The Tiny Hat Club

I happen to know, because of once having been fitted for a graduation cap, that my head size is 6-3/4. That's small. In fact, if you put a normal size adult hat on my head, I go blind. Pay attention to this, because it comes in later.

An odd thing happened when I retired from the post office on--let's see--October 1, 2008, at 3PM. The thirty-one years I had spent there began to slide out of my brain like a luge team with diarrhea. I'd assumed I'd drop by the station to say "hi" at some point, and smirk a little, but then I became afraid I wouldn't remember anyone's names. In a matter of just a few weeks, I didn't think about the post office at all.

And I liked my job. And my coworkers. You know--mostly. The early memories are the fondest, before Management decided the best way to get us to work hard was to barcode our asses and monitor us with drones and satellites, which resulted in a demoralized, trudging crew. No, the best were days we'd converge on some hapless new hire when the sun was going down on a Jeep that was still half full of mail. We'd pop open the back of the truck and do triage, passing out sections and parcels to all available hands, and we'd roar through the remainder of the route with elegance and efficiency and sometimes a little heroism, and it was a beautiful thing. Because the sooner we got all the mail delivered, the sooner we could go drink beer in the park. Often, off the clock.

Or the days we hunted down the proper destination of a lilac-scented letter with old-lady handwriting and no discernible address to speak of. It would get handed back and forth through the offices of capable carriers with freakish memories, even for quirks of handwriting, until it finally rattled into the right location because someone knew somebody on his route had a Great-Aunt Violet.

But it's all going away now, because it appears that my brain is a Postal Palimpsest. (Incidentally, any time a blogger can work in the word "palimpsest," all casual-like, you know you're getting a quality product.)

A palimpsest, as you all know, is a parchment or papyrus or other writing medium that has had the original writing scratched off and been written on again. Most of the time the antique folks would scratch their letters onto a waxed board or something and it was easy to smear it back into original condition, like one of those Magic Eraser Boards where you pull up the plastic sheet and everything goes away. But those haven't held up as well over time, so the ones people find now are often made of parchment. It might seem like a lot of work to scratch out the original document just to write over it, but you'd do it too if every time you needed to pop up in the middle of the night to jot down a thought you had to go out and kill a buffalo and tan its hide or something first. You totally would.

Anyway, apparently, because in my retirement I have become on fire to write creatively, I have had to scratch the postal parchment clean. There's no room in the brain for all of it.

Tiny, tiny hat.

Marbles: Third Dingle

I'm still on vacation. While I'm gone, you can read excerpts from a book I wrote four years ago, Miss Delivery: A Postal-Mortem. This is the third part of a series that begins here and continues here.


I was a half-hour earlier getting to Mrs. Jackov’s house, but apparently had still not achieved the magic delivery time. The door swung open, and I ducked my head reflexively. My work ethic, personal habits and parentage were all brought up one at a time and speculated on. I had had time to think about it, and managed to insert a proposition when she drew breath for another tirade. “I could just ring your bell when I get here, and then you could hand me your outgoing mail,” I offered, just before the door slammed shut.

Back at the station, I made a general inquiry. Did anyone know what time Mrs. Jackov expected her mail to be delivered? As it turns out, everyone knew. And not just the carriers, either. Also the supervisors, and the clerks, and the janitorial staff—anyone who had ever been in a position to answer the phone. A gruff, unsmiling carrier turned towards me and spoke with the voice of a cattle rustler. “Dead last, kid,” he growled, stubbing out his cigarette for emphasis. “She gets it dead last.” I was awestruck. Maybe some day I would have the self-possession to carry off an attitude like that. That little reverie was quickly extinguished with the memory of my waitress stint.

Wally Collins was gone all week, failing even to call in a few of those days, which made him officially AWOL. He was rechristened, in his absence, “Awolly.” You never want to give postal employees a chance to yoke you with a good nickname. You’ll die with it. Just ask Crud-lips and Dribbles.

But by the end of the week, I had really picked up the pace, both sorting and delivering mail. One day, the mail volume was so light that I actually got out earlier than Awolly would have, and I blazed through the route just to see how well I could do.

