BPO, DPO, APO (Before, During, After Post Office)

Every day, the thought of writing something to you stiches my mind like an unseen yellowjacket catching me on the arm when I least expect it. The sting hurts. After a minute or so, the affected area swells—just like a real yellowjacket attack–and becomes a preoccupation. I wander along, slipping letters, magazines, and catalogues into mailboxes. Like an ancient insect’s ovipositor, my satchel opens to deposit packages on porches and stoops. Every delivery exacerbates the condition. Preoccupation becomes obsession.

An obsession to tell a story is not something easy for this mailman to carry around. In part, this stems from the fact that the story is merely an unfinished and incomplete idea. The letter carrier constantly has his/her/their head in the mail. There is no time to shape an idea into a story. The next address forces any details out of my head. There’s a satchel full of packages, all of which have addresses that float around in the head like schoolchildren waiting in the lunch line. Forgetting one necessitates backtracking. And in a job reckoned in minutes and seconds, going backward represents sheer frustration, not to mention a supervisor’s derision.

So, the idea for an essay for you gets started and never matures. Mile after mile, I try to carry a metanarrative, something that exists above the hubbub of addresses and packages, above the terrain and the necessity to watch every step to avoid a fall—the kind of which has put me out of commission twice since I started at the Post Office, one time under the knife and out of work for four months—above the fleeting conversations that happen all along the route. Invariably, the metanarrative gets modifications, mental notes, and occasional visualizations. But, like the idea itself, it goes nowhere. At the end of the day, it’s just a dried-up fish on the end of a crude hook attached to frayed twine.

Them, when I arrive back at the office, I unload my truck. The next five minutes are busy. If I’ve brought mail back, I have to arrange it in a way that another carrier can get out and complete the job I couldn’t. (Only once in the last year has management arranged another carrier due to their labor shortage.) I sort the mail that’s come back from the addresses I’ve delivered—mis-sorts, forwards, and letters with bad addresses. I gather it all up, stack it in trays and tubs, and roll it to the elevator. Once there, there’re cut slips for the mail I didn’t deliver. I throw the returned mail into the proper trays for the clerks to deal with later. I return the “arrow key,” the special key we use for multiple-box units and those blue collection boxes, and the truck key. I drop vacation holds at my case and arrange it for work the next day. When all that’s accomplished, I clock out.

It’s then, as I’m walking out of the building, that I realize that idea I’ve been carrying with me all day has become a desiccated leaf fallen to the forest floor. I’m spent. Fourteen miles does that to me. The mental part of the job, akin to a factory worker’s assembly-line job, has drained me. My head is empty as a soap bubble.

I call it The Death of a Writer. He/She/They don’t expire. But their ability to fulfill their dreams, express an illimitable and compulsive need, to do what they were born to do has been strangled. I think about it every day when I finally settle into my chair. My knees hurt. My lower back is tight and painful. My feet feel beaten to pulp. I look at the computer. If I was any kind of writer at all, I tell myself derisively, I’d pick up that computer and be a writer. Be the person I was always meant to be. Do what I’ve always done—at least until I started at the Post Office.

But I’m empty and dry as the Atacama. That great idea I thought about all day was just a mirage. Deserts the world around are littered with broken and skeletal remains of good intent.

I know a carrier who writes every day. He works in Colorado. I like his work. I have critiques of it, my own affinities and repulsions. But I can’t say anything about his work, so long as it doesn’t breech my hatred of authoritarianism, paternity, and social hierarchy. Even then, I have to say this about him: He’s writing every day. He’s a writer.

Right now, I feel like I was a writer. Since my first published poem in 1991, I have authored many essays, books, articles, literary and scholarly reviews, and social critiques, but I’m not doing it now. As I said, I feel dried up after what the Post Office does to me. I sulk in my sorrows and have lost, for the moment, a way to figure out my path through the joys and vagaries of this mortal existence. Writing always provides that for me and writing, for now, is out of my reach.

By necessity, almost all writers work jobs. Melville was a customs officer. George Bernard Shaw demonstrated how telephones worked, like department-store cooks of my childhood. Stevens, the poet, was an insurance salesman, rising to become CEO of The Hartford. Harper Lee collected airplane-passenger tickets. Toni Morrison edited textbooks. A number of major and minor American writers were letter carriers and postal workers: William Faulkner, Charles Bukowski, and Benjamin Franklin, for instance. Franklin, of course, was personally responsible for the company I work for. Faulkner drank and goofed off, something nigh impossible at today’s Postal Service. Bukowski established his career on his experience at the Post Office.

I keep my hopes up. My minimal retirement—that might pay for part of an electric bill—starts in a couple of years. I still have teaching, which, with reading, keeps my mind lively. Maybe, just maybe, I can produce some work in my dotage that allows me to make up for time lost to the job.

Right now, I’m living in the era of During Post Office. I hold little dear about Before Post Office, except the memories of stories and poems spun on the loom of “time enough to create.” I hope After Post Office will treat me well.