Mail, 23 Apr 2013

My mail comes in a mailbox at the end of the driveway near the street. I really have no idea if mail gets delivered every day or a few times a week. I do know the mail-person will not pick up a letter from my mailbox - I had one sitting in there for about two weeks before I finally took it to a street side drop box in my neighborhood.

At any rate, my mailbox is basically a dark cement hole. The kind of place the Scotsmen I met in my first week here warned me not to stick my hand into because of the deadly spiders that live in Australia. I think about this on the odd occasion when there's mail in the box.


We're well into autumn; it's full dark here now by 6:30pm. So it was dark when I walked home from the gym the other night at 8pm. My street is fairly well lit - neighborhood style, not I-94 through Minneapolis style. Enough light to see where I'm going generally, but not enough to read by. As I walked up to the driveway, I remembered that I'd seen mail in the box when I arrived home from work. Since I was on my bike, I hadn't stopped to get it. Now, in the dark and heedless of the Scotsmens' warning, I stuck my hand in the box and grabbed the stack of mail.

Nothing bit me. 

But the stack seemed weirdly heavy on one side. Since my mail is typically at least 50% menus from restaurants, I thought maybe one of them had gotten clever and attached a magnet to their menu. I looked and there was a round thing on the corner of the menu... not exactly magnet shaped. Maybe a crab apple from the nearby tree had gotten into the mailbox? I touched the strange thing and - SLIMY. Ok, so either a rotten crab apple or something else entirely. I took the stack of mail over to the landscape light at the side of the driveway and... it was a snail. On the menu. So I brought him (or her?) in for a photo before I took him back out to the flowerbed. Snail mail! This is the exact spot on the menu where I found him - apparently snails don't read.

I was telling this story at work the other day during afternoon tea. I started with the Scotsmen and the spiders and my mailbox. As I carried on a bit more I got that sense that I have so often here that I am not conveying what I mean to convey. And in fact, I might be unwittingly committing some kind of social faux pax. So I paused. And someone piped up, "Do you mean a post box?" (Because mail here is "post" - which actually makes sense, if you think about it. You send post at the post office.)

"Yes. Yes, I do... I bet you guys were thinking the other kind of male when I said 'mail box.'"

General laughs from the group and nods of agreement. "OK, well, this story is not going to be as exciting as you may have thought."

FYI "snail post" is definitely not as funny a punch line as "snail mail" but the story still got a good laugh.