It was very well indeed. Marbles, sound asleep by the wall, was nonplussed, but he elected to postpone his nap and provided the usual escort service. I had developed a bit of a strut by the time I waltzed up to Mrs. Jackov’s house. There were no letters hanging out of her mail slot. I stuffed her mail inside and turned smartly to go, getting as far as the first bed of tulips (planted in rows, rigid as soldiers) before the door snapped open. “Hey!” came the familiar snarl. “You’re early!” I smiled and took a little bow. Possibly, this was inappropriate.

“I don’t have my bills ready! How am I supposed to get anything done when other people can’t even keep to a damn schedule?” A host of retorts rose up within me along with some quite specific fantasies involving ice picks. What actually came out was a mild-mannered offer to come back and pick up her mail in a half-hour. It was not the loudest of the voices within me. How had it achieved dominance? It had been around the longest; it belonged to the well-brought-up little girl who said Yes Ma’am and No Sir and strove to reduce friction. Only the fabled ice pick had been around longer, but no one has actually clapped eyes on one since Trotsky.

The rest of the day I replayed the encounter, replacing my part of the dialogue with ever more vivid recreations. By the time I’d gotten back to the station my embellishments had sharpened right up and become audible. Even the notable fact that I had completed an entire route in eight hours did not soothe me.

The next day, I was still engaged in perfecting my rant and was still lobbing some choice syllables into the air when Marbles offered to give me a listen. Marbles was sympathetic but was of the opinion that I should just do the best job I could and then sit in the sun, maybe drool a little. And it was Marbles who further suggested that maybe my job was a little more important than I had thought. For one thing, he transmitted, scratching his left ear with his hind leg, it was clear that Mrs. Jackov was determined to be angry no matter what I did. And if that was the case, why, it was important that I be there every day to bleed the pressure valve, or there could be dire consequences for the neighborhood and possibly (here Marbles briefly consulted an itchy spot on his tail) the whole world. This could indeed be one of the great contributions of the letter carrier breed. There were probably Jackovs in every place and time, and the everyday disappointment that the letter carrier brings is the only thing taking pressure off the system before they all explode. Without people like me, Marbles concluded, shards of malevolence from the Jackovs of the world would rain down upon the planet and doom us all.

Marbles sensed that he might be needed a while longer and accompanied me for the rest of the afternoon. When we turned the corner towards Mrs. Jackov’s house, we saw her open her door, check her watch, and place a letter in the mail slot for pickup. We arrived within the minute. The door flew open. Mrs. Jackov stared at me, face crimson, as I wished her a good day. I had turned to go before she found her voice. “I don’t know who keeps letting that damn dog out, but he’d better stay the hell out of the tulips,” she yelled.

Marbles and I moved on, companionably. He wasn’t so bad. He was a pretty good dog. It was a pretty good life. We both had a job, we had our independence, and I don’t know what-all else.

Marbles: Second Dingle

I'm on vacation. While I'm gone, I've put in some excerpts from a book of postal stories I wrote four years ago, just for fun. The story of Marbles begins here.

Whether or not a route had direction cards was a matter of the route’s regular carrier. They could be useful, confusing, illegible, or non-existent, depending on the carrier’s artistic sensibilities, clarity, or tendency to care. This batch was one of the good ones. My progress delivering the route was slow, but it never stopped altogether, and whenever I hesitated, a direction card would appear with arrows and boxes representing houses and all would become clear. At one point I had come up to a dead-end, having delivered all the houses in sight, but still hadn’t run out of letters, so I glanced down at the explanatory card.

CROSS STREET HEAD UP HILL RIGHT AT STONE WALL FOLLOW MARBLES

Across the street was a grassy hill with a worn path, and I went that direction until a short stone wall came into view, and then I hesitated. There was a large, peculiar-looking yellow dog sitting by the wall, regarding me with his tongue lolling. “Marbles?” I said, and whap whap whap went the yellow dog’s tail. He took off at a human pace through the woods, beside a hedge, and over an embankment, culminating in a driveway to a house. He trotted up to the mailbox and sat down solidly in self-satisfaction. The house numbers matched the address on my next letter. This might have been the finest dog I had ever met, and I told him so, whacking him affectionately on his side. He stood up once again, to make himself easier to praise, and that’s when I took a good look at him.

