute, you bond. And of course there’s the personal service of a small town post office. If you forget to put on a stamp in a large post office, your letter will be unceremoniously dumped back into your own mailbox three days later with the understatement “Returned for Insufficient Postage.” In a small town office the chances are good that the postmaster took four bits out of his own pocket, paid for your stamp, and the next morning will shout out to you, “Hey dummy! You did it again!” Just like home. I can remember the old, old days when my aunt ran the local post office. Whenever I’d send a postcard home from Colorado or California I’d add “Hi Florine!” to the card. She always read the postcards. It was an ancient form of the National Security Agency. Enjoy your at-house delivery. You’ll certainly stay warmer than I will, but you’ll never get the chance to meet folks intimately and …well…go postal.