https://medium.com/@philgarber/blog

0817blog

No More Love Letters

There will be a lot of very unhappy philatelists if President Trump shuts down the postal service and he really doesn’t want to mess with angry philatelists.

When I was young, I remember Joe “The Mailman” Neuman, a chubby fellow who delivered our mail and would bound up to the house each day, reach into his leather mailbag and leave us the day’s mail. Joe was a funny guy and seemed to really like his job as he would usually leave us with a joke.

Where have you gone Joe the Mailman, a nation turns its lonely eyes to you, whoo, whoo, whoo.

And where have all the mailboxes gone, long time passing; where have all the mailboxes gone, long time ago. Where have all the mailboxes gone, gone and vanished everyone, when will we ever learn, when will we ever learn.

College was the best when I received a scented letter from my then-girlfriend. I checked my dorm mailbox every day hoping to find a letter that was bathed in fragrance and if it came, I was in rapture. I’d bring the treasured letter back to my dorm room, lie down on my dorm bed, close my eyes and take in the smell for a half hour, fantasizing about my then-girlfriend, before I opened it. The content wasn’t that important. It was that scent, truly a wonderful moment to make a bad college day good.

As a youth, I liked to build model rockets. They were made by Estes Rockets and you’d pick out the rocket and the engine and the launch paraphernalia from a catalog and then send your money and wait. It was better than Ralphie’s secret decoder ring.

I’d check the mail every day until that magic moment when Joe the Mailman delivered the package with the Estes Rockets logo on the outside and I opened it carefully before I sat down to seriously begin assembling the rocket which came in two stages and could actually send a mouse into the heavens.

Baseball was my religion as a young teenager and I sent out letters to the St. Louis Cardinals, the Los Angeles Dodgers, the N.Y. Yankees and other teams asking when their next open tryouts were planned. I didn’t really care about tryouts. What I did care about was getting the letters with the Cardinal, Dodges or Yankees logo. It was pure magic that I could actually have a correspondence with Major League Baseball as if delivered from heaven.

And then there were the dreaded letters from the draft board, which began “greetings” or the letters from the college registrar who truly regretted it but told me that my grades weren’t good enough to get into Rutgers.

There were also the joyous moments like getting the acceptance letter from Central Connecticut State College, a school that few knew even existed but the letter meant my future was guaranteed, or so it seemed.

Birthday cards were always a welcome sight especially if you opened it to find $10 inside. They made you feel like people were thinking of you and that you meant something and could buy something with the $10.

Holiday cards were always popular. Christian families would hang dozens of Christmas cards around the kitchen door while Jewish families got a few lame Happy Passover cards. How sad for the families of either faith who got no holiday cards in the mail.

And don’t forget letters to Santa. The big guy probably doesn’t have a computer and would be totally crushed to open his mailbox and find it filled with snow and no letters.

If there was no post office, Elvis wouldn’t have had his hit “Return to Sender” instead if would have been reboot the sender. “Take an Email Maria?” I don’t think so.

And there was “The Letter” which noted “Give me a ticket for an airplane, ain’t got time to take a fast train, lonely days are gone, I’m going home, my baby she sent me a text message?”

How about “I’m gonna sit right down and write myself an email.” And then there’s always, “wait, oh yeah, wait a minute, Mr. IT man.”
And how cool it was to get those post cards from cousins seeing the Grand Canyon for the first time.

Some people went fancy with those little return address labels that had the name and address of the sender while the rest of us had to scribble our return address in the upper left corner of the envelope.

Getting back to philatelists, I never collected stamps but my brother did. He had a giant book in which he placed stamps he’d gotten from around the country and the world.

Maybe he was hoping to find that rarest of stamps, the “Inverted Jenny,” which mistakenly was printed with an upside down World War I plane that sold at auction in 2016 for $1,351,250, the stamp, not the plane.

I hope the mailbox doesn’t go the way of the phone booth. I can’t imagine scented e-mails or getting all excited over a digital birthday card. Losing the postal service would suck.