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ARLINGTON, TX Mailboxes
"There was no possibility of going for a walk that day," begins Jane Eyre. She would really have hated living in Arlington, Texas. There is no possibility of going for a walk on any day around here. A city kid determined to resist my suburban environment, I walk anyway. I am the strangest of sights. People gawk at me: a man, on the street, but not in a car. There are only two reasons for being on your legs here: jogging, or walking dogs. One day when I was doing neither, a man pulled over, rolled down his window, and asked, "Do you need any help?" A pregnant question. But as it seemed unlikely that he was my lucky angel, I simply said, "No thanks." Walking in a place not designed for it puts you in touch with things no one intended you to see. Walking the sidewalks of Arlington is like traveling the roofs of a real city. You sample a strange alternative point of view. Like Italo Calvino's Marcovaldo following cats through their weird parallel city of alleyways, I see a city no one else knows, just by putting my feet on the foot-paths nobody uses. You know how it is with American suburbs. They are "bedroom communities," full of houses and not much more, their gathering places stowed away in strip malls. Since no-one walks, no-one uses their front door, and since no-one uses their front door, the front doors are lost in disheveled shrubbery. The way into a house is up the driveway, round the back, through the garage doors that open up, swallow a Buick, and close again like the pod bay doors in 2001. It is almost 2001. Like John Prine said, we are living in the future. The mail carriers don't walk either. They come around in a little truncated bus like an ice-cream truck, driving in the wrong front seat. They pop the mail into the rural letter boxes that are strung neatly along the sidewalks. The longest walk people ever take is the ten yards from their garage to the mailbox. They gather up the AOL diskettes, close the box with a sigh, and disappear into their garage again. I imagine that federal law requires us to have rural letter boxes. It would be too great an imposition to expect the letter carrier to walk to the door. But no-one ever tells you that. It is an unspoken tradition. If the box isn't there, you don't get your mail. The old saw about rain and snow and dark of night has been amended to exclude houses where no rural letter box has been erected that meets acceptable postal service standards for height and distance from the road. I know this because, last spring, my son opened our mailbox and suddenly the whole thing fell over into his arms: box, post, mail, and an enormous jessamine bush that had wound about the rusted spot where the post met the soil and pinched the whole contraption off its moorings. I looked at him holding the thing helplessly. "I'm sorry," he said faintly. When you are seven you think that every broken thing is your fault. It wasn't his fault. But the box was lying on its side on the ground. We got no mail until we put up a new one. We selected a cedar post and a sheetmetal box with cedar slats wrapped around it, the product of some mill in Mississippi that vaunted its special "E-Z Up System." In the event, the E-Z Up System meant hammering twelvepenny nails into solid cedar blocks with a rubber mallet, in June, in Texas, for two hours. Somehow my wife and I did this. She even managed to stake the murderous jessamine around the new post, the better to preserve a family of anole lizards who live there. For a day or two, it looked beautiful. It looked like the photograph on the carton till the first rain, when it began its rapid fade toward featureless cedar brown, and the decorative slats began to warp and splay. We went through this ordeal in the cause of getting little slips of paper that say Have You Seen Me? with infant pictures of children missing since 1982 to our address. With the fanaticism of the specialty consumer, I began to look at everyone else's mailbox on my walks. Were they as nice as mine? Did they have the E-Z Up construction? How did the neighbors manage to attach those foot-thick oblong cedar braces with the provided "Self-Tapping Wood Screws"? I certainly hadn't been able to do that. Mailboxes were worth another look. There are two kinds of mailbox: the ugly, and the hideous. Ugly mailboxes consist of a rounded steel box mounted on a plain length of pipe. Hideous mailboxes try to look like they are not mailboxes. Or rather, they try to look like mailboxes that are attractively shaped unlike mailboxes. No one wants to camouflage a mailbox so well that they hide its purpose completely. In this respect, mailboxes are like lamps. You know the lamps that purport to be coffee grinders, clocks, Chevrolets, Elvises, objets d'art, cigar boxes, stumps of petrified wood . . . each one with a lightbulb coming brazenly out of the top of it. So it is with hideous mailboxes. They flaunt their obvious disguise of their own obviousness. As I walk the pseudo-organic curving "Drives" and "Lanes" of my subdivision, the hideous boxes are the most diverting ones. Looking at them I feel a child's joy in mimesis. There are boxes that look like barns, boxes that look like funerary urns. Many have representations of animals perched on them: dogs, running horses, birds. These animals tell the world that here is an oasis from the