Magic Mail

Remember the big rule of Christmas Eve when you were a kid? NO sneaking out of bed in the middle of the night to try and catch Santa Claus in the act? Because if you do happen to see him, then you won’t get any presents?

That’s how I feel about the postman.

I leave the house in the morning, the letterbox is empty. I come home in the afternoon, there’s mail. That’s how it works. There is no process in between. At least, none that I care to know about. This is why I can not deal with seeing the postman in action. Because, like Santa, it ruins the magic of the whole experience.

I am more than happy to accept that I am the only person with this particular…well, ‘psychosis’ is such an ugly word – let’s just say ‘quirk’. I see it as being very similar to the old adage “if you like sausages, you don’t ever want to see how they’re made”. I like getting mail, and I don’t want to see how it gets into my letterbox.  If I see a random postman zipping along the footpath on his motorbike, that’s okay because it’s not near my house. If I happen to be home during the day, however, then I can’t venture out into my front yard at any time between 11am and 2pm, for fear of seeing him*. 

Sometimes I’ll forget, and I’ll venture outside at the wrong time, only to hear the familiar tinny whine of the postman’s motorbike. I won’t hesitate to run back inside and wait until he has gone. And I don’t just mean gone to the house next door, I mean up the road and around the corner. (What? I don’t want him to inadvertently look over his shoulder and see me! He’ll think I’m being rude!)

As you can see, I’m not mucking around with this.

So try to imagine the testicle-disintegrating horror I experienced the other day when I ducked home from work mid-morning to pick up some paperwork (or, more likely, my lunch). I parked the car in my U shaped driveway, nipped inside to pick up the documents (food), jumped back in my car, put my seatbelt on…

…and then the postman rolled himself up my driveway.

They say that in times of great distress, time seems to slow down. I’d go one further and say my entire life flashed before my eyes – but yes, I would also agree that there were a few seconds that seemed to stretch on forever. In those few seconds the postman made eye contact with me, and made some kind of “I have your mail” gesture as he reached for his bag. Which brings us to the precise moment at which I fucked everything up:

I nodded in response and rolled down my window.

I will have nightmares about that for the rest of my days. Dear God, I rolled down my window. I wasn’t thinking. I was blinded by panic. This, of course, gave the postman the green light to further shatter the wonderment of receiving mail. He smiled as he handed me the letters, before continuing on his merry way. Meanwhile I, having broken all laws of nature and decency, drove back to work a broken and quivering shell of a man. With mail I acquired by unnatural means.

So now the magic of the postal system has gone the way of Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, and the idea of Blizzard ever actually getting around to releasing Starcraft 2. Disillusion. Disbelief. Despair.

And for all this trauma? There wasn’t even a letter for me.

 

*On the off chance that there are any feminists reading, ready to jump down my throat for my use of the singular gendered terms ‘postman’ and ‘him’ – my postman IS a him. Deal with it. And for heaven’s sake, fix your hair – you’ll never land a husband looking like that.