Strange doings at my post office box the last few weeks.
My post office box (PO Box 181, NYC, 10185) has been my permanent address for 14 years. I don’t use it as much now as before, but after moving here in 1990 I rented a PO Box because at the time I moved frequently from one apartment or hotel room to the next.
I have had some odd encounters at that Post Office Box.
Most recently, I and another gentleman were sorting our mail when a woman talking into her cell phone yelled “I HAVE TO GET AN ABORTION. I CAN’T HAVE A BABY! I’M 62 YEARS OLD.”
I might get in trouble for saying this, but I laughed. Not at what she said but at the fact she said it, loud and clear and 21st century public.
Another time I stepped up to the pick-up window to get a package. Another person stood waiting for the post office clerk to open the
door. A very tall and basically enormous black man who, in 3 seconds of unsolicited commentary informed me that he was from Ghana and had not been allowed to get his mail for 7 months. He had waited at the package window for quite a while.
The door opened and he talked to the post office clerk. I don’t know what they said, but he was disappointed to have waited “over 42 minutes” at this window for nothing. The clerk told him he needed more paperwork.
He left the post office. I got my parcel from the pick-up window. I took a bus from there (the PO Box is in Rockefeller Center) to the upper east side of Manhattan. I ordered a gyro platter (no onions) at a diner on 1st Avenue and 79th Street. A moment after placing the order that very tall man from Ghana walked in to the diner and sat down. This diner is miles away from PO Box 181, NYC, 10185. It shocked me to see him there, but when he saw me he seemed to think nothing of it. He smiled and shouted “THEY NEED MORE PAPERWORK FOR ME TO GET MY MAIL!”
I sat at the counter, giving me a ludicrous feeling of importance simply because the seats at the counter are higher than the seats at the tables.
The strange doings of late at my PO Box started a few weeks ago when I paid the annual $48 fee. The post office still had the same information about me that I gave them in 1991. Florida drivers license, an NYC address from Washington Heights/Inwood, my emergency contact was my friend from college who in 1991 lived in Philadephia. It surprised me to discover that after 14 years this was what they had on me, but the post office moves slowly.
PO Box 181 is in the exact building where anthrax was discovered soon after 9/11, and I remember like yesterday going to get my mail the very day of the anthrax discovery to see the clerks wearing rubber gloves and surgical masks just to hand me a box of DVDs from Amazon.com.
It was strange to learn that I still had paperwork here connecting me to Florida, to Washington Heights, to things that sometimes seem like a
lifetime ago and other times seem like they sit here with me. I wonder if I live mostly in the now and simply move on to the next
adventure, or if I somehow let the paperwork from my PO Box leave me connected to Florida, to Washington Heights, to Philadelphia. And why do I value this PO Box?
Last summer the PO Box section of the post office was closed for asbestos abatement. For a few months PO Box holders had to get their mail from some
room behind some doorway of the concourse at Rockefeller Center. I remember it as somewhere between the mens room and the Rite-Aid.
During that time it was open source mail. Everyone with a PO Box at that center could expect to get everyone else’s mail. I learned the names of so many of my fellow PO Boxers. Commenting to the post office clerks about how you hadn’t received an important piece of mail earned laughter. “We’re still working out the kinks!”
I remember walking in to that strange room. Showing photo ID, I was handed the largest stack of mail I’ve ever seen. Hundreds of envelopes, lots of catalogues and crap, none of it addressed to me.
When the post office re-opened my box 181, my permanent address in New York, had been moved a few feet to the left. Today I walk in to that room expecting PO Box 181 to be where it used to be from 1991 to 2004. But it is a few feet moved over to the left. I can’t get used to it.
