In The Post Office At Christmas Time

The post office is a crowded long wait in line nightmare at Christmas time at the best of times, but wow, imagine it during the renewed Coved fears.  I had run out of stamps and since I like to get sheets of commemorative stamps instead of generic stamps like I could get at the grocery story, I had to go to the post office.  Also, I had Christmas cards to mail, so mailing them directly at the post office seemed like there would be a better chance of getting them to their destination in time for Christmas.  

 

The first thing I saw when I went inside were two long lines, one headed toward the business end of the post office and the other headed toward the mail drop/package bin and next to it the self-service machine.  But the mail drop/package bin had a notice across it saying “Out of Order”, which was causing consternation for those who had planned on simply dropping in their packages.  So essentially that was a line for the self-service machine.

 

Not being able to mail my Christmas cards at the mail drop, I would be handing them to the person who would sell me the stamps, I now wanted to get into the other line.

 

I almost needed binoculars in order to see the end of the line.  It went all the way down to the farthest end of the post office way past the long rows of P.O. boxes.  This was because of the rule of keeping your distance from others, six feet apart.  I realized that it probably wasn’t any more crowded than normal (for Christmas), it just looked like it, because people in the line had to be so spread apart.  It was a peculiar “psy-op” in that it looked impossible and it was that visual impression that demoralized the people. That and having to wear the masks, of course, which means lining up in an impossible situation surrounded by unhappy people whose faces you can’t fully see and therefore emotionally “read”, coupled with a sense held by some that everyone else in there was a carrier of contagion.  Because of all of this, it felt to me like we were cattle in a line for slaughter.

 

Knowing that this was going to take some time, I settled into observing all that was going on around me. I watched people come into the front door and then look up and down the two long lines and realize what they were in for.  Many of them couldn’t grasp that whichever of the lines they wanted was really that far down (I swear, it was like being at the DMV), as if their vision simply didn’t extend that far.  So they would step into the line between two people social distancing not too far from the entrance door that was in actuality in the front 1/3 of the line. Of course they would be told, “The line is down there” and they were forced to look way down to where the ends of the lines really were.  They would stand there helpless for a while, as if pondering whether they could actually manage remaining where they had butted in (can you fight a person whose face you can't fully see?), or was it even worth staying in the post office at that time.  But soon enough social pressure squeezed them out and they crept on down to the end of line.

 

Every once in a while it would be an extremely elderly person who would come in and perform that “getting into the line too far forward” and when it began to happen to me, a wave of guilt washed over me, wondering if maybe I had a social duty to let them take my place in line while I went all the way down to the end of the line. It didn’t seem to me that these people could stand very long and therefore needed the courtesy of being allowed to butt in, somewhat like giving your seat to an elderly person on a crowded bus (and in Los Angeles, EVERY bus is crowded, which means that no man ever gets to sit), but as this was a “new” morality that I hadn’t so far evaluated, and due to the masks we all were less human anyway, I just stood my ground and defended my place in line.  And anyway, periodically giving up my place in line every time an elderly person came in meant that I would never be able to complete my task.

 

Who I most felt sorry for were the people who came in carrying arms full of packages they wanted to mail.  There was quite a lot of that and I figured that normally those packages would have been gifts that they would have brought to the recipients in person, but now that “Christmas was cancelled” and people were forbidden to have Christmas guests, they had to mail the gifts, instead.

 

One of those burdened with packages was the woman in front of me, who seemed to periodically accost me with evil eyes peering over the top of her mask to make sure that I kept my distance from her as by this time waves of people kept flowing between us since we were now at the level of the entrance door.  It was very tiresome for me to have to constantly jockey my position to accommodate the stream of people coming in the door, attempting to butt in front of me, and keep an acceptable distance from the package-laden women in front of me.

 

But who had it worse was an elderly man waiting in the self-service line holding too many small packages.  Finally his arms gave out and he dropped the whole load onto the floor.  As he was close to me, I felt that I should help him pick them all up, but I imagined him being horrified by my attempt to help, “Don’t you TOUCH these, don’t you know there is a pandemic going on!”, but he solved the problem for me by just leaving them on the floor and shuffling them forward with his feet.

 

This led my awareness to the area of the self-serve machine and I saw strangers helping other strangers figure out how to work it. That was nice.  And then somebody realized that the sign indicating that the mail drop/package bin was out of order only applied to the package bin, not the mail drop.  So he took it upon himself to re-adjust the sign so that it was clear that it applied only to the package bin.  That alone cause five or six people to get out of line, mail their letters, and then leave the post office.  Things were now easing up.

