Mail Merge

Playing Post Office. Please, Mister Postman. That awful movie with Kevin Costner. Maybe you don't remember or never saw it, set in the future of 2013, in a post-apocalyptic world where a man picks up a bag of mail and brings order back to dystopia. Something like that.
My grandfather was a mailman. A good friend of mine was, among the various jobs he had before becoming a science teacher, worked for the Post Office. He is also the only card-carrying communist I know.
I remember going down to the Post Office when I turned eighteen to register for the draft. Not that there was a draft at the time, but I was willing to sign myself up for a lottery that might end up with me winning the chance to serve my country. Not as a mailman. As a soldier. Interestingly enough, that same science teacher friend of mine served some time in jail for resisting the draft. He's a little older than me. Joan Baez sang in front of the courthouse during his trial. Eventually he found a way to serve his country after he was exonerated. He was a mailman, as I have noted, and he was a science teacher. A really good one.
All of this is to say that the fabric of my life seems to be interwoven with postal memories. My brothers and I used to make an excursion on any given summer day of hiking up to the mailboxes at the top of the road where our cabin sat. The locals didn't get delivery directly to their door. In those days, the mailboxes were clustered in a row where all the mail could be doled out. It was here that we would wait for our father to return home from work down in town. He was delivering the mail for us from there. We did not have a mailbox. We only vaguely had an address. It was seven tenths of a mile down the hill. On the left. When we hopped into dad's car, we all wanted to see what messages came from civilization. Was there a Time magazine? Maybe a card or letter to someone other than Resident? And every so often, there was a package.
A package of any sort was like a jolt of electricity for any boring week. My brothers and I periodically sent away for stuff from the back of comic books just so we could have that experience.
Now, not for the first time, there are rumblings about the Post Office going out of business. This kind of news hits me squarely in the place where I shiver upon hearing that they are about to do away with pennies. This can't happen. This should not happen. It is too much change for me. Or in the case of the pennies, not enough change.
I would miss the cards that come to our box. I would miss the daily check, pulling the door open to peer inside. I would miss waving from the porch to our mail person. It's a comforting ideal that I am not ready to surrender.
Not yet.