1025 Mailbox

Wednesday, December 20, 2006

[Later Edit - The Hairless Hunk has a winch on his truck, not a wench. I'm surprised nobody caught that.]

I spent all day yesterday writing notes. I have old friends and coworkers scattered all over the country, and at Christmas I write them a (real, personal, handwritten, snail-mail, and very short) note. Then around the end of January, I get a real, handwritten, snail-mail response. And that's about it until the next year.

Email doesn't seem to work for us/me. I set an email aside, and then I seem to forget it wants a reply. I don't know why. Perhaps because it's too much contact for the kind of distance relationship that now remains. I guess we/I want to keep in touch, but not too touchy-feely. Or maybe it's my standoffishness. Whatever. I wish I could do better.

My mother always kept very closely in touch with practically everyone she'd ever met - and moving every three years, that was a lot. She always said that if she ever decided to drive across the country, she'd have a friend to visit every day. We spent three years in Ottawa, two in the house on Fairbanks Avenue, and forty years later, when she and our Fairbanks neighbor were both widows, the neighbor and she would spend a week together in Miami every year. I don't know how you maintain that kind of contact. She never taught me how.

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My neighbors across the street put their house up for sale last spring. In preparation, they moved a lot of their belongings into storage, and borrowed a utility trailer to do it. Their driveway is long and narrow, and unlike mine, there's no turn-around at the end, so after they filled the trailer, they had to back it up the drive.

My mailbox is right across from the end of their driveway, and I guess they weren't able to turn the trailer tight enough when they got to the end of their driveway (and apparently weren't watching, or listening, the sound would have been pretty loud), and they rammed my mailbox, twisting it off true, and badly bent the post for my newspaper tube. I didn't see it happen, but that morning the trailer was in their drive, and two hours later, the trailer was gone and the damage was done. The direction of the twist and the height of the bend say "trailer, from THAT direction". We are the last houses on a dead end street. There is NO other traffic.

I had to figure it out myself because nobody from across the street came over to apologize or offer to fix it. I didn't say anything either. The Hairless Hunk used a winch on his truck to twist the mailbox back for me, but we couldn't do anything about the newspaper tube. Now, to get my paper, I have to open the car door a little and hang out the window to reach it.

Well, the house sold a few weeks ago, and they moved out last week. This time I think it was a moving van that hit my mailbox. It's twisted so far I'm not sure it will twist back. I'm surprised I'm still getting my mail.

Again, no one said "Oops, sorry."

I probably won't be keeping in touch with them.
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