NOT because it still delivers
letters — the Alamo of warm and fuzzy Luddites like my mother and multinational
credit card corporations.
And not because of stamps.
Collectors, may you never give up on the dream of finding that inverted
Jenny-plane 24-center at a flea market in Ohio.
And not because it is celebrating
National Dog Bite Prevention Week by ranking cities by the number of attacks on
postal employees in 2014 (No. 1: Los Angeles, with 74).
Nor is it the workaday architecture
of post offices themselves, whether Brutalist concrete or prefab ranch style.
Nor even the small-town half post
office, half general stores, with idiosyncratic hours, and bricks of hunter’s
Cheddar.
No, this is a paean to the big-city
post office, those grimy, chaotic, good-will-draining temples of American
bureaucratic dysfunction, where hopes and packages are mangled, and lunch hours
are not to be trifled with, and where you can still experience a city in all
its magnificent, unfriendly, unruly mess.
Like the D.M.V. and jury duty, the
post office is one of the last great equalizing institutions. There are no
V.I.P. windows, no first-class lounges, no velvet ropes — save for the vinyl
Tensabarrier aides that children claim as dance partners. All of us — including
the actress from “Girls” I spotted one Christmastime, her boulder-scale Chanel
shopping bag swinging close to the eye of a toddler — have to face the same
beleaguered civil servants, who recite the same scripts about liquids and
perishables. It doesn’t matter if you star in a hit television show about
Brooklyn — you are still not entitled to mail a lithium battery or genetically
modified crops.
As with many of our objects of
affection, the post office has shifting moods. Stress and crowds spike around
what are thought to be the most anxiety-inducing parts of life: changes of
address (moving), tax day (finances), Christmas (major holidays) and Mother’s
Day (mothers).
Quieter stretches valley the peaks,
but you are always just a passport-renewal seeker or a clerk’s coffee break
away from the line threatening to move so slowly that it is actually inching
backward. Then one fellow patron might roll his eyes, another might huff, still
another might appeal to Jesus. Here, beneath the fluorescent bulbs speckled
with what may or may not have once been tiny, vaguely prehistoric winged
creatures, our differences dissolve.
Yet there are pleasures to be had,
beyond the masochistic ones. At the same Brooklyn post office where I saw the
boy nearly blinded by the bag, there is, amid the self-inking stamps used to
label mail, one that reads “PRETENTIOUSLY HAZARDOUS.” So flawless was this, so
in perfect pitch with the light-speed-changing neighborhood in which it sits,
that I thought maybe I had dreamed it up. So I returned and there it was again,
the accidental poetry of an author within the United States Postal Service,
some 625,000 men and women strong and $5 billion on the bleeding side of its
yearly operating budget.
No one can sanely argue that this is
money well spent. It could probably buy everyone on earth a candy bar. But
maybe that is not the point. Maybe the point is to pick up some stamps today,
or send back the empty toner cartridge from your printer — because you’re a
good person and you want to save the planet — and lucky you, you are about to
see the stubborn, glorious disarray that still tatters our gleaming cities.
Ethan Hauser is the author of the
novel “The Measures Between Us.”
