Improvement, progress, obsolescence. Maybe some violence in annihilation and a little choice if the cause is disuse or elimination. The end result is the same. Whatever isn’t there or in active use any more. The change I’ve noticed has occurred one at a time for various reasons and now it needs to be noted, so you of a certain age can tell your progeny what we used to have. Tours can still take you to see drawings on cave walls to commemorate the buffalo hunts while Indian smoke signals disappeared about as soon as they were issued. The invention of paper stopped stone carving and enabled us to know information from Dead Sea Scrolls. We’ve moved into an electronic age of a paperless society – unless you print out for yourself. No more twice a day to your door mail service . I looked around and mail boxes I depended on to keep me from parking and going in a post office or to claim an earlier time for pickup are dwindling and in, some cases, gone to never return.
Just so you know, post boxes appeared in the 1850’s as small boxes attached to a lamppost. Mail at that time was just left on a doorstep, so this counted as an improvement. By 1890, the larger boxes were beginning to appear on various street corners. I had a memory surge when I saw one of these in front of an historical house in Portland, Maine. It was larger and more bulky and an army green color. I even had my picture taken as a childhood moment. In 1930, location was determined by the up and coming automobile. Placement supposedly made drop offs from a car possible, though you did at times need to cut the engine to lean over to roll down the car window. By 1971 our current ubiquitous blue boxes were in place with a pull down door instead of an open slot. A rite of passage in our family was for the able child to have the privilege of rolling down the window and carefully inserting the letter. A bad day had a look of dismay and the confession, “I dropped it. It was an accident.”
I haven’t done exhaustive research but of the seven boxes I used with regularity, five have disappeared. The first to go was with the movement of our Village Post office to a new location a mile away. Even though the box was on a concrete base, heavy rains came over the bottom half. I assume the weld didn’t hold and there were too many soggy notes. The box was wrapped in shrink wrap and eventually hauled off. Two others were moved to a closer location to the main doors of their post office. I heard that the problem that led to their vanishing was that the children of the night contaminated contents with everything from water to less mentionable choices. Two others boxes were across a parking lot where one could not really drive up to use. I am watching my remaining two with bated breath.
I had thought of taking a poll about your routine of communicating. Do you use snail mail at all? Do you have a box attached to your house or a series with locks and keys for an apartment? How often do you check and, next, how often do you respond? Are e-mails and texts as personal as you get? Have you lost the excitement a child has of a letter with your name on the front? Til the cataclysmic change comes, something will arrive from me following the Victorian saying of intense purpose: to share a story, to ask a favor, to affirm an action, to declare love, “I take pen in hand.” You are worth $.63 to me and even more.
See what large letters I use as I write to you with my own hand!
Galatians 6:11
Let Me Tell Ya 