You've Got Mail

Not a review of the Tom Hanks movie.

Growing up, I would walk down my street and pay attention to the different mailboxes. That was how I would identify a house—by its mailbox. My two favorite mailboxes were one made to look like a cow and another shaped like a tractor. I had an affinity for farms as a child. Looking back, it seems my street may have, too.

The Google Maps Street View photograph of my childhood home is old. This is evidenced by the plastic mailbox in the front yard—a mailbox that was replaced by a wooden, sturdier one after being destroyed by a snowplow in the winter. The mere thought of snow is enough to send the entire state of Texas into DEFCON 2, whereas I probably still went to school that day. That’s just one of 7,359 differences between living in Texas and living in Pennsylvania.

The new mailbox suffered its fair share of dents as well, though. Shortly after it was put in, it became home to carpenter bees. As someone who hasn’t always had the best relationship with bees, it made mowing the lawn around the mailbox an issue—a big enough issue that I complained about them to my dad every time I mowed the lawn. Eventually, we decided to fill their tunnels with Liquid Nails and evict them. Problem solved, at least temporarily.

Not too long after saving the mailbox from the bees, my older brother backed into it with our grandmother’s car, which she graciously let us borrow. He claimed it was an issue with the car. If it were anyone else's car, I wouldn’t believe it, but my grandmother didn’t have the best track record with her cars. The car my brother crashed was an exciting replacement for her old car. Her old car had roller windows; a concept that, to a kid born in a year that starts with a 2, was unheard of. It didn’t have a key fob and needed to be manually locked and unlocked. The fuel gauge didn’t work, and my grandmother kept track of her gas by doing math using the odometer, the car's gas mileage, and tank size. If I remember correctly, the number on the odometer was somewhere in the low trillions. The only reason the car was able to pass state inspection was because she knew the mechanic personally. While her new car was a step up from this, it probably should’ve been closer to 10–12 steps up—hence my brother’s argument.

Nonetheless, our wooden mailbox toppled under the car, but not without first busting the taillight. You could see the internal damage the bees had done to the structure of the mailbox. Whether or not they played a significant part in its snapping, I don't know. Fast forward to today, our mailbox is made out of brick and has already been hit by a car. One of the many lessons that I’ve learned from my family is that if I have kids and they wind up being anything like me—first, God help us, and second, I should go for the obsidian mailbox.