My fondness for retrieving the mail has been described to me as antiquated, if not neurotic, by those who do their bidding online, which I reject out of hand on the grounds that I trust a mail carrier and his Jeep more than I trust an electronic pulse. Or her Jeep.
The mail, and thus the United States Postal Service, represents to me an American convention on the level of church going, or voting on Election Day. I lose on those fronts, too. I am older now, but not old enough to remember when we actually got mail twice a day. What a thing to imagine, two occasions on the same day to anticipate great surprises, a British car newsletter, a card, perhaps an enticement to cruise the Rhine on a decked-out barge.
And bills, of course, but I’d rather get the news on paper than on a screen.
As for neurotic, that only kicks in when the mail, prior to me fetching it, has been driven over, there being so much bounty on a given day it spills out of the bin and across the garage floor. “I didn’t see it,” she says.
How would you like to get your latest copy of Boathouse Barn Finds with tire tracks across the bow of a 1938 triple cockpit Chris Craft?
President Elon Musk might now wish to throw out the USPS with the bath water. I couldn’t take it. The news reports cite President Donald Trump as noodling about the USPS, maybe taking it private, maybe merging it with the Commerce Department. Yes, the USPS can’t make a nickel in profit. It bleeds hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars. But has the Department of Energy has ever produced any energy? Has the Department of Education ever educated anybody?
At least the mail puts something in my hand. And while I’m at it: Musk, leave the penny alone. There’s no such thing as a lucky dime.
Musk appears to be running the show. He appeared at Trump’s first Cabinet meeting the other day dressed in a T-shirt, a black overcoat and a ballcap, like he just ducked in before running to the drugstore to get a prescription filled. Boys, the post office is probably America’s oldest institution, first running out of a saloon in Boston as early as 1639. We weren’t even a country yet! And just as probably it is America’s favorite institution. According to the Pew Research Center, 75 percent of us have a favorable view of the post office, trailing only the National Park Service at 76 percent with a favorable view.
God only knows, but it is unlikely they are going to pave over Yosemite.
Much of what Musk is up to is long overdue. And it is laughable that the third assistant shift leader in each agency’s Department of Loving and Happy Thoughts develops a terrible case of writer’s block when asked to tell us what they did in the last five days, but I certainly got mail in the last five days. A little DOGE goes a long way, but at great risk to my polished image, it won’t bother me a bit to continue feeding those hurting and in need, well, except in Minnesota, where thieves generally get the money before a kid gets the food.
There are 530,000 USPS employees serving all of us. The current price of a stamp is 73 cents. The math will never work.
Figure it out, Musk. That’s what you’re good at.
Joe Soucheray can be reached at jsoucheray@pioneerpress.com. Soucheray’s “Garage Logic” podcast can be heard at garagelogic.com.
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