“If it takes the entire army and navy to deliver a postal card in Chicago, that card will be delivered.”
~ Grover Cleveland
I’m feeling nostalgic today. Oh for so many things but in particular? The postal service. One of those forever foundations of our lives that we could always depend on. Up until this very moment, no matter what, we always knew that, yes in rain, sleet or snow, our mail would magically arrive—slipped into the door slot, or the front yard mailbox, or wherever our address happened to be. The postal person (who oftentimes became part of our families and remembered always during the holidays with little gifts from us!) could be seen walking in every kind of weather carrying a huge backpack of letters and packages to be delivered throughout the neighborhoods. It was predictable. Comforting. Undeniable. It didn’t matter how small the postcard, or passionate the love letter, or mysterious the fat package, or longed-for correspondence, and yes, even the dreaded bills—they would each be hand-delivered almost always on time. Whether you mailed something yourself or eagerly awaited its arrival, this was all part of the come-and-go easy flow of America that used to be.
Like the sun in the morning and the moon at night, the mail simply just was. You never even thought that one day it wasn’t to be—that it would be stopped, removed, used as a political ploy to block a national election from happening.
I was one of the lucky ones. When I lost my home, my boys were alive, off to school and thriving. And though I was shell shocked at nearly age fifty, I was healthy. I sat on the floor of a teensy studio apartment the size of a postage stamp, surrounded by my six animals, light years away from my beautiful old home in the Hollywood Hills, I knew this was a Cosmic Test that I wanted to learn and pass—though I thought seriously of tossing it all in. But I couldn’t. I had to feed six animals that depended on me.