Mr. Postman was at your door

Rarely so these days, if ever, isn’t it? Like most figures in what seemed a forever-landscape less than 50 years ago, Mr. Postman—Mang Mianong in my Ilocos childhood, who linked us with Papa working away in Manila—has been fast withdrawing into mere memory. 

Here in our Marpole neighborhood, hardly any sign of him/her at all, except when passing you by and attempting to catch your eye at the bus stop, like the Filipina recognizable in gray short pants and collared-shirt patched with the Canada Post insignia, on her route this morning from the 7-Eleven postal outlet.

“Small consolation, eh? Soon, she will disappear,” quips Lillian, as she catches me following the post(wo)man with my eyes. I agree, sharing with her a sentiment that has been sweeping Canadians as the specter of no-more-door-to-door delivery looms.

If Canada Post, in cutti ng costs where income has been eaten away by digital communication, could ward off raging volleys from mayors, communities, and activists like Susan Dixon, who has been relentless with her updates on Change.Org—by 2019, those “tunnel” boxes, often a favorite perch of sparrows once familiar in the North American landscape and greeting cards, will soon become collectibles, as community mailboxes continue to rise.

Horrors of possible thefts, missed mail if an elderly or disabled person can’t get to the mailbox, especially when snowbound in the winter, unimagined strategies for unimpeded access, and that changing the mode of delivery does not affect costs that much anyway, have been thrown at Canada Post President and CEO Deepak Chopra, who remains unfazed.

For Lillian, who now limps close to her 100th year, just about half of Canada Post being there through the country’s dramatic survival of 250 years, Chopra’s compelling figures—like “1 billion fewer pieces of mail in 2012, yet still sustaining service of 15 million addresses”—wheeze her by as swiftly as a hummingbird’s flight, still living as she does by the concept of mail service as she had always known it, vividly romanticized especially during World War II, her teens.

Chopra’s pitch heightens, as he cites in the corporation’s website, Canada’s uniqueness— “a vast and beautiful country with one of the lowest population densities in the industrial world…but it means Canada Post has one of the highest cost structures of Western post offices, and also getting higher as the number of addresses continues to rise, while mail items per household fall.”

Still, sounding more like a business venture to Lillian, rather than the emotional link between mothers and sons during the war, mothers and daughters, as their lives drift apart with a marriage, and lovers in deep need of stoking the flame, she shakes her head in defiance of Chopra’s pleas, to which I’m likely to give in.

Perhaps, sensing it, Lillian asks me what I think; I gloss over how we would be spared, as already in our Strata, our mail goes into a “community box,” apparently introduced in the 1980s in apartments, residential and office buildings. While she does live in a rental apartment herself, Lillian worries about her elderly daughter living in a house miles away from a neighbor in the Prairies.

At this point, I take out my iPhone to check the time, which she notices, “I bet you get mail in there, too,” she says, hinting at poignant surrender. I couldn’t help a rueful smile, convinced myself that mail, the way we had loved to engage in, has changed—with the urgency we once dreamed but now so loosely sent off even if flippant, lacking the earnestness of words, which flowed from the heart literally as we labored to translate emotions in cursive, and delivered by a knowing Mang Mianong.

I had expected Lillian to tag on, but with eyes on a lake of sunlight where the bus stop stood, she simply sighed and said “Sad, indeed.”