Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of soul…

by David Benjamin

MADISON, Wis. — As I consider a Postal Service targeted for vivisection by a paranoid narcissist and run by a fatcat hitman with a dirty scalpel, I scroll through my lifelong romance — with stamps and parcel post, love letters and amiable, unflappable mailcarriers.

My first mailman was twenty minutes late every day. Rollie Fredericks’ route covered Pearl Street in Tomah, Wisconsin, where my grandmother, Annie, lived — next door to Rollie’s mom. Just before reaching Annie’s mailbox, Rollie would settle down with Tillie, often on the front porch where everyone could see him taking time off, for coffee and family. When Rollie finally got rolling again, his first stop was Annie, who would ask after his mother even though she gossiped with Tillie over the garden fence every day of the week.

No one on Pearl ever thought of objecting that the mail came a little later in the morning because Rollie Fredericks paused on his route to see after his mother. 

In grade school, I was a philatelist, collecting stamps haphazardly and even launching a shortlived stamp “approvals company” with an eighth-grade friend. For a kid in a hamlet in the middle of nowhere, stamp collecting was a MovieTone newsreel, hinting at more geography, history and language than I had dreamt of in my philosophy. I learned that countries on stamps don’t always use the names printed on Rand McNally maps — weird, chewy names like Suomi, Magyar and Sverige. One of my proudest possessions was a first-day cover — with globe and spire — of the 1939 New York World’s Fair. I also owned a chilling set of Polish stamps, issued by German occupiers in the 1940s, each denomination with a different-colored image of Hitler. I discovered a few tiny nations — notably San  Marino and Monaco — who issue more stamps than they need, featuring remarkable designs and often in odd shapes, honoring almost everything on earth, because they knew amateur philatelists like me couldn’t resist buying them.

Stamps sucked me into geography, biography, tyranny and human memory in ways not conveyed in classrooms. As I licked stamp hinges and tucked into my album my new arrivals, from Albania (Shqipnia) in 1947 or Belgium in 1956, they took me palpably to places unknown to most people I knew (South Georgia, Cape Verde,  Brunei) and some that have disappeared from the world map since I was a kid (the Belgian Congo, East Germany, Aden, Yugoslavia). 

I’ve never lost my sense of wonder that this peaceful, universally shared system, of putting a sticky square adorned with the portrait of a dead president or a silent-movie actress onto an envelope and dropping it — with more trust than we invest in most family members — into a box on the street, expecting it to arrive by and by, safe and undamaged, ten blocks or ten thousand miles away.

When my wife, Hotlips, and I lived in San Carlos, California, I made all the trips to the P.O. I still make all the trips to the P.O. I buy all our stamps and surrender them reluctantly to the mailbox. I love going to the P.O. In San Carlos, we had a talkative postal clerk named Gary, who got to know anybody who visited him more than twice in a lifetime. He shmoozed incorrigibly, but with empathy and humor. When there was a queue, there were grumblings among the uninitiated that Gary was holding things up. But when I fell to Gary’s space on the counter, and shared with him idle talk about family, job and politics, I’d had a better day.

Gary’s frequent sidekick at the counter was a woman often out of sorts, occasionally slipping into outright surliness. Other times, she was almost friendly. Since I couldn’t avoid her, I decided to ask about her troubles. She was a sufferer. So she was ready to spill — about her back. Well, jeez, I know!, I said. I get these back spasms sometimes (I exaggerated — all sufferers exaggerate) that just put me to bed for 24 hours. And she said, oh, I know, sometimes I can barely move, and I said you know what I do to relieve the pain? Well, you know what I do?, she said. 

After that, well, we had a medical bond that lubricated every postal transaction. I rarely miss California, but now and then I feel a nostalgic pang for garrulous Gary and the lady with the bad back.

We lived in New York for three years. For the first half of that stretch, in Great Neck on Long Island, our mailman was grumpy and antisocial, especially annoyed by our travel schedule, which required him to “hold” our mail. I always went to the P.O. (an elegant columned edifice inscribed with the name of Henry Morgenthau, with those heroic WPA murals high on the walls) to pick up our accumulated post, but I could not appease that put-upon postman. We called him Cliff Claven.

So, when we moved to Brooklyn, I made a point of forging an immediate acquaintance with the postmaster, David, at the Myrtle Street P.O. and his ramrod, the estimable Veronica. With David and Veronica, I had a street-corner friendship that took me back to my childhood on Pearl. I also cultivated our mailcarrier, Molly. Every time Hotlips and I traveled and Molly had to hold our mail, I brought back a little illegal token for her — soap from Marseilles, chocolates from Paris.  

Our five-year sojourn in Paris heightened my affection for the U.S. Postal Service. La Poste, the French mail, works, but not as efficiently or inexpensively as the American system used to work (before Commissar DeJoy), especially if you expect by September that package you sent for in April. 

By comparison, Japan — my home for seven years — has possibly the most dependable mail system anywhere. It unerringly conveyed my daily letters to Hotlips, from the U.S., for thirty months before I moved to Tokyo. It also has a postal banking operation that provides safe, convenient banking services — from the Buddhist version of Christmas Club to checking accounts and mortgages — for every citizen in every neighborhood without the scrutiny, surprise fees and other aggravations imposed by commercial banks. 

Still, a letter in Japan costs significantly more than one in America. We have the cheapest mail on earth. No nation does it quite like the USA does.

Well, did.

We’re destroying things now. Things we love. Things like national parks and the poem etched into the base of the Statue of Liberty. And the Post Office. 

Not because we’ve stopped loving them, but because we are governed and bullied by the fears and grudges of a mean little man who…

… has never had to open his own mail or…

… lick a stamp — because there are women and servants to do that sort of thing…

… never filled an album full of commemoratives from Malaya, Upper Volta, British Honduras and the Isle of Man…

… never rushed to the mailbox day after day, praying that the most important package of his life, likely dispatched by an outfit that advertises in the back pages of comic books, would finally arrive… 

… never dropped a letter, or parcel, or hotel key into a box on the corner…

… never subscribed to a magazine with his own money…

… never wrote a Christmas card…

… never sent a Valentine… 

… never wrote a love letter…

… never waited for a love letter back… 

… never celebrated when a friend, a cousin, an aunt or uncle passed the Civil Service exam and got a union job at the Post Office, with all the blessed security that comes with it…

… never knew there was such a thing as a Civil Service exam…

… never paused on the street to talk to the neighborhood mailcarrier… 

… certainly never set foot in a post office and never in his whole life learned the name of a postal employee except the one he hired to fold, bend, mutilate and spindle Benjamin Franklin’s best idea.