The Mail Delivery Person

 

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.