ugliness all round. Every now and then, we have a little run of whimsy. One box is painted with spots and has a Dalmatian head. Its neighbor is painted in brown blotches and has a bulldog head. Then the wave of canine simulacra spends its fury, and we go back to function for a while. But a few houses down, a box sports a nesting pair of brightly painted wooden cardinals. Another little space of functionality is reclaimed for Beauty. Hideous, all the same. Hideous boxes fight the battle of decoration against function. When you come right down to it, a mailbox is as close to pure function as it gets. You want it to be a box, and you want to get mail in it. It doesn't strictly require anything more than that. A plain container will do. But there is something in the suburban mind that militates against unadorned function. We have too much of that anyway. Sadly for Beauty, both hideous and ugly mailboxes tend to be decrepit, even when a house is "on the market." Here in Arlington people are always testing the market. There are houses for sale on every street. But nobody gives a damn about the appearance of their mailbox. When a house "goes on," the St. Augustine grass is cropped, the crepe myrtles are nicely leggy, the windows are washed -- all the things that you never see to when you intend to keep living somewhere. The mailbox, though, can be rusted, dirty, askew. No one notices, except me and the letter carrier. The saddest derelicts, among mailboxes as among people, are the ones that started out so well. On every street there's one box that was once the nearest treasure of its owner's heart, but has fallen into neglect. "The O'Neill's," it says, as if it were the personal box of the great Ulster chieftain. There is a design handpainted on the box: birds twined into a wreath of flowers, or a gaudy pineapple. But everything about it looks weatherbeaten. The effort of extending the good cheer of the household as far as the curb has been too much to maintain. It is hard to suppress sighs of pity and terror when walking past these ruined icons of domesticity. Afraid of such decrepitude, people forgo the effort and settle for an ugly functional box. The evolution of the ugly mailbox toward its customary design is another unwritten epic of suburban life. A length of steel pipe supports a black metal box with a red flag, a hinged door, and a rounded top. Is its commonness the product of social convention, or organic necessity, or some invisible-hand convergence of the two forces? The pipe, a cylinder, that strongest of geometric forms, supports the weight of box and mail alike. The flag is red, for greatest contrast against the black of the box, giving the letter carrier that extra cognitive edge when she comes sweeping down the Drive in her little bus. The top is rounded because we live in an atmosphere full of water, and water cannot pool in and rust through a round box top. Every once in a while, though, there's a box that swims upstream against the current of custom. These are the boxes with flat tops. Sure enough, many of these flat tops are rusted through. What must their owners be thinking? They ignore the trial and error that have gone into centuries of mailbox design. Here we have mailbox modernism. Just as modernists decided that long-evolved traditions of straightforward narration, visual perspective, and musical harmony were stultifying, these mailboxes propose that the old roundtop mailbox crushes us with the dead hand of convention. We even have boxes that look just like the shiny aluminum lockboxes that stand outside of apartment complexes. What can they mean? Perhaps these are first-time homebuyers clinging to a suggestion of apartment-block security. None of this faux-rustic stuff for them. If the flat-topped box is modernist, then the shiny aluminum rectangle is postmodern. It poses a pretend bit of shiny vacant suburbia against the pretension of rural gentility that makes up the mass of dull vacant suburbia. By now, you are getting a bit fed up with these styles of mailbox. I don't blame you. Rural mailboxes are indefinably annoying. They are so out front, so in-your-face. If you are walking, they appropriate the sidewalk. If you are driving, they lean out onto the road. You want to smash their ugly mugs. That's why one of the principal recreations of the Dallas/ Fort Worth Metroplex is smashing mailboxes. For a few years, we lived on a long straight road in North Dallas. North Dallas is one of the wealthiest neighborhoods on the planet. The corner store is Neiman-Marcus. But it is Texas, so it contains inexplicable pockets of prairie. People graze horses in their yards. The folks across from us had a big red barn out back. The whole place was like Green Acres. Here, the mailboxes really were rural, strung along a straight lane of blacktop with no sidewalk to bound it. The straightness of the road meant that you could drive along with someone hanging out your passenger window waving a baseball bat, and smash each mailbox in turn. Well, not you -- I doubt that you would do such a thing, and I never saw the appeal of it either. But somebody did, because every few nights we would hear the smashers advancing up the road. First faintly: thunk, thunk, thunk in the distance. Then, closer: wham! . . . wham! and at last wham!! -- that was our mailbox -- and then subsiding as they moved on, thunk, thunk thunk and fading out. We'd