A few years ago, when I was expecting the arrival of my first grandchild, I purchased a sheet of stamps and framed it for the baby’s room. I told my daughter-in-law that the gift served two purposes. It was decorative art for the baby’s room and in case of a postal emergency; she could just break the glass and use the stamps. We laughed at the time but I got a strange piece of mail in my box this week and it seems that “postal emergencies” are a thing.
I rarely go to the PO Box since the Covid-19 outbreak because I can only handle so much disappointment in one week. (That’s sarcasm by the way.) I have held off invoicing for my business for two months since no one was working and I didn’t want to hit them with an invoice on top of it. So mail in my business PO Box has been sparse to non-existent. And on one exciting trip to the box, I realized the mail inside wasn’t even for me. Each time I open the box and it’s empty, I’m tempted to stick my face up to it and shout, “HELLO! Is anyone in there?” but I’m afraid to scare the mail lady.
So imagine my delight when I pulled out this envelope from a client and saw all the vintage stamps on it. I laughed as I pondered whether my client, a moving company, had experienced a postal emergency and where exactly they found these Christmas stamps from 1963. I came up with two scenarios.
I wondered if my client had grown children who had once had stamp collections and like many of our children, left all that stuff at home when they moved out. I could just picture my client tossing out the stuff years later and running across the books of stamps and thinking, “There might be a postal emergency some day and I could use these.”
My second scenario was that as a mover, he went and picked up someone’s belongings and when he got to the destination to deliver their stuff, he found that they had given him a bogus address and it was all a ruse to get a mover to clean out a house for someone. (Not that I’m giving anyone any ideas, but I think this might actually work!) I pictured him sorting through the boxes and running across a stamp collection. Granted, I could call my client and ask, but the explanation could be boring, and I was way too entertained coming up with stories on my own.
When we moved to rural Iowa, my parents told me that it was important to stock up on supplies in case of an emergency and we couldn’t get to town. I took them at their word and always have enough food and supplies to outlast a zombie apocalypse. I wasn’t even aware that there was a toilet paper shortage until I saw it on the news. After seeing the news report, I went and checked my supply and sure enough, we have plenty. We also have plenty of paper towels and Ziploc bags in case you are wondering. We did however run out of some condiments and I had to dig through the packaged condiments (that come from fast food restaurants and I’m too frugal to toss in the trash). McDonald’s salsa got me through a difficult time. Gene looked at the stack next to his plate and said, “What has the world come to?”