Raising The Red Flag

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Having found a good cedar post and a bag of cement in the shed, I sank a hole with a crowbar and a gardening trowel and then spent way too much time stenciling on my address with the neatness I assumed was owed the post office. Yet I was intensely proud of the finished product. It was like a piece of sculpture. I even got in the car and drove past it several times, pretending I was the world at large and noting with keen pleasure that someone in this benighted neck of the woods had erected a very fine mailbox, indeed. Look at that clean, straight lettering, would you?

I didn't sleep that night, excited by my mailbox's official debut the following morning as a fully qualified, functional element in the vast network of the United States Postal Service—an august institution, I now allowed with swelling patriotism. Like the christening of a ship or the swearing in of a new citizen, the debut would be auspicious, an event not to be taken lightly. Accordingly, I popped out of bed at dawn and stationed myself at an attic window. I could just glimpse the box with my old birding binoculars.

The hours slid by, uneventfully. No sign of the mail carrier. At noon I gave up constant surveillance, gearing down to a couple of observations each hour, but to no avail. At five, I put aside the binoculars and walked to the road. "Probably just no mail for me today," I told Arthur, my dog, who has despised mailmen since birth. Expecting the usual marathon, he looked disgusted when I stopped at the mailbox.

Good grief, there was mail. Somehow, I had missed the delivery. But something still wasn't right, I decided, even though it was my first true experience with rural delivery. For, on top of sneaking furtively by, the wretched carrier hadn't even raised the red flag on the side of my box, a signal readily visible from my perch in the attic. Just seeing it in the up position and knowing the box was radiating a state of genuine alert would have been enough, a palpable sign that it had been put to the test, had made it into the ranks. Instead, I had sat stewing in the house while the mail had sat brewing in the box—a container, alas, technically no longer virginal but in essence still unacknowledged, uncelebrated and unmarried, so to speak. So much for a memorable debut.

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