Okay, imagine going to the post office in the United States:
at 6:45 pm, to pick up your mail, and saying hello to the clerk at the desk who
says hi back and teases you about how another clerk
asked you for ID but of course you don’t need it to collect a package at the counter
if you have a PO box
(it says so on the PO box contract)
Then, there was yesterday’s cab ride. Three of us went out to Cole Harbour. We had a most taciturn fellow outgoing but the inbound fellow just couldn’t tell us enough about how he would vote in the US Presidential election if given the chance. He’s a Hillary man. All the way. No one, but no one, can talk him from it. The election, he is sure, is today (yesterday’s tomorrow). Indiana will decide and then we know who the President is for this summer. Clinton must win because she is not upper class. I learned a lot from all of this, and realized the impossibility of trying to explain either the party conventions or the electoral college in the space of a cab ride, to an audience of three who were coming at the proposition from three different points of reference.
Which is, to misuse a quote Eudora Welty, Why I Live at the PO.
May 7, 2008 at 12:35 am |
heh, I have a PO box but never had a contract and have never shown ID, not even to get the box in the first place. I didn’t even have a key until a couple of weeks ago. On the other hand, at my former postal outlet, they once refused to let me mail a letter without the postal code. They appeared to thrive on red tape and on slowing things down (in an unfriendly way, not a Nova Scotian way).