Oh? Okay. Never mind (My Sacred Life, Sunday)

My friend John Ptak included a post on his blog recently wherein he offered up many disparaging comments about mailboxes.

Now, John is a man of great intelligence and wide experience in the world, but I had to wonder about this one. His delightful wife (I may have mentioned her name here once, if I recall correctly: Patti Digh) is a serious, devoted, not-to-use-the-o-word (obsessed?!?) collector of containers, mostly bags and little cute boxes she is unable to resist.

When I called John on his seemingly misled campaign to berate the common mailbox, I pointed out that my wife, the amazing Julia Rogers Hamrick, was as devoted in choosing our mailbox (along with the matching house numbers, and who knew you could do such a thing as match the two?) as John's wife is in collecting bags and little boxes. Woe be unto the person crazy enough to insult one of Patti's bags or my Julia's mailbox.

I would use cost as an example of this devotion, but I don't know exactly what we paid for our mailbox and matching house numbers, and instinct tells me that I am fine not knowing.

So, feast your eyes!

Then, John answered my email to point out that his criticism was only of those big mailboxes on street corners, the public ones, the really ugly ones. The ones which only (in this country) the USPS gets to design and approve. Did I mention that they are ugly? They are. Functional, and ugly. Please note that no photo is included of a regulation USPS mailbox. I'm not really all that fond of including ugly on my blog.

One side topic about which I used to be curious until I asked my postman once: you sometimes see the very-same shape in a box on a street corner which is clearly the property of the USPS, but...there's no way in. I mean, there's no handle near the top of the box which you can pull so you can deposit your mail inside the box.

It turns out that, for the postal service folks on foot, it is helpful to have a place where they can drop off mail which residents desired to have picked up from their homes, thus consolidating it for later pickup by a USPS truck. These odd, 'don't deposit here!' boxes are far less common anymore because most delivery people now have their own vehicles where they can accumulate sent mail for the return trip to the post office and processing there.

Happy mundane-yet-informative Sacred Life Sunday!