 

Later, a man inside the business end of the post office finished his transaction and as he was walking out, he saw the elderly man shuffling his numerous packages on the floor. He came up to him and pointed out a large cloth bin that was near the counter where he had been.  He said, “If you have already put postage on your packages, all you need to do is put them into that bin.”  Sure enough, the elderly man had already put postage on his packages, so he hadn’t needed to be in the line for the self-service machine. He thanked the man, shuffled the packages to the cloth bin, put in his packages, and then left!

 

By now, the woman in front of me felt that we were close enough to the business end of the post office so she stepped ahead and put her packages on the counter that separated the line of people from the post office windows.  From then on, when she got back up there, she would just need to keep pushing the packages down the counter until it was her turn to go to one of the windows.  When she came back to her place in line in front of me, I said, “That was smart!  I had been worried about you holding those heavy packages so long.”

 

She said, “They weren’t really very heavy, but they were awkward.”

 

I said, “Yeah, they were tiring to your arms,” and she nodded “that they were.”

 

Ultimately we got up to the head of the line, and then it was my turn.  They had on display numerous commemorative stamps and I said to the post office woman, “I don’t want to take up your time, but which of these do you have on hand.”  I knew from experience that they wouldn’t have all of them and with all these people waiting on line, I didn’t want to take a lot of time selecting my stamps.

 

She pointed to the most colorful one and said, “We have ‘Bugs Bunny’”.  I said, “That would be great, let me have a sheet of that one, please.”  They were very cute and funny stamps, enough to brighten ones day with a laugh.  I paid for them and then showed her the envelopes and said, “Can I give these to you or should I put them into the mail slot?”, referring to the one that we all thought had been out of order but which the helpful man revealed it wasn’t.  She said, “Oh, that’s okay, give them to me.”

 

I was then complete and as I walked out of the post office, I said to a person who had just come in, “The line moves faster than it looks.”

 

Outside on the parking lot, the woman who had been in front of me in line had her mask off and was backing her car out of its parking space.  She saw me, gave me a big smile and a wave.  I peeled off my mask, waved back at her, and gave her a hearty “Have a Merry Christmas!”

The Children Are The First To Crack

I have lived in this huge apartment/condo complex for around ten years now and this is the first time the management has ever sent out an alert regarding vandalism from the children who live here.  The notice said that children have damaged the plants and beautiful landscaping that was put in last month, and they have been getting into the laundry and damaging the washing machines and dryers.  Also, they have been playing around the cars in the parking garages and in the driveways, which has long been forbidden.  The management has now threated to evict any family whose children damage property.

 

This complex has a large swimming pool, a kiddie wading pool, an indoor basketball court, a gymnasium, a billiards room, a party room, several outdoor grills and picnic tables where people have parties and birthday parties, and lots of grass to play on. In the summers, the management provides a free camp for young children involving games, crafts, sport tournaments, and other activities.

 

But ever since the first lockdown in mid march, due to Coved all these facilities have been closed. The quad is really a ghost town most of the day.  I hardly ever see an adult at all.  I do see children after 3:00 when “home schooling” ends for the day, but it is hard for them to find places to play, thus they are in the garages and I guess in the planters, and so on.  Also, I am certain their parents are under various stresses and that affects children as well.

 

This year there was no summer, no beach, no family summer trip, no birthday parties, no Halloween, no Thanksgiving, and now the biggest of all, the “cancelling of Christmas” to whatever extreme that really means.  I’ve been getting in the mail gift catalogues featuring photos of beaming children on Christmas morning getting the toys that wanted, and adults, too, photos of a happy Dad with his new golf driver or a smiling Mom with something beautiful for the home or to wear.

 

Children thrive on ritual…and adults, too.  When I think over my own childhood, there were dozens of things we had to have each year or something was wrong.  Here are just a few examples.

 

For my birthdays, my mother would take us and my friends to a local amusement park.  It was like our own tiny Disneyland and we never got tired of it.  My two sisters and brother had summer birthdays, so their parties involved diving for pennies in the swimming pool and having barbecues outside by the pool

 

Always every summer the family go out into the woods for a picnic, and weekly our mother would take us to the beach at Santa Cruz to play in the waves.

 

If we took a driving trip across country to visit our relatives in North Carolina, we loved it whenever there was a “bumpy ride” where the highway went way up and down, Dad would drive faster than normal because the thrill ride made us all scream and laugh.  Our parents would stop at every “see the hila monster” or “rattlesnake”, whatever junk attraction there was in some small town off the road.  When it was very hot, there was always that obligatory stop at Dairy Queen.

 

At least once every month, the family would go to the drive-in movie and we would wear our pajamas.

