6 • THE BIRDS AND THE BEES
One of my favorite short stories is Eudora Welty’s “Why I Live at the P.O.”
It’s a dead- on comic satire of a certain spirit of family life, and it feeds my
private fantasy that I too might someday take up residence in the USPO.
If other people don’t share this ambition, they just haven’t been blessed as
I have. Latest in the line of my estimable mail associates was Postmistress
Anne, manager of all things postal in our little town—these things taking
place within a building about the size of a two- car garage. When we
moved, I rented one of their largest boxes for my writer mail, apologizing
in advance for the load of stuff I’d be causing them to handle. Anne and
her colleagues insisted the pleasure was all theirs. We’re lucky we still
have a P.O. in our little town, they explained. The government keeps track
of what’s moving through, and if the number is too low they’ll close the
branch. “I’ll bet you get lots of interesting things in the mail,” they sur-
mised.
I thought to myself: You have no idea.
So I turned over three pieces of ID to prove I was citizen enough to
rent a postal box in the Commonwealth of Virginia, and since then I have
wondered if they’ve ever had second thoughts. Such surprising gifts come
to me through the U.S. mail: a “Can- Jo” (rhymes with “banjo,” with a
body made from a Mountain Dew can) hand- crafted by a man who felt I
needed to have one. (So did, he felt, President Carter.) Class projects.
Paintings of imaginary people. More books than probably burned in the