Soapbox

I Used to Love The Mailman

    Based on the song of the same name, which insisted on being written first.

    I used to love the mailman.
    I knew him by name, offered him a glass of water on hot days, even gave him cookies, sometimes. We joked together, said hello if we ran into each other at the grocery store.
    See, the mailman brought me letters… which were these little pieces of paper that people used to write things on for other people to read: news and greetings, thoughts and feelings, hopes and fears, and they’d fold them up into an envelope and stick a 13 cent stamp on the front, and a mailman would take it to them, so they could read it. Neat, huh?
   Now it wasn’t electronic, it wasn’t cellular and it certainly wasn’t instant. A letter didn’t twitter or tweet and you had to draw your own emoticon smiley faces… what's up with that? But you could hold it in your hand and know that the other person once held it too, while they were thinking about you.
    Which was very cool.
    After you read it you could tuck it in your pocket and take it with you to school to read again in some quiet moment, puzzling over the exact turn of phrase your friend had used, probe for hidden meaning. You could put it under your pillow at night and hope it would bring you dreams.
    Sometimes a letter even retained a bit of the scent of the person who wrote  it, by accident or design- something flowery in a card from your maiden aunt , perhaps a faint whisper of soap in a letter from a far-off object of desire. But it made them seem very real, very close.
    A letter was concrete, a small gift from a person who cared about you, something you could read and toss away- or keep for 20 years, then take out and open again. And like opening a door, they would be right there again, chewing on their pencil, deciding what to say, maybe drawing pictures in the margins, closing with a favorite line of poetry.
    Back then,  talking on the telephone meant talking in the kitchen with your family around, listening in, and the words “long  distance” made fathers frown in disapproval and tap their watch. So letters were the best connection to the people you missed.
   
    Today you can hear from people 20 times a day, a message they took entire seconds to compose: ~How R U LOL emoticon~ while standing in line at the bank or in between texts to seven other people. But a letter is personal, and tangible.
    Letters take a little time, and thought. That’s why they mean so much.

    On an impulse, I wrote a letter to an old friend a few months ago. She called me on the phone when she got it, told me how sweet and quaint it was for me write, She said some other things too, but I don’t remember what they were- see, she didn’t write them down.  Like in a letter.
    I used to love the mailman because he brought me love from far away. Now I don’t even know his name.