 

On Thanksgiving, each one of us had to have one of those turkey candles at our place setting and loved to see whose turkey would remain burning the longest (you know some of those were fickle birds!).  That was always a heated contest, even our father got in on it, to the extent that one Thanksgiving, my brother’s and or father’s candle was still burning after we finished our meal, so we kept it burning on the dining room table while we went into the family room to watch the annual “Wizard of Oz” on television. When it was time to get dessert, Mom saw that the dining room table was on fire due to those turkey candles that had gone on the loose!  We have no idea who won that contest that year, but the dining room table wore its newly-created tattoo for the rest of its useful life.

 

Speaking of fire hazards, every Fourth of July Mom and Dad would get us a huge “block party” fireworks kit and Dad would put up on the tennis court a complex of ladders for attaching various spinning fireworks to and we had the neighbors and friends come over for the festivities and we all would all have hot cider and hot dogs.  Mom armed us all with numerous sparklers that we loved to toss far up in the air.  Apparently one Fourth of July somebody’s sparker ended up buried in the tanbark that was all over the ground near there and there it continued to smolder for years!  Mom kept a garden hose dripping in the vicinity of that slow burn, which would slowly migrate across the landscape, but never actually burned out.  She said that for sure she was on some fireman’s “bad list”, since the Fourth of July block parties and throwing the sparklers up in the air never abated. 

 

Christmas of course had its own long list of must-does.  For example, we had to have an advent calendar, the Christmas count-down had to begin.  Naturally we all were involved in decorating the Christmas tree (some years we had more than one in the house) and Mom had to decorate everything in a Christmas theme—pillows on the couches that she had made and towels in the bathrooms and Christmas themed plates and drinking glasses and things hanging on every doorknob and Christmas lights all around outside.  Christmas music played all day throughout the house and also outside. Of course we had to get in the car and go all over everywhere (Atherton where we lived, and Menlo Park, and Palo Alto) to see the Christmas lights.  We read all the dozens of Christmas cards that our parents would get from friends from all around the country; we children new who all those people were.  When Christmas was over, we read all the Christmas cards again and then had the ritual of burning them in the fire place one at a time (sending all those good wishes up into the ethers).  We had fire burning in all the fire places in the house, which means in the living room, the bar, the kitchen, the family room, our parents’ room, and outside by the pool.  What’s Christmas without a fire in a fireplace in almost every room?

 

We children would spend hours lying on the floor by the Christmas tree and would look at the gorgeously wrapped presents that were there and if it had our name on it, we tried to guess what it was.  These were presents from Mom and Dad and each other, as well as gifts from our friends and friends of our parents and certain relatives.  

 

Christmas Eve, we kids were just too wound up to stand it, so Mom dropped us off at a movie theater and every year we would marvel how it was light when we went into the theater and dark when we came back out after the movie.  Then the family ate dinner at a restaurant called “Gale’s” in Menlo Park, which, sadly, no longer exists.  It always had to be Gales for Christmas eve dinner, just because.

 

We children were allowed to open just ONE present before going to bed that night, and it had to be from one of the siblings. Obviously the presents from Santa Clause would arrive sometime in the night.  Dad would get up on the roof and stomp around and say “Ho Ho Ho, Merry Christmas!” (we figured out who it had been years later).  That was magical for me even when I was old enough to learn the “truth” about Santa Clause, because I believed and still do.

 

We made a big deal of leaving cookies and milk for Santa.  When Mom got into health food, Santa got “Tiger’s milk”, because he needed to have strength for his mission of giving toys to all the boys and girls. (P.S. In our family, it wasn’t “good children” and “bad children”—all Children deserved love from Santa Clause.) And every Christmas morning we made sure that Santa had left us a thank-note for the delicious cookies and the empowering Tiger’s Milk.

 

I think back on these things, and so much more, and appreciate how glorious and powerful our childhood was, and how our rituals wove together the whole family and actually the whole culture.  And Christmas was especially powerful, so that its power lasted within far into my adulthood. I think it remained in our mother’s heart all her life.  Fortunately, we all were mostly able to get together every year, even though there had been a lot of moving about so that no longer were we children living near each other, or near our parents.  But we would drive, fly, or take a train to be together whenever possible, which was most of the time.

 

Ritual keeps you whole, moral, caring, and always getting wiser.  Messing with this is destructive.  And I think when cherished rituals are messed with, it is the children who are the first to crack.  It is like the rug is pulled out from under them, quickly or slowly, and they no longer feel secure about where they are anymore.  And absolutely they need to play.  That is really their main job and requirement, playing, and what I say about toys is that toys are a child’s tools.  They need those in order to accomplish and to grow up.

 

Everybody must be aware of not letting precious rituals slip away.  And when the children crack, you will be next, and somewhere before that is the time to say “enough”.  Do not let whom you were get taken over, but proudly grab onto it will all your might.  You are the sovereign.