The Mailperson

 

The Mailperson

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 pleasure devices for working women with limited time for interpersonal relationships.  I don’t know how to cancel them so they go straight from my mailbox to the recycling container in my driveway.  I hope all those glossy supermodels don’t realize their beautiful faces end up crumpled and soggy under beer bottles and soda cans.   

Long ago, I regularly received birthday and holiday greeting cards from family members by snail-mail, but now I only get such greetings via social media.  There was a time when I corresponded with faraway friends in longhand on colored note paper in matching envelopes, 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 catalogs and 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, not online, 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 remembered when phones were attached to the kitchen 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, they’d think that 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 jeep paused, she stuck her head out the window, and yelled out 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’s lived right next door to me for ten years.