Pushing the Evelope(s)
Right into the living room
I don’t know if it’s an LA thing or a stage of life thing, but I’m currently on a first name basis with my mailman. When I was in my twenties in New York I was rarely home in the hours between 9AM and 3AM. If I was home, something had gone terribly wrong (hangover, illness, depression, or a combination of all three). In my first apartment, the mailbox locks broke, which meant the carrier just dumped 16 apartments worth of mail on the floor every single day.
In my current days of free and easy semi-retirement (exhausted early motherhood and anxious forced unemployment) I am officially home too much. This means my current mailman and I see each other throughout the day. Not just when he drops off and picks up mail, but also throughout the day as he makes his way up and down our street. We have a very old fashioned built-in mail slot in our living room—lacy metal work covers a small hole in the wall connected to an opening on the outside wall. If I’m in the living room I hear the mail arrive with a slide and a thud. It’s like getting a text message ding, except it doesn't make you feel like you drank ten cups of coffee and then derail your day for four hours.
The other day the baby (who has been doing a very cool thing where she will only fall asleep in an actively moving car after an hour of me trying to get her to fall asleep in the crib) fell asleep in the car. When we got home, I parked the car on the street and sat next to her as she finished her nap. I attempted to be present in the moment (not look at my phone) and in the process heard a chorus of children’s voices calling a man’s name over and over again. I realized it was the name of our mailman. I followed the sound and saw him vigorously waving at the second story window of a nearby apartment building at the unseen children. It was the nicest thing that happened all week.
One time our mailman was on vacation and our landlord’s dog, a sweet but enormous German shepherd, came barking from the back. After a yelp and a scuffle, I opened the door to see the replacement mailman running to the sidewalk, slamming the gate shut behind him. I tried to explain what was happening but I don’t think he was in the place for that and later we were sent a threatening letter by USPS that included the number of mail carriers who experience dog bite incidents each year. I can’t remember the number, but it was astronomical. I hate to say this, dogs, but it’s not a good look on you. Get it together.
Of course our actual mailman knows the neighborhood dogs by name. At my old apartment, in the bleak unending sameness of lockdown, the sound that punctuated my day (other than the children next door screaming for what I would approximate to be 23 hours a day) was my old mailman greeting the enormous husky lolling in the yard across the alley. Hearing “Hi, Kramer!” through the window meant it was lunchtime.
Recently, I noticed that the USPS delivers mail on Sundays. I asked my mailman why. He told me it was contract workers delivering Amazon packages. This portends something bad, I’m sure, for both my mailman and for me.