Journal of the Plague Year 4-15-2020

No musings today about coronavirus or lists of TV shows watched. Instead, I am going to tell a story about a post office family and how the PO delivered for me. Since there appears to be sentiment in some quarters to eliminate the agency because it doesn’t make money, the timing seems good. 

I married into a post office family. Hubby’s paternal grandfather was the assistant postmaster in the city of Milwaukee, holding the highest non-political job in the PO of that city. As a result, the family had what some would call a misguided belief that the post office could do no wrong. In those days (1930s and 1940s), the department was much better funded than it is today, in part because there were fewer alternatives. UPS, FedEx and DHL weren’t even a glimmer in anyone’s eye. The telephone was the only threat. 

Fast forward to the late 1970s, when now-hubby and I decided to get married. We told our parents, everyone was happy, and we began making plans. At the time, I was working as a college reference librarian in upstate New York, answering questions about primary source material and the location of the library bathrooms.

Soon after we had announced our intention, I was sitting at the reference desk under the huge stained-glass window in the Gothic Revival cathedral of learning. A student delivering the afternoon mail tossed an 8 x 11 manila envelope onto the desk. “Looks like this is personal,” she said. And it was indeed addressed to me. There was no return address. It was somewhat lumpy, as if there were Life Savers inside.

Instead of Life Savers, the envelope contained a used shirt cardboard covered with rings. The rings were taped to the cardboard. A note in my prospective father-in-law’s writing said, “You might want these now.” 

I was stunned. The envelope contained jewelry worth many thousands of dollars. Sapphires, diamonds, platinum, gold, and silver rings—seven in all. They included the bridal set worn by my mother-in-law, who had died many years before I met her son. Father-in-law had purchased it in the New York City diamond district on 47th Street in the late 1940s. I have worn it ever since we were married a few months after the remarkable reference desk delivery. 

The envelope was sent first class, uninsured. Later, when I expressed my surprise that father-in-law had sent such a valuable shipment by regular surface mail, he shrugged and asked, “Why wouldn’t I? It’s always worked before. That’s why we have post offices—to send things.”

I don’t know if we have post offices so we can send diamonds to future daughters-in-law. I do know that faith in government agencies like the Post Office is a thing of the past. We got married just in time, right before the war on the federal government began in earnest. If we had waited a few months or years, this story might not have had such a happy ending. Or it might never have occurred at all; father-in-law might have had time to rethink his devotion to the agency that employed his own father for so many years.