There was something hanging off the dog, something underneath, something I fervently hoped was a temporary accoutrement, a little something picked up in a romp through the woods, but no. I took in just as much of the dog as I wanted to and then directed my attention elsewhere. The dog did not so much defy description as defy observation. I didn’t want to look. Marbles turned around and headed amiably off, trot-bobble, trot-bobble, to a place in the sun, and plonked down in a contented heap. He had a job, he had his independence, and I swear I don’t know what-all else he had.

The rest of my section looked pretty straightforward and I went on my way, pleased and a little unnerved by my introduction to Marbles. The direction cards were invaluable and the rest of the route went slowly but uneventfully, until I got to a Mrs. Jackov’s house. I was just dropping mail through her slot when the door flew open. Mrs. Jackov glared at me like the living bane of Oz. “You’re late,” she hissed, unnecessarily. I began to apologize in a general sort of way, without the desired effect. In fact, she had a couple letters to go in her hand and she began to swat me on the head with them. “I can’t just leave my letters hanging out of the slot all [swat] day [swat] long [swat], waiting for you, they’ll get wet! Or stolen!” I promised, based on a habitual and unfounded optimism, to do better the next day.

Wally Collins called in sick the next day too, so I did have a chance to redeem myself with Mrs. Jackov. Things went a little smoother, and Marbles was once again at his post next to the little stone wall. We greeted each other like old friends, and I patted him carefully on top of his head. Once again he led the way, trot-bobble, trot-bobble, and when we emerged at the driveway, we startled the meter reader. “Is that your dog?” he asked, and I explained the dog and his evident function in life. “This here is Marbles,” I said, introducing the two. “Marbles, Meter Reader.” Marbles put out a nose, accepted a pat, and began to trot away.

“There’s something hanging off that dog,” the meter reader said. “Looks that way," I said, looking a different way. He observed the dog for a scant moment and then abruptly launched into a torrent of idle chatter. The meter reader and I developed an equally fervent and precipitous interest in anything not related to the dog. We were still gabbling away when a Sears delivery truck pulled up. The driver got out, with a friendly wave in our direction, and went towards the back of his truck. Marbles got up to investigate the new possibility for attention, and the driver provided some, pronouncing him a good boy. Re-validated, Marbles trotted back to his sun spot. The Sears man stared after him.

“What is that hanging off that dog?” he wanted to know.

“We don’t know," the meter reader and I said in unison, and steered the conversation hard in another direction. Meanwhile, the other fellow failed to pick up on our diversion tactics and continued to stare at the dog. “Holy cow,” he said, crouching down.

To be continued.

Marbles: First Dingle

I'm on vacation. But I've loaded up Murrmurrs with something a little different. When I retired from carrying mail in 2008, the first thing I did was write a book of dang-near true postal stories. I called it Miss Delivery: A Postal-Mortem. Here are some excerpts: "Marbles," in three parts, begins on my second day delivering a route all by myself. The first day had not gone well.

It’s hard for me to feel bad for long. I rebound fast. This is not a sign of intelligence. In fact, it is often achieved by willfully ignoring or denying all that is true. If I were the last tyrannosaur holed out in a cave when the asteroid hit, I’d come out and think: hmm. Chilly. Dark. But look! Toasted stegosaurus nuggets, as far as the eye can see.

So the day after my hellish solo debut, after a dreamless sleep, I went off to work in a much lighter frame of mind. After all, there was no possibility this was going to be as bad a day as yesterday. For one thing, I had gained some familiarity with the sorting case. I would be able to make some headway sorting the mail this time. And I’d been out on parts of the route, at least, and wasn’t likely to forget where the mailboxes I’d already found were. Certainly not that cutesy little birdhouse piece of crap with the hungry cat face on it holding the little tiny US MAIL sign in its mouth swinging from the tree halfway across the yard in Gnomesville that you could only see by climbing the steps to the front door and leaning out over the porch. Yes, things were certainly looking up. I walked into the station, punched in my shiny new time card and strode over to the sorting case. The boss met me there. “Collins called in sick,” he informed me. “I’m going to need you over on route 136.” And just like that, there I was, right back to looking like an exhibit in the Postal Wax Museum.

