Please Mr. Postman

We receive a lot of mail. Some of it is even ours.

We get a lot of magazines and even more catalogs. We get catalogs from places we have never heard from, let alone order from. And we receive a lot of first class mail and bulk mail.

Some of the mail is for us. Bills, of course, and invitations. Letters, rarely, but always appreciated, and cards more often. More and more solicitations for donations these days.

We also receive mail sent to us in care of the condo association. Allyson is the treasurer, and everyone in the association sends her their dues. But I don't think the condo association mail is a source of confusion for our postman.

The source seems to be all of the other people who live with us who do not share our last name. I have noticed this issue before, when our niece lived with us. That was in the old house. After she moved in and started to receive mail, I noticed that the volume of mail intended for other people started to rise. I had forgotten about it until recently, when campaign workers started having their mail sent to us.

So we get our mail, and the condo association mail, and now the mail for these other people who live with us temporarily who do not share our last name. This summer, a few people moved in, and some of them changed their address to our house. Shortly after, we started receiving their mail, and then random pieces of mail.

Some of it shares our house number, but is sent to a house on another street with our house number. Typically, the mail is intended for a house a block or two or three away from ours, which makes me think our mailman is making the error. Maybe the volume of mail going to our house number confuses him, and he just starts routing mail with our house number to our house, whether or not the street is right.

Recently I have noticed mail intended for people who live in the neighborhood and do not share our street number. This has been only a momentary setback for my theory, though, when I notice that this misdelivered mail is intended for people who share our first names.

I can see the mailman, sitting down to sort all of his mail, quickly throwing letters into piles, rapidly scanning the addresses, and every once in a while throwing a house number or first name match into our pile.

I take this mail to our neighbors. I worry about late birthday cards, urgent pleas from spurned lovers, loving missives from lonely grandparents sitting too long in our foyer waiting for me to get them to their rightful destination. These letters weigh on me, confronting me each time I arrive home, chastising me for my slothfulness. I refuse to be one of those people who are party to mail thirty years later arriving at someone's mailbox, spurring the TV news to do a report on the nostalgia of a long-lost letter finally reaching its intended recipient. After two or three days, or a week at the outset, I take the missing missive to our neighbor's house and drop it in their box or through their slot. And I feel once again all is right with the world.

Until last week. We received a letter intended for a woman who lives a mile from here. It looked like a birthday card. Or maybe a condolences card. Or maybe, worst of all, a get well card intended to cheer up someone who has just endured some awful surgery and who would be comforted that her old friend from Georgia (the return address) remembered her at this difficult time. The street number was way off. The names were not even a remote match.

This piece of mail really knocked me off my game. Maybe mail is really just a probability vector. 99.9%, or 98% of the time, you get your mail. But in some small percentage of the time, you don't. It gets stuck behind some machine at the post office or lodged in the bottom of a mail carrier's bag or delivered to someone too far away to feel enough of a connection to attempt to right the delivery wrong.

I went into a slight depression. This piece received my immediate attention, but I did not cart it the mile. I just wrote on the front, accusingly, I know, "Delivered to wrong address" and dropped it in the mailbox, hoping that maybe this time, they would get it right and Mary's get-well card would finally arrive at its proper destination. And as I did so, I said a little prayer.

Please, Mr. Postman, please, take extra care with those hand-addressed envelopes intended for sons and daughters and fathers, mothers, friends, cousins, bringing cheer, good news, comfort, celebration, please take extra care and get these messages to their intended recipients. Please take a second look at names, and streets, and cities, and in the bottom of your bag, and know that we are grateful for that extra time you take to get us our mail.