Lorene Cary pens a love letter to U.S. postal workers
Guest Commentary: A Dear Alphabetic character to the Post Office
The USPS is in the news these days for its (potential) election-related failings. But a novelist and Penn professor remembers it for its dazzler
Sep. 01, 2020
Honey Postal Employees,
When I went abroad to boarding school, leaving my 8-years-younger sister alone in our parents' shattering-glass marriage, she needed someone to confide in. Someone who would believe and not shush her. She wrote me a hole-and-corner alphabetic character, found an envelope—no lightly penciled guide lines—and addressed it something similar this: to my sister Lorene who goes to St Pauls school in Concur, New Hampshire.
How many postal workers handed information technology to each other, like-minded to go along it moving, with the middle-school handwriting sliding off the envelope, and no postage anywhere?
When my husband Bob was old plenty to be allowed to collect mail from their rural Iowa mail role box—there were no street names—Mrs. Elsie Bowen, their mail master, "cheerfully businesslike," with her glasses and graying hair permed into waves, he remembers, knew everyone'southward name.
When chicks were delivered, Bob could hear them cheeping from the back. The ammonia of their urine and the grainy feed tabular array that came with them combined into a smell he tin all the same conjure.
When it was time to send my higher applications, with their strict deadlines and life-changing potential, required postmarks—college applications, grant proposals—I arrived at 11pm at ane of the few places in Philadelphia that was open 24/7: 30th Street Station.
Muddied mosaic tiles high up in the domed entryways reflected passing headlights. Marble walls stretched a block long inside. Travertine floors gave up a slow sheen and an echo-y click as I walked to the line of tardily-mailers. The importance and grandeur of the place marked and capped and sealed the evening'southward hectic rewriting and hope and fearfulness and driving likewise fast and parking as well tight and running in. Time slowed downwardly in the "Historic Corridor" equally it was called.
30th Street lent to these silent, moments of information transfer a solemnity appropriate to the stakes attached to these bits of paper moving among united states. Postal clerks, whether amused at the line of tardily-mailers or bellyaching by united states of america, made our little transactions homo as well as individually celebrated.
When I wrote my terminal book and learned facts about the great-grandfather who had moved his family from Goldsboro, North Carolina—Nana pronounced it Gols-burrah—to Due north 33rd Street in Philadelphia, the Post Role showed upwardly again. Nana's male parent, Will Hagans, had become a Goldsboro postal clerk, although not a postmaster, like the many that Black legislators were helping to get appointed.
And when my starting time-ever girlfriend grew upward, a wonderful woman who fifty-fifty equally a daughter anchored effervescence with a tiny, weighted streak of sly, she became a postal worker. Siboney and her family lived upstairs in our duplex row house, and my mother says that when I got angry as a two-year-old, I would brand for upstairs, calling the family'southward mother: "Miss Dor-ree!" who knew I meant Doris. Siboney was the beginning person I ever rode a bicycle with, played Jax, jumped rope.
When she was given a delivery route shut to my house, I would see her and wave, or we'd talk, only briefly, because she had a road to encompass. After a few years of telling me, "This bag is getting heavier!" Siboney has retired, simply her integrity and intelligence were plowed into USPS, like fertilizer.
And then, of course, similar my swain and sis Americans, I have experienced the Post Office every bit energy, information, social club, and an expression of the national will to connect our largest structures efficiently and carefully to the smallest needs of our people. Cookies to grandchildren at Christmas. Notices of law suits. Apologies. Bills of sale. Church building bulletins to the sick and close in. Thank y'all. And love letters.
Dearest,
Lorene
Lorene Cary is a lecturer at Penn and author, most recently of Ladysitting: My Twelvemonth with Nana at the Finish of Her Century, a care-taking memoir, and My General Tubman, a play nigh the complex journeying of the abolitionist/activist that ran this year at Arden Theatre.
Header photo by Elizabeth Kay on Unsplash 
guentherbelve1987.blogspot.com
Source: https://thephiladelphiacitizen.org/lorene-cary-love-letter-usps/
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