It occurred to me that it was inevitable that, in one’s first days on any job, things might go a little sideways. It takes a while for the smoothness to set in. You can’t expect yourself to be able to accomplish the same things as a seasoned professional, and no one else would expect you to, either. Would they? I picked up a letter and scanned the new case, hardening into a familiar pose. I wasn’t getting anywhere.

As I stood, poised with my original letter outstretched towards the case, I thought about some of my previous jobs. I had been a waitress at Friendly’s Ice Cream. On my first day, I admired the other waitresses who flew around the corners with dishes stacked all the way up either arm, swinging them down gracefully and setting them before their customers, and I thought: amazing. Soon, I’ll be able to do that. But I wasn’t. I was quite possibly the worst waitress ever. Months into the job, I still couldn't bring two lunches at a time to a table and park them correctly in front of the people who ordered them. In fact, I had so little talent that when I did manage to bring someone his correct order, and then served his coffee upside-down in his crotch, he went out of his way to reassure me. “Don’t worry,” he said earnestly. “It wasn’t warm, anyway.” He felt so sorry for me that he gave me an extra-large tip. Although maybe that was for dabbing him dry.

I wasn’t all that great shakes as a lab technician, either. I never could bring myself to kill a rat, and I used to wash all my colleague’s test tubes for him in exchange for dispatching my rodents: a half-hour’s work for me vs. fifteen seconds for him, and I considered it a great deal. I stood there with the same letter in my hand and it dawned on me that nothing in my personal occupational history could rule out that I would suck at this, too.

On this day, though, I got some assistance from another rookie carrier, one with a few months’ experience and a proper sympathy, and we were able to plug all the mail in the case and get the route ready to go in a reasonable amount of time. I had learned to place the Bad Dog cards in front of the letters for a bad-dog house, so that was an improvement right there, and my new friend also introduced me to the concept of Direction Cards, which were made up to guide the carrier through the odder deliveries—“back door,” “slot in garage,” or “blue house behind laurel hedge”, for instance. The other rookie didn’t seem to think I was irredeemable, and that plus the direction cards had given me a little heartbeam of hope.

To be continued.

Leaking Weasels: Part Two

When you work for the post office, you learn that there are a number of things parcels can do that are not optimal. They can tinkle. They can tick. And then they can exude. Long before we were required to receive instruction on suspicious packaging (by which we were helpfully informed that "protruding wires" are something of a red flag), we had our own instincts about exuding parcels. You get a package addressed to the biology lab at the University, and it's damp and squishy, you're going to quarantine it in the back of your Jeep like it's a snoozing wolverine. You just are.

I was not especially concerned the day I took custody of a small box that appeared to be leaking sand from a rip in the bottom corner, until I noticed that the return address was a crematorium. Some PR issues are best left to Management, I rarely say, but did in this case. Protocol requires the box to be taped up and mummified in plastic with a form apology:

"The US Postal Service cares about your mail. Unfortunately, the use of mechanized equipment as well as the hiring of Stevie "Stone Hands" Whipmeier in the parcel section sometimes results in damage to a mail item. Please accept our sincere apology for the mishandling of [NAME OF DECEDENT], some of whom can be picked up at our facility during regular business hours, because our janitorial staff Larry is still in the parking lot doing a doobie. Please bring this notice, a Ziploc bag, and a Dustbuster. We care."

I never personally delivered a limp weasel, but there were things. It used to be fairly common to see coconuts coming through the mail stream, all decked out with stamps and a Hawaii postmark. People are tickled by the notion that they can mail an unswathed coconut, and they inflict them on their friends when they go on vacation. I'd knock on the door and hand it to the recipient, who'd holler over his shoulder "Jesus Johnson, Edith, your brother Harold went and sent us a giant nut," and shake his head. It's not the sort of thing you throw away, so on the mantle it would go, stamps facing attractively forward, where eventually the grandchildren, who have grown up with it and watched Grandma dust it, have to keep it because no one wants to throw out Grandpa's big nut.

Also common were boxes of crickets, destined for the house of a pet owner. LIVE CRICKETS, it would proclaim hopefully on the side of the box, and we'd cross our fingers and tip it a little, whereupon it would emit a dry, cascading sound like wood chips. You have to deliver it anyway. Maybe, you hope, the recipient owns a crippled snake.

