(Kind of) On Closing Post Offices

Due to the economy, the U.S. Government is looking at closing a lot of post offices. A whole lot of post offices and this bothers me because until I was about eight years old I was forever sending away for whatever could be obtained by virtue of saving up enough cereal box-tops. I was joined in this endeavor by my older sister and thoroughly encouraged in it by my Mom. Maybe this was because even in her early twenties, my mom was the world’s most avid supporter of the U.S. Mail Service. There might be a great blouse or hairdryer you could just as easily obtain by going to a local department store, but it was better if it was sent away for and received in the mail. To this day, I remember her excited poring over the S&H Greenstamp catalog and selecting just the perfect item to redeem those dozens of books of stamps for…all the hundreds upon hundreds of stamps we collected whenever we went, well, just about anywhere.

Thinking about it now, it seems like another world. A bizarre world where you could obtain a new Kayson’s china plate just for filling your gas tank (or as it happened back then, having the service station attendant fill it), driving home later to place that bland, white, paper thin china plate with the gold trim and what looked like a ubiquitous garden weed sprawling across its center into your cabinet as your ‘good china’, reserved for visiting relatives and special occasions. Special occasions such as almost every weekday morning when Mom would console my feelings of abandonment as my sister left for school and I stayed home, not yet old enough to attend kindergarten and not at all happy about it (if pre-school existed, if Montessori had been conceived of, they had not yet reached the realm of my existence). She’d pour a splash Folgers into a Kaysons cup and float a healthy blob of vanilla ice cream on top. To this day, therein lies the definition of comfort food.

Maybe this explains why I once spent four hours on Ebay, intent on emerging the victor in an auction for a full set of Kayson’s Golden Rhapsody, service for ten. I won, only to spend another two hours several months later to procure the salt and pepper shakers, butter dish and gravy boat. It was a happy day for me when I obtained, for under $20 in another Ebay auction, the final piece – the teapot/coffeepot, literally stealing it for so little money because the seller hadn’t realized Kayson’s was spelled ‘sons’, not ‘sins’. I left feedback letting them know of their error, and hopefully helping them realize full value on their next auction. I probably resembled my mom even more than usual the day it arrived in the mail, so excited I was to unwrap each piece, so happy to see nothing had arrived broken or chipped. I’d called my sister and she was as excited as I was. We agreed that someday we’d split the set evenly, as all she’d managed to collect to date was one butter plate and a serving platter.

It went into my china cabinet and was reserved, as Mom’s had been, for ‘special occasions’, even when that occasion was nothing more than a cup of coffee (with ice cream, of course) and an old Natalie Wood movie on TV late at night. When the china cabinet went to a friend in a much-needed downsizing, it never crossed my mind to downsize the china, not that I had much need for a service for ten. Some things in life you just don’t part with due to sentimental value, and I’ve found most of these things arrived, originally, in the mail.

So we were fervent about our box-top collecting, ever mindful that we were working on a deadline. Because it didn’t seem to matter if it was the scarecrow doll from Quaker Oats, the ‘binoculars’ from Trix, or the Secret Decoder Rings from Captain Crunch, you just had to get your box-tops and your $2 in the mail and postmarked before the deadline of June 30th. Even our mail-order catalogs, the Lillian Vernons with their #2 pencils and “Your Name Here!” staunchly upheld the June 30th deadline. Mom joked about this throughout my childhood, the fact that everything wonderful seemed to expire on June 30th, her birthday.

June 30th fixed in my mind very young, and although I’ve long ago given up sending in cereal box-tops (and lost my taste for cereal with the exception of an occasional bowl of Lucky Charms, which I strenuously insist nobody ever gives up or should give up completely) and since she passed away eighteen years ago there’s been no one to send that birthday card to, there’s never a June 30th that she doesn’t cross my mind, generally re-crossing it later in the day, traipsing across it several more times and finally winding up the day by running laps around it before I go to bed at night.

