Missoula News

Missoula Notebook

Notes on Not Checking the Mail

By Sutton Stokes, 5-03-08

From my (home) office window, I have a clear view of the mailbox hanging on the inside of our fence, and this means I have a clear view as well of the mail carrier’s daily arrival. A stern-looking fellow with a sun-beaten face, usually wearing a pith helmet and dark sunglasses, he first leans over the fence and peers into the mailbox to see if any outgoing mail awaits. Then he riffles through the stack of envelopes in his hand to double check the addresses before stuffing it all into the box.

The other day he spotted me in the window and gave a wave, raising his arm stiffly and keeping it there, motionless, as he moved away down the block. More of a salute than a wave, and by that I mean a perfunctory ritualistic gesture devoid of any particular meaning or emotion. (Ask someone who’s been in the military how little a salute can mean.)

Still, fresh from the alienation and lonely crowdedness of the big city, and on the search for a sense of community and belonging here in Missoula, I am susceptible to the charm of moments like this. They fit my admittedly stereotyped and hackneyed ideas about what life in a small town could be like: knowing not only your neighbors but even the government officials who serve you, exchanging updates with the cashier in the grocery store, telling a small child you’re going to have a talk with his mother if he doesn’t stop swearing like that.

In my fantasy, I’ll have the window open on a balmy sunny day and the mail carrier will call out, “How’s that next column coming, Sutton?” And I’ll call back, “Oh, you know, it’s coming.” And he’ll wave again before continuing on his rounds, perhaps whistling a cheery tune as he strides away.

Of course, my window is currently painted shut, but I’m thinking about starting to plan on doing something about that soon.

Seeing the mail arrive every day as I do, I could of course rush out and collect it immediately, except why would I want to? Up at the beginning of this essay, I started to write “letter” in front of “carrier,” then crossed it out and wrote “mail” instead. My reason is probably obvious to anyone old enough to remember back when people still sent each other letters.

Now the mail is basically a daily garbage delivery, with identity-theft-ready credit-card offers mixed in like pieces of broken bottles to cut you if you’re not careful. One of today’s vital life skills is learning to spot and toss these offers without wasting time opening them, sort of the way pioneers had to get good at distinguishing the medicinal plants from the poisonous.

Do children still pout when none of the mail is for them? It’s hard to imagine growing up these days thinking of the mail as anything but a bother, but I am just old enough to have seen the last years of the age of the letter and I remember making fervent complaints that no one ever sent me one when I was little. “The only way to get mail is to send mail,” my mother told me, and so I adopted the habit and kept at it through my early twenties.

Of course my romance with mail only really blossomed when I went off to school. I remember haunting the small mail room of my small college, peering through the little window on my mail box in hopes of finding a letter indicating that my long-distance girlfriend hadn’t forgotten about me after all. Nowadays I suppose we would just exchange daily messages on our Facebook pages, and I suppose I would have found new ways to be insecure in that context as well. (E.g., who are all these male “friends” she has? Etc.)

In 1995, just before I left that college (without a diploma), I sent my first emails — to that same girlfriend — under the tutelage of a technologically precocious fellow who lived downstairs in my dorm. I immediately understood there was something different about email, a different rhythm than with letters, and so the fact that she didn’t answer for several weeks helped prepare me — if only subconsciously — for the breakup she announced once we were both home for the summer.

I spent the rest of the 1990s floating around on Coast Guard cutters without internet access, and so while many of my peers were coming to depend on email, my relationship with the mail was artificially extended, as was my relationship with that very girlfriend, which was briefly resuscitated during that time. (Did she like me best when I was far away?)

It was a particular thrill to be the one selected to actually pick up the ship’s mail on port calls — to come striding back along the pier with the bulging dingy white sack, and everyone’s eyes on you like you were Santa Claus in blue work fatigues. There was nostalgia in this pleasure, too, for the scene reminded me of the old war movies I watched with my father as a child, just as the letters the soldier characters received at mail call reminded them of home, a spiral of memories actual and adopted lapping at me from all sides.

Another memory: a musty post-office lobby, dimly lit with flickering florescents. My father stands at one of the tables, sorting an immense pile of flat brown packages, while I — young, short, barely able to reach — page through the clipboard of curling “Most Wanted by the FBI” posters hanging on the wall and compare the indistinct over-Xeroxed photos with the faces of other patrons. If a private detective had been assigned to watch our family, he might have assumed my father was in the import/export business, so much time did we spend at post offices, so often did the UPS truck make deliveries at our house.

But it was just that my father was a jazz critic and received a constant stream of review copies of records — yes, actual records, 10,000 of them before that era ended, speaking of obsolete information-delivery methods. He worked at home, and so during the summers I frequently accompanied him on these trips to the post office, not least because of the McDonald’s ice-cream cone that was often involved.

So there is what the idea of “the mail” conjures up for me: warm memories of childhood, stark memories of learning to find my way as I grew up. Small wonder, then, that I am reluctant to actually get the mail these days, when I know that I will only find bills and circulars and come-ons printed with the lie “FINAL OFFER.”

For more like this, read the rest of the Missoula Notebook.

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