Mail Boxes

MAILBOXES

When I was younger, I used to imagine that the mail boxes, on our city street corners, were magic portals. They stand there ever so quietly, with uncomplaining patience. They have the serenity of the inanimate. Many of our neighbors daily fed letters into the swing hinged openings, of these round shouldered blue mailboxes. They assumed that carriers would come and pick up their letters and deliver them to the main Post Office. Then, other clerks would send the missives on to their final destinations. I always thought differently.

I suspected that there really were no bottoms to these corner mail boxes. The letters, I imagined, funneled into a mysterious galactic void, and somehow ended up on the cluttered desk of a celestial postal office, in a far and distant galaxy. There, a harried interstellar mail clerk would hand cancel the letters with stardust, and let bands of angels carry them on to their many destinations. I envisioned great gossamer winged flotillas of celestial mail people crowding the heavens above, in search of the addressees. On cloudy days, I thought I could even see some of them as they flew by, far overhead. I wondered how they got their directions straight, with no street signs or road maps to guide them. Do roofs have addresses on them?

Later on in life, I became aware of the US. Postal Service. They didn't have wings or star dust, but they did their job in a timely and efficient fashion, that even the angels would have been proud of. It wasn't always so.

Long ago, communications between the continents were carried by ship and often took months to deliver. The news was a little late in arriving sometimes. The Battle of New Orleans, during the War of 1812, was fought well after the peace had been signed.Word just hadn't arrived from Europe, before the battle got started.

Later on in the century, the Pony Express riders braved hostile Indians, inclement weather and mind numbing fatigue to carry a small sack of letters across the wide continent of America. They never lost a letter.We have come a long way since that time to this, the age of computers.

In the amazing technological marvel of instant communications, that is the 1990's, you can hook up a computer to a modem and contact someone immediately, in Perth, Australia or Novosibirsk, Russia. We accept it as an everyday occurrence. It wasn't always that way however. Long before computers with modems, there were mailboxes. For a few pennies per stamp, you can send a missive to the far flung corners of the earth. Simply place the letter in the box and off it goes, on a magic carpet ride. I used to see, in the cloudy skies of my youth, the many trains and boats and planes that were carrying my letters to far away places. It seemed like an awful lot of people went to some degree of trouble, to earn the few pennies I had paid for a stamp. I could almost visualize the postman, in the far off jungles of Malaya, dutifully delivering a letter to the third straw hut on the left, in some long forgotten village, a thousands leagues away from anywhere.

You can send mail to Northern Tibet, Timbuktu or Tierra Del Fuego, on the southern tip of South America. Wherever your mind can imagine, your letters will be delivered safely, for a few cents. It is an impressive concept. Today, we see the uniformed members of this rugged confraternity delivering their mail daily, across the broad expanse of America. Rain, sleet or snow, the mail arrives every day. Even during the great World Wars, the mail got delivered. Sometimes, it was even delivered to the bombed out remains of the last addressee in a war torn city. Mail is civilization, and it always get delivered.

People from across the planet can send you correspondence, knowing that it will arrive in a safe and timely manner. It is a leap of faith unknown in any other form of human commerce. No one interrupts the mail.

During the Christmas Season, hundreds of millions of cards and packages are shipped throughout the world.They carry the good wishes and sentiments of an entire planet. The postal system delivers them all. Even the rigors of the Sears catalogue season doesn't daunt these blue clad scions of Mercury. The Mail goes through!

So, when next you place a letter in the corner mailbox, think of the army of dedicated messengers, that will carry your letters anywhere you wish. You will never again walk by these round-shouldered blue postal bins, without appreciating them for the magic portals that they really are.

Joseph Xavier Martin