The Mail Delivery Person
Every day, catalogs fill my mailbox. Hundreds of glossy pages of trendy women’s
wear, reams of suggestive lingerie. I
even receive a magazine full of pleasurable devices for working women with
limited time for interpersonal relationships.
I don’t know how to unsubscribe in the physical world so they go straight from the mailbox to my
recycling container. I hope all those supermodels
don’t realize their beautiful faces end up crumpled and soggy under my old beer
bottles and soda cans.
Long ago I regularly received birthday and holiday greeting
cards by snail-mail, but now I only get such greetings via social media. There was a time when I corresponded with
faraway friends and family in longhand on colored note paper in matching envelopes
licked shut. with stamps licked on. But
no more. Now I get instant texts and
emails for everything.
You’d think that all this digital communication and the death
of snail mail would mean a lighter load for my mail carrier. Not so.
Now she packs her little white jeep so full of bulk rate advertising
that it sags on its shocks.
Yesterday, by chance, I was wandering about in my driveway
trying to get good cell reception when the mail person pulled up and handed me my
daily pound of catalogs by hand. When
our eyes met, our faces grinned, because this was a rare occasion, being face
to face with another human being in the real world. We were so unaccustomed to seeing people in
real life that this was a special moment.
My heart fluttered.
She was my age. We
reminisced about our mutual analog history.
We had read the same hard-covers and paperbacks. We both still had leatherbound photo albums
with yellowing photos of swim teams and summer camp. We’d both had checkbooks, typewriters, and
phones attached to the wall by long curly cords. I prayed she was real and not some gamer’s
avatar.
Her route awaited. She
had to move on because the postal service monitored her route and location by
GPS. If she spent too long in one place
she might be forming a personal attachment instead of maximizing
productivity. As she pulled away, I
impulsively asked for her phone number.
Her red, white and blue government vehicle paused, she stuck her head
out the window, and she yelled out to me her home address, just the number and
street, no name, zip code, or town. Just
the number and street. It sounded very
familiar. I memorized it, turning it
over in my head, ran inside, and searched it on the internet. There it was, digitally projected on my
screen from some faraway data center full of the all the personal data of everyone on
earth. I felt lucky then to have internet
resources and computer skills. Maybe I’d
found the woman of my dreams after all these years of connecting solely with
others by zoom and chat. Where did she
live? Was she within a single charge
driving distance? Yes, there she was,
dropped like a pin on the map I’d quested.
She lived right next door to me.
