Postal Problems: David Loftus

As a childhood stamp collector who started out buying lots from the H.E. Harris Co., sent many envelopes to himself to amass First Day covers, bought portions of other people’s collections when they were ready to get rid of them, learned enough German to go to the collectors’ store in Hanau, Germany and say “Haben Sie Apollo briefmarken, bitte?”, and traded stamps by long-distance mail with an elderly collector in Estonia for a number of years even as a grownup (already more as an exercise in nostalgia more than anything else), I can’t help feeling a little regretful nostalgia about the changes the U.S. Postal Service has proposed. It’s going to be a bit harder on free-lancers, too, who often mailed their work and received their payments on Saturdays.

I’ve always thought it was somewhat miraculous that I could get a note to go almost anywhere in the country, door to door, in just a few days, by writing a minimal amount of information on the envelope. That is still not the case throughout much of the rest of the world, for one reason or another: not only is the service nonexistent in many places, but even in the “developed” West, too many letters and packages get waylaid and ripped off by immigrant labor. (Not a few of my missives to the Estonian collector never made it to him, probably because African, Eastern European, and Middle Eastern immigrants working in postal stations along the way found the fat packets too enticing, though they were probably disappointed by what they found inside.)

I can certainly understand the proposed changes, however, and will learn to live with them without much grumbling. We’re all to blame, to an extent. Of course people have pretty much stopped writing letters and sending obligatory thank-you notes, but I suspect those were never the bulk of the Post Office’s income. Since so much more business is transacted via the Web and email, and so many paychecks are “delivered” by direct deposit, the amount of paper mail has diminished precipitously. Given how much we buy and communicate instantaneously by fiberoptic carrier, we have no basis for complaint. (I wonder how many young folks out there are aware of the fact, however, that in centuries past, the mail within a great European city like Paris was delivered half a dozen times a day or more? You could carry on a pretty torrid epistolary affair under those conditions. Those were the days. . . .)