Without question, after my parent’s divorce and her subsequent and surprising voluntary relinquishment of both custody and rights, our relationship changed. Instead of a mother I had, suddenly, a character I’ve only seen replicated so completely in Patrick Dennis’s “Auntie Mame” books, someone I visited twice a year and who had me fluent in astrological charts, rising signs, karma, and numerology before I’d been introduced to the rudiments of basic geometry. Someone who took longer to put all the required (in her mind) layers of make-up on her face every morning than it takes me now (and probably then) to slap a first coat of paint on a spare bedroom. Someone, she insisted, I’d known in several of my past lives and who would, someday, reincarnate as my child (I study Basil and see no resemblance. I’m relieved). Someone who let me read both Ram Dass books and Mary McCarthy’s “The Group” when I was in the fifth grade (I learned an awful lot about astral travel but never understood what a ‘diaphram’ was or why a single woman would need to see a doctor to obtain one until many years later and a candid conversation with my then teenage sister).

She was what she was and I don’t bog down too much in trying to figure out what, exactly, that was. Fortunately for me, my dad remarried a truly wonderful, patient woman who didn’t mind taking on two kids in addition to the three she already had. Someone fluent in all things Tupperware, someone who created amazing things which included real vegetables every time she entered the kitchen, a holder of a degree in English Literature and a reluctant, although certified, Catholic to boot. She left death, sin, hell, the end of the world and eternal damnation right there where it belonged: on a shelf and only as something to threaten you with when it was your turn to keep the bathroom clean and you didn’t.

All things considered, I think I came out OK. I like to think I absorbed the best of both of these ladies, having evolved into someone not uncomfortable in the kitchen who also keeps a reasonably clean bathroom, a true fan of vegetables, an avid and broad-minded devourer of books who doesn’t always believe everything contained between their covers, a believer that you can condense religion of any kind into the idea that you do unto others as you’d like to be done to, and you believe in something bigger than you are, thereby not packing the world around on your shoulders alone all the time or being ridiculous enough to believe you’re ultimately in control of much of anything. Outcomes are what they are and you can call it karma if you’d like or past life baggage if you must but semantics don’t really matter. Sometimes, it just is what it is and it’s best to let it be that.

Had she lived (and this is another story in itself, and a sadder one, I honestly believe, than she deserved. She was four years older than I am now when she died, never having believed that an insulin shot is not a cure-all for a juvenile diabetic, that in addition to taking the shot you must also watch your diet, exercise, etc.) she would have been 67 today. No matter the age, she would still bear an uncanny resemblance to Natalie Wood. She would still, no matter where she was, have a book either open in front of her or somewhere on her person. If there was a stray animal within fifty yards of her, it would become part of her home. No matter what true junk it turned out to be when it arrived, she would always believe the item she’d saved up those box-tops or stamps for was going to turn out to be, as my dad often said, ‘the best thing since sliced bread’. Had she lived to see it, she would have been a huge fan of the Internet, and I can only imagine her emails, how they’d probably be so long, and so large, I’d have to keep updating my computer every six months just to handle them. I’m confident of that because her letters never failed to arrive with four or five stamps affixed and no less than three due on receipt, so fond was she of letters in excess of twenty pages, with a few magazine clippings thrown in for good measure. She stuffed the envelopes like she stuffed holiday and birthday boxes, never mind the year she stuffed $100 in the bottom of one box and we inadvertently tossed it into the fireplace on Christmas morning once it was emptied of gifts, not realizing we should have known her better, should have kept digging through the packing paper and newspaper until we’d truly found the bottom of the box.

All things considered, I believe she was a remarkable woman who did the best with what she had – and maybe, about the time of the divorce, had courage enough to walk away from something she knew she couldn’t do on her own. As a theory it has a few holes in it, true – but I’ll stick to it. And although it’s in the nineties outside today, I may just have that cup of coffee (decaf, but it’s the thought that counts) this evening and throw in some vanilla ice cream. And I really hope, for the sake of any kid out there who’s got a Mom with a love of receiving surprises in the mail, we keep a few of those Post Offices in operation.