~a column by Colleen O’Brien
It was the smell that awoke me, the smell in the dream. I was in the Post Office in Jefferson, where my dad worked. I was a little girl and I had come in through the wide swinging doors off the loading dock at the back where I’d been hanging out after school.
The compelling aroma of the P.O. was of ink and canvas, dusty old wood, floor polish and cigarette smoke. I loved it. There isn’t much ink being used nowadays, and the bags are heavy plastic, but the musky mixture lingers, in fact or in my imagination, at least at the Post Office in Jefferson.
The allure of the Post Office fragrance was that I always felt a part of the building and its mission because when Dad let me hang out there, I became as important as him. That he worked under a motto of great drama influenced me as well: “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.” He liked to recite poetry; this one rippled off his tongue like a “hello.”
I truly thought that was one romantic way to talk about a job.
I liked watching Dad “casing” the mail. He was fast, the letters flying into the boxes as if he were a magician, expert at slight-of-hand. I had studied him practicing at home in our living room with a portable mock-up of mail cases like the ones in the workroom of the P.O. – he was to take a test for rural mail carrier, a better-paying position than his current job as a counter clerk – and he could make the letters sprout wings as they left his hand. I knew he’d get the job.
Going up the stately granite front steps, my hand sliding along the middle brass railing, and through the doorway of Jefferson’s Post Office, turning to the right in the vestibule and into the foyer, I was as bewitched by the smell of the place as I was coming in through the swinging back doors. The character revealed through the smell was as comfortable and known to me as the balm of my own home.
When I went in the front of the P.O., I was with my mom, who was buying stamps or mailing her twice-weekly post cards to her mom, my grandma, in Perry 26 miles away. As Mom chatted with the postmistress, who always came out of her office to say hello, I wandered around.
I had investigated every inch of the lobby many times: I knew the details of the giant farmer in the wall mural – his big hands and face, his rough clothing, the background of fields of grain. I made sure that the cubbyholes of the desks built into the walls were full of address labels, and I placed the pens dangling on their linked ball-bearings into their inkwells, ready for patrons addressing envelopes. I knew the pattern of the tiled floor and what I could see out of the extremely tall windows – the trees in front of the high school cattycorner across the street, the water tower a block away, the brick telephone company facing the P.O.
I was a perfect height to peer into the mailroom through the wide, brass-trimmed slots for outgoing mail – “Local” and “Out of Town.” I surveyed the contents of the wall of private mailboxes around the corner from the front counter. Here, some people in town and some businesses had their own mailbox, their own key. I spied through the windows of the fancy brass boxes into the workroom on the other side, where the mailmen cased the flat cargo that would go into their shoulder bags in order of their route around town as they delivered Jefferson’s letters of love and friendship, business dealings, happiness and woe, letters from nearby, and from places Dad told us Jeffersonians had moved – Germany, California, Hawaii. A necessary and romantic kind of job.
Once in a while, a mailman would make a face at me through a wall mailbox, startling me but never scaring me. I knew them all and liked them. It was my plan to work in that fun place when I grew up.
There was a great deal of camaraderie in the big room one could see from the front counter. It was a well-coordinated, concerted effort of order and busyness as the postal employees got the mail out. They joked and laughed, talked sports, sometimes books if Dad was around. They pulled pranks on one another that just slayed me – putting a rubber snake in Doug’s mailbag was my favorite. That they could act like boys made me wonder about men; Dad did not ever act like that at home with his three girls and a wife. Would he had he had sons? That these men could have fun and still do a serious job was a lesson I didn’t know I was learning.
After my little sister fell off the dock and broke her front tooth right out of her mouth, we no longer were allowed to play there or go through the swinging back doors into the inviting smell of the P.O.’s mailroom. I was getting older by then and didn’t mind. I was hatching new plans for my life’s work. Having been placed in a class with a teacher who praised my writing, I was rethinking my future. Poetry called. And essays like in The New Yorker. Ditto their short stories. I was reading adult books, and the secret wish of writing the great American novel had entered my head. I could be Louisa May Alcott. Or one of the Bronte sisters.
Good-bye classy old wonderful-smelling Jefferson Post Office. Thanks for the tour, the nearly forgotten memories. I hope I dream of you again.
