All my mail comes from Cunard. You know, the “It’s not a cruise, it’s a crossing” travel company, whose fleet of ships includes the Queen Mary II and Queen Elizabeth II? Cunard’s promotional budget per capita, on me alone, must be in the hundreds of dollars each year, such is the volume of snazzy brochures and jumbo color advertising cards the firm sees fit to send me, attempting to entice me to embark on a 14-day trans-Atlantic jaunt from New York to Southampton via Reykjavik, Iceland, and Kristiansand, Norway. I would if I could, Cunard, believe me. I would if I could.
Some time ago I signed up for a U.S. Postal Service service that emails you a photo-snapshot of your incoming mail — well, maybe half of your incoming mail; the automated camera seems to miss a lot — and each morning, as I attend to my Gmail inbox, I get a zing of hope in my heart if I find an email waiting for me from USPS Informed Delivery. Hope does spring eternal and, despite plenty of practice with disappointment, I happen to suffer from a deep-seated, apparently DNA-level expectation that all surprises will be nice, so I click on my Informed Delivery email expecting the sneak preview of my incoming mail to reveal a valentine, an impressive check for some forgotten sweepstakes won, or perhaps notification that one of my children has won a magnificent scholarship. But it’s always Cunard, and/or their pals in luxury-travel junk-mailing, Backroads, Roads Scholars, and Kensington (“Tailor-Made Private Tours”).
Because I live on a private street, I sadly do not get mail delivered to my door, which really is a shame, as it would add a jolt of excitement to my mornings, however short-lived the burst of happy expectation. Instead, I have to pay U.S.P.S. for a mailbox at the Gay Lane post office, out of which I fish my handful of aspirational travel catalogues for $24,000 family hiking vacations in the Swiss Alps in summertime, when the buttercups bloom. Still, I do enjoy all the ephemera of snail mail rather more than the average person does, I think: letters, postcards from Ljubljana, stamps showing the crowned heads of small foreign nations, Sitting Bull, or Allen Toussaint.
The Ladies Village Improvement Society may be to blame for my psychological impulse to imagine each incoming “mail piece” (as the postmen call them) as a potential present inbound from, say, some secret admirer I didn’t know I had or perhaps a fan letter with an enclosed hundred-dollar bill. Do you remember the Post Office Game at the L.V.I.S. fair’s kiddie land, on the last Saturday of each July, back when the fair was held at its (highly superior) location on Mulford Farm? To play the Post Office Game, you stood in front of a genuine antique cabinet of post office boxes, golden-brass-colored with small knobs and windows, handed over a ticket, and opened the numbered box of your choice. The hand of a teenage volunteer who was hiding behind would come toward your hand inside the post box to place a prize in your palm. You know, a whistle, a glamorous ruby necklace, a small paratrooper with plastic parachute. That was the best.
I also always loved the errand of accompanying my mother to the Amagansett Post Office in my early childhood, when we lived among the windswept dunes and lonely bogs of Cranberry Hole Road. I would reach down into the post office’s big metal wastepaper basket to pull out armloads of other peoples’ junk mail to bring home with me for fun and entertainment. It was so brightly colored and sometimes there were stickers. In my teenage years, I wrote copious letters and sometimes do still find old, yellowed missives to or from friends as I sift through a hatbox of photographs of us back in the days when we were young, beautiful, and loved nothing more than to take Polaroids of ourselves in our combat boots and dreadlocks, smoking our cigarettes.
What a cliché it is for a columnist to say that she regrets the loss of letter-writing. I’m not sure I mind the loss of letter-writing so much — I’m a copious email-writer, regardless, and my handwriting is torturously abominable, due to being a leftie and having been forced by certain sadists at the East Hampton Middle School to write with my wrist and hand twisted into an unnatural position, with the result that holding pen to paper was always uncomfortable and left a smear of ink on the cushiony side of my hand. But I do very much regret the loss of delightful paper goods.
Who remembers the magical delights you could buy from Mrs. John L. Strong Stationery at Henri Bendel’s on Fifth Avenue, the cotton cards in that creamy color called “Strong’s vanilla”? A golden swan would glide across the top of your notecards, or a tiny blue firecracker with a miniature explosion of red tissue paper that fluttered if you blew on it. When I interviewed with Anna Wintour at Vogue in 1998 — or was it 1997? — I walked from Madison Avenue to Bendel’s to escalator up to Mrs. Strong’s to buy myself a box with which to write my thank-you note. That’s how you got a job at Vogue.
Did you know that U.S. postage stamps are, like coins, eternal? You can use a stamp from 10, 20, or 50 years ago on your letter. You can buy old, unused stamps on, for example, eBay — or find them in the back of your Aunt Fanny’s dumpster-bound desk drawer — and curate a very artistic display of philately on the envelope. The solar eclipse (2017), Hot Wheels (2018), the Space Shuttle (1991), a Jackson Pollock painting (2010), the FM radio (1983), Madam C.J. Walker (1998), an ice cream maker (1977), a moray eel (1999). It’s true. You can combine these beautiful stamps in threes, fours, or fives to make up the correct postage, your own unique Pop Art collage. Tall ships, Thomas Paine, the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, lady’s slipper orchids, Lucille Ball, the Beatles. All you need is to find a reason. Valentine’s Day is nigh.