go out in the morning and our box would be hanging by a thread of metal onto its battered post. Mailbox battery isn't one of the more terrifying problems of mass society, but it has forced mailboxes to evolve armor. When I complained about the regular obliteration of my mailbox, a cop I knew suggested that I fill the box with Quik-Krete, a recourse that would break the baseball bats, and possibly the wrists, of the offenders. I pointed out that this would confuse the letter carrier, who would open the mailbox to find a blank wall -- a Magritte-like joke, ceci n'est pas une boîte. No problem, said the cop, just hang a little basket by the side of the box, where they can put the mail. Most boxes have opted for more permanent solutions, trying to retain their boxness while warding off destruction. The most popular is a brick house all around the mailbox. When you pass these miniature megalithic structures, they seem to protest too much. Half-a-ton of brick is mobilized in the defense of a few ounces of sheetmetal. You want to ask -- are you really that afraid of the batwielders? What are you getting in that mailbox that's so important, anyway? All I ever get is pizza coupons. My neighbor's mailbox looks like a funeral cairn. I imagine some archaeologist centuries from now trying to figure out why nothing is buried beneath it. I admire much more the mailboxes that protect themselves with stealth technology instead of brute force. These boxes hide in shrubbery. This presents the vandal with unpromising options. Do I go ahead and swing at that bush -- and end up hitting just a bush? That would make me feel stupid. Sometimes the stealth boxes are set among an assortment of planters and stony lawn ornaments. You only have a split second, careening along the road, to make up your mind what to swing at. Like the dense-pack strategy extolled by President Reagan for protecting our nuclear missiles, these clusters of lawn objects make it hard to knock out the primary target. I feel proud, then, of the jessamine bush that adds a layer of subterfuge to my already cedar-encased mailbox. The weak spot in my box's armor is, however, the cedar post, which teeters on a short metal spur driven into the ground. How to post your mailbox is an issue that brings out a palette of choices in suburban culture. The plain pipe anchored in the sidewalk is an enduring favorite. But perhaps because it is ugly and functional, the plain pipe has provoked many variations. In my neighborhood, people stick the pipe in barrels filled with cement. Or they make it grow out of planters and conceal its base with pansies and four o'clocks. Really artistic souls plant the pipe in antique milk cans. A common adornment for the pipe is a pair of iron curlicues that grace both its sides. These curlicues are evil rust-traps, among the first decorative elements of a mailbox to come to grief. But there are few homeowners who can resist doing something, however feeble, to disguise the fact that they have a length of pipe shoved into their front sidewalk. Some of the supports are thrust into lawns instead of sidewalks. It cost me the agonies of hell to beat the support of my E-Z Up mailbox into the turf, so I had to smile one day when I saw a mailbox mounted on an earth auger, a great twisted corkscrew of metal chewing up someone's lawn. A few blocks away, someone has gone beyond the biblical injunction to beat his sword into a ploughshare and taken a ploughshare and mounted a mailbox on top of it. From rapine and pillage, to agriculturalism, to the information age -- here was human progress recapitulated in a mailbox post. But mail is not really part of the information age -- not real mail, or snail mail as we wired types call it. Perky Meg Ryan clicks on You've Got Mail and conducts a passionate correspondence with Tom Hanks; but does anyone send hard-copy love letters anymore? As I prowl around my suburb searching deeper and deeper into the heart of postal mysteries, I see that the mailbox is sometimes a thing of social cachet, in inverse proportion to the significance of whatever's within it. I haven't gotten a letter in years. Jaded multicultural youths in commercials for Internet businesses assure me that this is a good thing, but I wonder. I get not letters but waste paper. I walk back from the mailbox through my garage, and drop four-fifths of the day's catch directly into the paper-recycling bin. I have a seldom-erring touch with the junk. Ads from exterminators, Consumer Val-Paks, anything marked Important or Urgent (it never is), invitations to time-share resorts in Texomaland, credit card come-ons with low APRs guaranteed for the next two weeks, sample issues of the Utne Reader, catalogs for aerobics classes at the community college, and surveys of customer satisfaction (no, I'm not satisfied, not at all; but I doubt there is anything a new brand of frozen yogurt pops can do about that situation) -- they all tumble head over heels into the bin to be resurrected as brown grocery sacks. The only thing I keep, outside of bills and the odd readable magazine, is an ever-mounting supply of personalized address labels. Every charity, advocacy group, mail-order firm, and insurance company in America has a corporate mission to send me personalized address labels. Presumably I am to apply the rainbow-colored labels that say Teach Tolerance to my remonstrances to my Neanderthal