Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Neither snow nor rain nor -- whatever

Luckily, the United States Post Office has no official motto.  The words -- Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds. -- are mistaken for such a motto but are just the inscription on New York City's main Post Office building at 8th Avenue and 33rd Street.  At any rate, those words used to pretty much sum up the reliability of the United States postal system.  It's met its match, though.  What neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night could stop Saturdays can.
And that's the way it will apparently be.  No more mail delivery on Saturdays.  No more pacing back and forth awaiting the arrival of Penny Savers and solicitations and, yes, bills.
I can't remember the last time I received a letter.  Cards still trickle in come holiday time but fewer and fewer of them, too.
My family used to only receive its mail in post office boxes.  The first box I remember was P. O. Box 761.  That was our address.  After that we moved to P. O. Box 63.  Even if we had lived in the town in which those post office boxes were located those numbers would still have been our addresses because no one in either town had mail delivered to their homes so we certainly couldn't have expected such service miles out in the country.
Now I live in a pretty big city and yet I still have a post office box -- P. O. Box 1497.
Go figure.
Old habits die hard.  I guess that's why many of us will still pace back and forth even on Saturdays waiting for one last hand written and carefully folded letter from someone we yearn to hold.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

No e-mails or txts or twitters can be sealed with a kiss, that's for sure.

Tom Walker said...

Fewer people are using postal service mail, so the only sensible solution is to raise the price of stamps and cut back on services. I just can't understand how they got into this mess.

Marnie said...

Surely the computer have taken over!