Postal
Good writing, you’re getting better!
In my college’s boxy reddish township, which was on the whole lovely and lush and without blemish, there was one place I’d without fail dread to go, and that place was the post office. The structure itself caused me no unease. But a visit to the post office was freighted with difficulty for other reasons. Lines, fees, recondite rules. Unknowably complex hours of operation. These were the years during which the price of domestic first-class postage increased four times in four years, and one could never be quite sure how much one was going to have to pay to send a letter, a CD, a box of tiny flowers. I recall once skipping class to ship a textbook back to the seller that I’d bought it from. The day was bright and dry, with a terrific bite to the air. I entered the post office and exited an hour later, having waited too long in two different lines and twice paid too much for shipping, the first time because I’d picked the wrong option and the second because the right option was, well, expensive, and after it was over I just slumped into the benches outside, face hot and palms damp and fighting tears.
So it was not without anxiety that I went for the first time to a Wash DC post office last week to ship an envelope. The post office at 1050 Connecticut Ave lives in the mezzanine level of a steel and glass office building, along with a Victoria’s Secret and a Morton’s The Steakhouse and maybe ten law firms. Perhaps I’d arrived early enough in the day. Perhaps nobody went to this particular post office downtown, next to the Victoria’s Secret and the Morton’s The Steakhouse and the maybe ten law firms. But when I was there at 1050 Connecticut Ave I entertained briefly the thought that maybe I hadn’t actually ever been to a post office at all before this one. It was silent, spotless, open, filled with space. Steel, blue plastic, carpet of tight bristly fibers. Rows and rows of P.O. boxes reaching out toward the room’s vanishing point, and in the air the quiet throb of efficient operation. It was a house of worship where before I’d only known folk shrines and cunning men’s huts.
