Bloggy Blog #52

  The landlord rang our doorbell with some good news. He's a friendly guy. Older, somewhat of a handyman - I guess you have to be to own a rental property - and looking to sell the complex to so far no buyers. He's partners with another fellow owning the place, but that guy relocated to Florida, so now he's stuck doing all the maintenance and presently speaking to me about how our mailbox was full.  He had a new key made, and was here to deliver it in person.

It's full because at some point, I decided to take the lone mailbox key off of my key ring and place it elsewhere. This wouldn't be a terrible thing had I not traveled to New York in the process. It could be hundreds of miles away, or right under my nose. I endured a valiant search for it, but it was of no use. 

Losing the key was a little frustrating.  This is due to the fact I simply do not lose keys. Unless you want to count the time I locked them in my car with the engine running. Not sure how that even came about. Technically, I still knew where the keys were then - just not where they should have been at the time. I was in a school parking lot when this happened, a place I could have very likely summoned campus safety over to fix the issue. Instead, I took it upon myself to smash a small partitioned corner window that allowed me access to the backseat. Crawled my way through to the front, and cut the engine. This was my MacGyver moment - a quick resolution to a tad bigger problem – only my father didn’t seem to think so. When I came home he was pretty upset I broke the glass instead of just calling him, where he could have brought me the spare keys. I suppose he had a point there.

During my time living in New York City, I always made it a point to get my own post office box. There was something about affixing my name to an address of New York, NY that gave me a sense of pride. The first post office box was located on the upper west side of Manhattan, around 92nd Street. I was living in Harlem at the time, so it gave me an excuse to get out of the apartment and hop a train some forty blocks. I rented the box for a full year, forking over the required thirty-six dollar fee for such. I decided to get a new box after I moved to the Hell’s Kitchen area, specifically at a post office on 54^th Street.  For both boxes, I received a pair of keys. I never lost them, nor separated them. I kept the spare on my ring, not because I was too lazy to remove it, but because I knew I wasn’t going to lose my key ring. Especially not in New York City. 

I’ve always been a fan of stand-alone mailboxes, those with the classic barn shape style that sit curbside in front of homes. Unfortunately, I never grew up with a mailbox like that. With our property resting on a sort of plateau, it made those mailboxes rather unaccommodating - not to mention no one else in our neighborhood had one. Instead - and probably expected - our mailbox was attached to the house, an easy arm’s reach from our front door. This allowed my father to get back to his brief military roots as a mail clerk and strike up friendships with our postal carriers. Like my New York City post office boxes, this interaction surely gave him a sense of ownership and pride. Today, my parent’s mailbox sits in the lobby of their apartment building, a short walk around the corner from their main door. The key to this mailbox doesn’t sit on anyone’s ring, but rather a small hook hanging in the kitchen. Similar, our misplaced key also had a home in the kitchen, right on the inside windowsill. That was until I came to the conclusion that was a very stupid place to just leave such an important key, wherein I tossed it onto my key ring and the rest is history.

I remember reading a story a short time ago about a postal carrier charged with keeping over twenty thousand pieces of mail from his customers. The story detailed the pieces of mail he kept, from personal letters, to government checks, to small parcel packages to name a few. And while those three are some pretty big things one can receive in the mail, the rest of the list wasn’t especially critical. In fact, it read mostly as a list of things nobody cares about. While this guy was likely fired from his position and later prosecuted, you have to wonder if he was actually doing the residents along his route a huge favor. Shortly after receiving our new mailbox key, I went downstairs to try it out and gather the mail. What was stuffed inside the box was a month’s worth of coupon flyers, ads, non-profit mailings, notices addressed to prior tenants, community newsletters and a few small reply-by-mail cards addressed to “our friendly neighbors at ____.” A few of our own bills too, of which we pay for and monitor online, so sending us a paper copy is, well, you get the idea.

I can’t imagine my father going days without checking the mail. It’s just not something programmed into his genetic makeup. Perhaps, though, they do not receive as much junk mail as I do here, or others around the country, grown tired of their boxes filling up with useless garbage. My post office boxes in the city were filled with it, to the point I stopped checking them daily. Something myself and others took joy in getting keys for and claiming ownership of, is now inundated with mostly nonsense. Makes me wonder if I deliberately lost that key to begin with, a key unlocking a gateway to mostly nothing. And with our landlord telling us our mailbox was full – it’s full of something, alright.