congressman, and stick the barbed-wire emblem of Amnesty International on invitations to my kid's birthday parties -- just to keep everyone alert to my politics. Stay on your toes, predatory energy company -- I'm coming at you with return-address labels that say World Wildlife Foundation! That will have them quaking in their corporate boots. Given that the effective content of our mailboxes is nothing at all, I wonder why people in my subdivision go to such lengths, at times, to upgrade their mailboxes' social tone. Some boxes are all dressed up with nothing to get. In my pedestrian travels I get close enough to read what's written on them, to study the iconography of the tasteful decorations -- for among the hideous mailboxes there are many that are hideous because of too much good taste, not too little. The subtlest of this breed have a thurn-&-taxis motif of interlaced hunting horns, evoking Old World charm. Others have the ER and coronet of the Royal Mail, as if Postman Pat were about to trundle past in his lorry. Maybe this proliferation of international images explains the no-nonsense block letters on other boxes, the ones that starkly announce: US MAIL. I used to wonder, when passing them, what on earth else they could be expecting. But if the postal services of Europe are out patrolling our streets, looking forlornly for a welcoming mailbox, they are well warned off by the official rubric of the US MAIL. Sometimes these boxes add in small sober letters "Approved by the Postmaster General," a dignitary who either has little else to do with his time or is simply so damn big-hearted that he personally comes out to inspect our suburban letterboxes. Of course they are not "letter" boxes, as I've been saying. The contents rarely make a closer approach to genuine letters than "just the right card" that someone has picked out with the help of a drugstore Greeting Card Specialist, that postmodern mediator of interpersonal communication. It's all the more bemusing that some of them say, usually on a flap that emulates a British door-slot, letters. What is the mail carrier to make of that? "No flyers for home equity loans here, thanks. This box is for letters. Kindly limit its contents to letters and letters alone." These letters boxes are adorably "naff," as Postman Pat might say if he would just loosen up a little. Their pretensions lighten the tone of this upwardly striving suburb. However we may struggle, we middle Americans always flop back down into the morass of our own gaucherie. If we really wanted to be European, of course, we would do away with the rural letter box altogether and opt for the slot in the door, the British way to get the post. Nothing is cheerier on a bracing English morning, after all, than to hear the knock of the flap as the postman slides the mail into the front hallway. So why don't Americans go for the English option of gathering up the post and consuming it along with top-of-milk in their coffee and rashers on the grill? I have seen mail slots in the doors of some Eastern cities, but they are anathema in the heartland suburbs for the same reasons that lead us to post our electric meters on outside walls and our water meters on the street. In Texas, we want nobody to get in our houses. Conversely, nobody particularly wants to get in. Texans all seem to have guns anyway, making Postman's Knock a game akin to Russian roulette. And perhaps worse than the confident stride of the postman to knock at the front door would be the insinuation of his hands into the orifice of the mail slot. We would feel so violated. The Arlington homeowner seeks to turn the outdoors, bit by bit, into his indoors. I watched my grandparents do this from within, years ago in Aurora, Illinois. They started with a patio that became a porch with the addition of a lean-to roof. The porch became a room with the addition of walls and insulation and glass jalousies tinted green. It was the oddest room -- warm and cozy and dry, but with a window that opened into it from the back bedroom, and steps up through the back door into the kitchen. Gradually they abandoned their house, which was kept immaculate for company that never showed up, and moved onto the "back porch," where they drank highballs and fell asleep on lawn furniture. I see it now from the outside on my walks, this appropriation of exterior spaces. First we stake a claim with objects: grills and furniture and tools. Then, we begin to live outside rather than inside: we cook there, we eat there, we drink our drinks there. (Since it's the late 1990s, we drink microbeers rather than the preferred rye and 7-Up of my grandparents' era.) But we cannot bear to be outside for long. We build walls around our new living space and turn it into the indoors, whereupon the next margin of outdoor becomes our new frontier. We live in the suburbs like lobsters, molting and growing bigger shells. In these shells, wired to each other by the Internet, we no longer get mail from one another. One can argue that the Post Office created the United States, simply by defining a territory where communication with the rest of the polity was a right guaranteed by a federal authority. The Postal Service is now only one way of getting packages from place to place among many, a semi-commercial entity. The mail has only one socially unifying function left. It is the carrier of last resort. When they want