I went to the post office Saturday morning.  That's fairly routine for me nowadays, what with the renewals for the Garden Society pouring into the PO Box.  I also needed some stamps to send acknowledgments to donors. 

As I have written here before, buying stamps at the post office seems to be the number one pet peeve of some postal workers.  There's one at every post office, seems like, and not always the one you'd expect.


The one at Astor Station is heavyset but sorta pretty in, I dunno, a Brady Bunch kinda way  — with big plastic powder pink glasses  and her hair always pulled back in a matching clip.  She's soft-spoken and I've actually heard her coo and gurgle at customers. 

I have watched her over the years, and she seems to like weighing things.  She doesn't mind fetching the odd package, even big ones.  But.  Whatever you do.  DON'T ASK HER TO SEE THE STAMPS.  Her demeanor changes completely.  I mean, it's a Jeckel/Hyde thing.  Her eyes turn to laser beams.  SHE HATES SHOWING YOU THE STAMPS.

I can imagine she had a bad experience showing someone stamps once.  There are a lot of old cranks in the Fenway.  I'm sure she's had her share of them come in, demand to see every stamp in her big old ratty binder, and then buy, like, a penny stamp, or something.  Philatelists are funny.

But I'm no philatelist.  (No matter what they say in the mail room!)  And personally I was so traumatized by my last encounter with her I started fretting about buying stamps two days before I screwed up the courage to go in. 

The strategizing is what was keeping me up at night.  Should I try for the Statue of Liberty or a Hail Mary? A squib kick or flea-flicker?  Finally I decided that if there was more than one clerk and she was one of them, I would just wait for the other clerk.  I would just tell anyone behind me in line to go ahead if her station opened up first.  Sure, she might shoot me the stink-eye, but I would be spared the actual stink.

So I show up and there are three clerks working.  Whew.  Mine was being extra super nice to the other customers, as she does, so that when someone comes and asks to see the stamps and she turns on them it's for maximum effect.  I know this type.  I know all their little tricks.  I have their ratty old play book.  I subscribe to their fucking little newsletter.  

The line wasn't long but the wait was excruciating.  As it happened there was NO ONE behind me.  I didn't really have a Plan B.

The other two clerks seemed to have difficult customers — there was weighing and scanning and they had the old abacus out making all manner of calculations. On the right you had a couple sending an oversize envelope to someplace deep in the Himalayas that didn't even have a name.

"Is there at least a zip code?" the clerk asked.

"It is 34.7°North, 85.7°East," the man kept saying.

"That's not a zip code," the clerk snapped.

"The sherpas will know," the woman insisted.

On the left was an unkempt young man with an outsize box with breathing holes poked in it.

"Is there an animal in there?" the postal clerk was saying.

"Not exactly," the man said, in a thick accent.

"What do you mean, 'not exactly'?" The clerk asked, tapping on the lid.

"Stop tapping on it!" The man shouted.  "I told you, it's a violin!"

And there she was in the middle, with an easy one.  Just a couple envelopes to weigh.  I heard her trademark coo and gurgle.  I thought, she knows I'm here and I want to see the stamps.  She can smell it. 

I saw an interesting couple of Russian apocalyptic vampire movies recently, called Nightwatch and Daywatch (based on the books by Sergei Lukyanenko and starring the sloppily sexy Konstantin Khabenskiy), and one interesting thing about them was the existence of a sort of reality behind the scrim called "the Gloom". 

The Gloom is a sinister mosquito-ridden apocalyptic reality just under the surface of our own where superhuman Others divided into equal armies of Good and Evil battle it out, with the fate of the Earth in the balance. 

As our moment approached I felt I was entering The Gloom.  Soon we would do battle. 

But suddenly, Apocalypse was averted when the box with the violin in it sprouted legs and ran out the door, playing the Furious Violin Polka, the customer bumbling after it, screaming back to the clerk, "I told you it was a violin!"

It was a photo finish.  Just seconds before my gal wrapped up her customer, the end clerk called "next!"

And he not only showed me the stamps he told me a little bit about each one. 

"She's a Puerto Rican poet," he said, r-r-r-rolling the "r"s and pointing to the new stamp with Julia de Burgos on it.

So I bought TWO books.

And got my stamps for once without having to go into the Gloom.