Steering right, Driving left
Ginny, our mail lady a few years back, had the longest postal route on the island, serving half the South End and all the residents near the Head. She drove a car with right side steering. She always said when she retired she wanted to go to England and rent a car where she’d feel right at home behind a passenger-sided steering wheel. With luggage in the back, not a ton of junk mail and magazines. I never heard if she did or not.
Like all our U.S. Postal carriers, Ginny would drive packages up to the shack if they didn’t fit our mailbox, the one with 10 pounds of goofy add-ons, red star on the ‘flag’, big glass nose on the door like a Christmas present for the insane. That, or a mailbox adulterated by an artist on drugs. Or worse. When parts of this evolving sculpture fell off, Ginny would pick them up and put them in the box with our bills and unsolicited credit card applications, just another small aggravation on a route filled with those. Boxes too high or too low, too far back, too grown over with blackberries or nettles, on wobbly posts with doors that no longer closed. At any given time ours would fit the description.
I hear folks who say the Post Office is a lousy organization, a letter costs too much to send and probably gets lost anyway, that UPS or Fed Ex would do a better job faster and cheaper. I think these people would find fault with Heaven itself and ask for a refund from St. Peter at the gate. I can send a letter across the country for half what it costs for a bottle of pop and it gets there in 2 days, 3 at most. Now, of course, most of us can e-mail it Instantaneously. Still can’t e-mail a package yet. Or a magazine. And anachronistic yahoos like me still send letters. Handwritten even. Even if we never get a letter back.
All my life I’ve appreciated going out to the mailbox, sort of a daily mini-Christmas, a surprise in every Cracker Jack box and yeah, mostly junk, I know. I like that it’s efficient, that it’s been around since Ben Franklin, that it delivered letters sent to soldiers in Europe or cowboys in Amarillo or me at the end of America. To all the Ginny’s driving wrong sided down America’s backroads, through wind and hail, sleet and snow, curmudgeons and naysayers, thanks!!
And Ginny, if you’re touring England, mind the hedges.
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