literature

The Postmaster General

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Literature Text

I find myself thinking about the Postmaster General.  When I was a kid, a young teenager, one of my many summer jobs was being a postman.  I was part of the small army of teenage recruits that helped the post office to cope with the inflated workload of Christmas mail.  Where I worked was just one of the small suburban post offices that used to dot the town.  I think it later became a suburban branch of a bank, if I remember correctly, which in turn became a shop of some sort, as services retreated from suburbia and became consolidated in larger centres.

We teenage postmen needed only one qualification for the job; we needed to own a bicycle.  We would arrive at the post office in the morning, to be handed leather satchels of letters that had been sorted by the Real Postmen at the crack of dawn.  The satchels would be strapped to the handlebars of your bike.  The Real Postmen were Men, in my teenage boy's eyes.  They joked, they teased each other, and they played cricket in the post office's car park.

I was paid by the hour.  This taught me something about the economy – the slower I rode my bike, the more I would get paid.  One day, as I was riding along the footpath with my satchel of mail as slowly as I could without falling over, I saw the Postmaster General walking along the street toward me.  He was a small old bird-like man, which I guess meant he could have been anything over the age of thirty, with black rimmed glasses.  I felt guilty to be seen by him delivering the mail so slowly, so I dropped letters into letterboxes with much vigour until the Postmaster General was out of sight, having only nodded in my direction but not said anything to me.

Was it the Postmaster General's idea to give the local kids some work over their holidays?  Was he performing a service to the community, or were we just cheap labour to help with the extra work?  What kind of man was he when he wasn't a Postmaster General?  I didn't ask myself these questions until many years had passed.

I also worked for the local milkman around the same time, back in the days when milk was delivered to your doorstep in bottles and a kid would come to your house once a week to collect the money for the milk.  I was that kid.  The first time I did my round collecting money and the milkman counted my takings, I was short of the required total.  The milkman informed me that the difference would have to come out of my pay.  It was fair enough, I thought, and was thankful that I was still paid some amount instead of me having to pay the milkman.  I also learned another lesson about life, collecting the milk money.  There are people in this world who cannot afford to pay for their milk, and can you please add it to next week's bill?  The one poor young woman who couldn't pay for her milk looked attractive to a young teenager, and I did harbour ideas about other ways she could pay.

Like the Postmaster General, was the milkman a saint looking after the local kids?  These memories are from over thirty years ago.  Most likely these two men are dead now, dead and buried, along with their parents and their wives.  And yet they live on in little pieces, little fragments scattered across the minds of many, like in these memories of mine. Where do we really exist?  We are not just discrete people, who stop at the edge of our skins; we are smeared across a shifting palette of many minds, in clumps and concentrations of varying size, that live on after our physical bodies wither and die.

And I honestly never read the back of any postcards.
Stock credits:

1. The man who told me at Christmas drinks that the real cost of online shoe shops is the loss of jobs for young people.

2. My next door neighbour who died last week at the age of 97.
© 2011 - 2024 WiseWanderer
Comments5
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DomiSM's avatar
I think that's all any of us can really hope for, to be remembered by someone, hopefully for doing something good during our lives. I think these two fellas would be smiling now, knowing you remember them, eventhough you didn't really know them :)
Very well written, as always :)