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Il Postino

Duff Allen

Being the postman is not such a bad thing. Besides, I get to know about the marginalia in people’s lives, as well as the opportunity to dress funny and nobody laughs at it. Nobody dislikes me, and some even have a little fear of me, as if I cared. I do care about the twenty or so dollars that are slipped my way in December, around the holidays, as imaginary hush money for a Level 6 employee who’s pretty well set for life, on the whole. The perks I think are unrealized: only by crossing the front steps of an entire neighborhood’s system of houses does one get to know a community proper. So many households, even in a fairly well-to-do section of a town, have crumbling mortar; the neglect of domestic care screams like bacon sizzling and burning in a pan on Sunday, the one day I do not ever deliver. And the whole Oedipal fear-of-the-messenger syndrome as the persona non grata, who is so unctuously inappropriate, is so deeply embedded in people’s unconscious skulls, I do not even have to blow my dog whistle that dangles in chrome around a slip-chain hanging loosely from my neck beneath my undershirt, or, hardly ever. But when I do, even the squirrels scatter. Even the hands that care leave me. Otherwise, my work is as regular as a Swiss-made clock. “Good morning, Jack,” Mrs. Fieldstone says. “Good morning, Mrs. Fieldstone!” And this atavistic reply which we all pine for, to be addressed by our surnames by one who is beneath us, is so refreshing, even if it is so much a dissimulation, that neither party is bothered and both are rewarded. Oh, I watch it from askance, and from afar. The old, pin-eyed men fucking young wives. The gay boys playing by the curbside becoming young gay men in secret. The high school girls with their rolling eyeballs, bouncing off the school bus, half-ashamed, as they descend the three steps down to the road, they ever rode one. The post-menopausal ladies who are alternately vicious or polite to me when I deliver more worthless circulars or their benefits, respectively. The happy, middle-aged bachelors when they get their semi-annual gun brochures raising their eyebrows when our paths cross. All of this comes to light slipping into mail-slots sixteen square blocks of L.L. Bean catalogs, or Jury Duty notices, or Department of Motor Vehicle Registration forms, or even a handwritten note with a handwritten address to an innocent little boy from a grandmother, return-addressed to Kentucky, once a year at the same time, presumably with a little money for his birthday, before she has died. Being a postman is not such a bad thing. And most of the people’s ever crumbling lives I stumble upon ever so briefly, day after day, season after season, barely know a thing more about me other than my name is Jack and I frequently wear blue shorts.

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