to tell you that you haven't been accepted to Harvard, that your aunt is dead and would you please collect her ashes, that your microwave has been recalled, or that you owe $32,056.94 in back taxes, they use the us mail. That's the only kind of mail that is certain any more -- mail, fittingly, about death and taxes. Or rejection. Editors still send rejection letters to writers. No-one sends a rejection e-mail. It's too easy to hit Reply and send back an screenful of grief. When I was a child, a long-distance phone call meant death or disaster. Nowadays, a long-distance phone call is probably a recording of Ed Asner wanting to know if I'd care to send medical supplies to Cuba. All the terror has drained away from the telephone. The mail has taken its place as a bearer of definitive bad news. Nothing can be worse than a registered letter. Maybe that's really why I hide my mailbox in the shrubbery -- not that I want to conserve the lizard population, or to protect the thing from Louisville Sluggers, but that I want to hide as well as I can from the piece of paper that can only mean catastrophe. Now, there was a time when people actively courted bad news. When my grandfather retired, he moved to a desolate spot on the Illinois prairie. I swear it was the identical location Cary Grant was sent to be strafed by a cropduster in North by Northwest. The great attraction of this remote venue, for Grandpa, was that he had no mailbox at all. To collect his mail, my grandfather had to drive into town -- a generous designation -- and go to the post office. This entailed, naturally, a cup of coffee at the diner and a trip to the hardware store to see if they had anything a guy could use. Whenever I visited, I was duly impressed with the awesome ritual of Getting the Mail. I doubt that there was anything in my grandfather's mail more momentous than what appears today in my own. But when you were a widower living on the prairie in the 1970s with one TV and two radio stations, even a page of magazine-subscription stamps from Ed McMahon took on a certain glamour. My grandfather was serious about his mail. He was a carpenter by trade, and the best thing he ever built was a mailbox. I have an 8x10 black-and-white glossy of Grandpa standing proudly by this mailbox. The box is constructed to look exactly like his house, the one he built the back porch onto before he retired to the land of grain elevators. It has the same clapboard siding -- grey in the picture, but I know that in real life it was a vibrant 1950s pink. The windows are neatly framed in white. The rudiments of landscaping surround it -- miniature hedges and trees -- and in the driveway sits a Cadillac with fins. Circling above the house, suspended on a short length of wire, is a toy airplane. The chimneys are there, and the shingle roof, and the gutters and downspouts, though there is no back porch -- for the excellent reason that the back wall of the house is hinged to drop down for the receipt of mail. Yet this box was never used for mail. Even in the kinder times in which it was built, you wouldn't expose such a thing to elements and vandals. In fact, I have no idea what this mailbox was ever used for. It is an icon of glorious pointlessness. What I loved most about it were two of its more pointless elements. When I was young there was a product you used when you got sunburnt (no SPF 45 for us in those days). It was called Unguentine. To emphasize the refreshing qualities of the product, it came in a red plastic squeeze bottle. You unscrewed the cap, which was shaped like the top of an old-fashioned fire extinguisher, and you sprayed the stuff on your sunburn. It did no good at all, but at least it didn't make it hurt more, unlike my grandmother's favorite remedy of cold vinegar on a rag. And when the Unguentine was gone, you could run around and play with the empty bottle. As he was finishing his box / house, my grandfather started to put in detail. Like a serious train modeler, he wanted the little things to be right. So he asked me for my toy ex-Unguentine bottle, and he glued it to the side wall of the mailbox as its home fire extinguisher. Or maybe, now that I think about it, he was humoring me by letting me contribute something to the mix. The bottle was so big compared to the scale of the house that it looked like a huge water tank, not an extinguisher. I felt embarrassed at first by that out-of-place bottle, but he felt so good about using something of mine that I couldn't help but accept it. It hangs there in the picture, a secret that I share with my grandfather. The other thing I love about the mailbox is that Grandpa went the last inch. In front of the mailbox, or rather down at the end of the driveway of this model house, stands, of course, a mailbox. This piece is to scale, and it's not any old mailbox. It's the house itself again, as a miniature miniature. As a child, I wanted to crawl into that little world and disappear, an incredible shrinking boy. What lavish adventure -- to live in a world where the mailbox had its own mailbox, with its own mailbox in turn, and another mailbox for that; and where every mailbox was a house where you could live, and play, and drink milk and eat my grandmother's cookies, and fall asleep on the back porch in a wheeled Naugahyde chaise lounge. That was my first glimpse of Paradise. 
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