Or chicks. Chicks would come through the mail, always, luckily, chirping, and at eight in the morning it seemed like the jolliest thing ever, and we'd stow the box in our Jeeps and drive off humming. Ha ha! we'd think, as they chirped in the back. What a fun day this will be! But the chicks never went to anyone at the front end of the route. By the time five hours of chirping has gone by, we are one frying pan and a bottle of sweet-n-sour sauce away from committing a grave postal infraction.

But in my 31 years of service, nothing exuding from the mail ever seemed as significant a hazard as what exuded from the mail carriers. Mail carriers are given a uniform allowance every year with which they can acquire everything they might reasonably be expected to need, but there is a certain subset of carriers who simply refuse to pick up a new shirt. The uniforms aren't even bad-looking. They're a decent color, they're permanent-press, and with a minimum of care, they are quite presentable. They won't wrinkle unless you sleep in them, crunched up on the sewer grate in front of the liquor store. If you wear the same shirt every day for three or four years, the friction of the newsprint and magazines against the tension provided by the beer belly turns the midsection of the shirt a sort of sickly, kitchen-compost green. Have you ever seen a mailman wearing a greenish, wrinkled uniform shirt? Yes, you have. We still do not know why this subset of mailmen does not avail itself of the generous uniform allowance every year, but it is probably hard-wired in their DNA, on the same chromosome that makes it so difficult to take up a collection for a retirement present or funeral bouquet.

But no discussion of exudation is complete without Gary. Gary would periodically say "oh, pardon me" for no discernible reason, and when we asked him why he said that, just before the reason wafted down the aisle, he'd say "because I'm a polite guy." Which was true. In a sense.

I'm not sure we would even notice an over-expired weasel.

Leaking Weasels: Part One

Nowadays, when you go to the post office to mail a parcel, they'll ask you if there's anything liquid, fragile, perishable, or potentially hazardous in there, but long ago, they didn't care what you had as long as it didn't exude anything. You could slap an address tag around the neck of a dead weasel, and it was good to go, even it if exceeded a uniform thickness of 1/4 inch, which some of your dead mammals will, depending on the circumstances of their demise.

The specific instructions said you could enter such an item as post "as long as no liquid is likely to exude." That in itself is a testament to a faith in our communal institutions that we, cynical and suspicious as we have become, no longer have. Me, I look at an expired ferret, say, and I think: "here is something from which, at some point, liquid is likely to exude." But in times not long gone, people could look at the same weasel and think: "shoot, it'll make it in time."

Of course, back then, you had a pretty good chance of seeing your weasel all the way to its destination before any exuding happened. People were in charge of it. Someone would fling the weasel into a bin for your city, someone in your city would re-fling it into the bin for your neighborhood, your carrier would satchel it up, and just like that, bip bam boom, there would be your deceased weasel lined up all neat in your mailbox, wrapped in a Time magazine, with a soap coupon between its lips.

Stuff happened from time to time but it was a good system, entrusting the mail to people. Even certifiably [what is the word? Ah yes] stupid people could be entrusted to see the mail to its correct destination--I've seen them do it. The only trouble with people, in fact, was their tendency to want pay and medical insurance and frippery like that, and so giant sorting machines the size of football fields were developed to replace the regrettably high number of humans. Now, some robotic arm slaps the wrong barcode on a weasel and before you know it he's looping around the country growing more unattractive by the nanosecond. And the three or four people left in the system now have to allocate a portion of their workdays to apologizing to customers.

We still have an Exudation policy at the post office. We're agin it. Ever since 9/11, whenever an employee noticed a mail item that appeared to be exuding in any way, we were to immediately step away from it and call our HazMat trained employee, Big Mary. Big Mary would come to the fore and invert a plastic mail tub over the exuding item, run a few yards of yellow caution tape around the periphery, and call the local firemen, who were really cute. It was a pretty good system.

But I still think it's sad that we live in an era where evil people are moved to send suspicious white powder through the mail, resulting in the very real danger of a company powdered-donut ban, and when you can't even count on Priority Service to deliver a maggot-free ferret.

To be continued.