June
20, 2022
Greetings
from the casual consumer,
I
needed to find a stamp, a need that has not arisen in so long I wonder if it
ever happened. If we have stamps, I don’t
know where they are. If we don’t have
them, it means I need to go to the post office.
I
feel awkward going to the post office, that unease of going to any institution
that reminds me of being sent to see the principal. I realize I don’t know the price of a stamp, which
as a citizen I am required to complain about, and suddenly I feel that same
guilt as when I am asked to vote for college regents.
Then
this; whenever I think the post office, I think of the library.
Libraries
and post offices are fixtures in most communities. I suspect that most people view them like
teenagers view their grandparents. Aware
of them, but only visit on unusual occasions.
The
post office, and its bookend, the local library, are often in outdated
buildings, and seem to be perpetually from another era. They smell different, a mixture of mustiness
that comes from old paper and dust, and whatever solution they use to clean
jails and schools.
The
people who work there are cousins of the people at the DMV, underappreciated,
overworked, doing their best not to be as surly and resentful as they probably
feel. The post office clerk and the
librarian have a specialized knowledge, which we might not respect to the
degree it deserves.
I
will admit that I have thought for a long time that both these icons are almost
obsolete. Technological advances, it
would seem, would make them irrelevant. “Oh,
are we still doing that?” I would ask, so smug and cynical, two adjectives born
of ignorance.
Library
cards and stamps have a quaint nostalgia to them, a reminder of some simpler
time, when people sewed and sat on porches, and families ate together without
screens to distract them. I realize this
might sound condescending, but in truth the importance of this thread to those
times is just becoming real to me.
I
have realized more recently that both the library and the post office provide
incredible values to us as their constituents.
Stamps, which I have learned cost fifty eight cents, are a miracle. I can send a sheet of paper to virtually
anywhere in the country for spare change in my pocket. Libraries are virtually free. Books at Barnes and Noble cost $20.00 to
read. At the library, they give you a
100% discount. Read it, and afterward,
they will recycle it for you. Of course
if you finish reading it later than you promised, you are penalized four cents or
something, which you probably have left over from buying stamps.
All
of this is the wandering-around-conversation in my head that led to the main
thing that libraries and post offices have in common. They are both filled with stories.
Libraries
have shelves lined with books that hold the stories that someone needed to
write down before they slipped away.
Ideas too big to be held by one person.
Stories of adventure and romance and history and friendships and fantastic
thoughts about the future. Stories of
us.
Post
offices have stories. People write them
on sheets of paper, another quaint and terribly important tradition, and put
them in envelopes, a lovely, simple, nearly sacred apparatus. They tell the story, freeze it in time, and fold
it, slide it into the slot at the post office, and add it to the millions of
stories others are sending to the people who need to hear them. Right now, these stories are migrating all
over the country, the world, like enormous swarms of literary butterflies. Stories of us.
Libraries
and post offices are filled with stories of us, because we have walked through
their doors and made use of them, been helped by them, changed by them, for
generations. Just because we may have
forgotten the stories, doesn’t mean they no longer exist.
It's
remarkable. These fixtures hold a legacy
that has mattered for hundreds of years.
In every town that lasted people built a school and a church and a
library and a post office. They became,
and remain, places of community, of exchange, places where we weave our stories
together. Interesting what we value. If these bastions of stories become irrelevant,
what will we build in their place?
Hope
this finds you visiting,
David
Copyright
© 2022 David Smith
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