Beware of Cat (4 page)

Delivering Reality

On a Saturday morning in one of my first months on my regular assignment, the accountables clerk handed me a registered letter. Generally speaking, the few pieces of registered mail I’ve handled contain coins or gems. This doesn’t happen too often on a blue-collar, residential route like mine.

When a customer goes to the expense of registering a letter, the window clerk signs for it, enters it in a log book, gives the customer a receipt, and locks the piece of mail in the office safe. Later, when the truck driver arrives to take our outgoing mail downtown for processing, he signs for it. Most drivers carry a pouch to keep such an item safe until it’s delivered to an accountables clerk downtown. Once again it’s signed for. An individual accounts for every leg of the journey for a registered letter. Losing one can be grounds for dismissal.

Although they are rare, I have handled insured registered letters valued in the tens of thousands of dollars. In 1968, the Postal Service very quietly delivered the Hope Diamond, registered and insured for $1,000,000. If you’re the type to ponder the nature of reality, just join the Postal Service. Toss in a registered letter, and it doesn’t get any more real than that. Like a mortgage payment, or the anxiety leading up to tax day, the Postal Service is all about reality.

Letter carriers guard a piece of registered mail with assiduous attention. I usually secure it in an inside pocket. Until it’s delivered and signed for by the customer, or safely returned to the accountables clerk, a registered letter is a nagging presence in the back of a carrier’s mind.

I could count on one hand the number of registered letters I had handled in my short career, so I was startled on this Saturday morning when the accountables clerk asked for my signature. Even more surprising was the condition of the letter. Smudged, dirty, dog-eared, it looked like a museum specimen. We studied it together, calling other carriers to have a look.

The postage consisted of several colorful stamps from Vietnam. Near them was a receiving postmark in San Francisco. We looked at each other in wonder when my finger underlined the receiving date: 1976. The letter had arrived in the United States at least fourteen years earlier. The original address was faded and crossed out, but we deciphered a Vietnamese name (or at least an Asian name) and
General Delivery
in San Francisco. None of us had ever seen a registered letter addressed to General Delivery.

Below that, someone had penciled in another address in San Francisco, but that one was also crossed out. Various official stamps blotted the envelope:
NO SUCH ADDRESS,
or
MOVED
,
LEFT
NO
FORWARDING
. Without a return address to work with, carriers in California had kept the letter alive. Four or five
addresses had been hand printed, with notes added, such as, “Try here,” or “Please forward to . . .”

Each one was scratched out.

We followed the trail of addresses around northern California. Then, in the lower right-hand corner, were the words, “Moved to Oregon in 1983.” An arrow pointed to the flip side of the envelope. On the back we found an address for a church in Portland. More hand-written addresses, more postmarks: 1984, 1985. The trail led to Seattle, and by 1987 the letter had meandered up to Missoula, Montana.

In the late 1980s, the letter stopped twice in Bismarck, North Dakota. Then it was off to Minot. At that point, in smudged black ink, the words
FORWARDING ORDER EXPIRED
were stamped across the address. A heavy black finger of ink pointed out that the letter should be returned to the sender. Of course, there was no return address, and once again, in the spirit of getting the mail delivered, a letter carrier in Minot, North Dakota, had written in the address of a small house on my route in South Minneapolis.

I stared at the address. There was no mistake; the numerals were printed clearly. Even the zip code was correct. I shook my head in bewilderment. While the accountables clerk explained to the other carriers what we were looking at, I turned the envelope over and looked at the name again. Attempting to sound out the letters, I decided it had the ring of a feminine name. The printing, old and faded as it was, looked masculine.

A love letter?

The only address not crossed out was the one on my route. We speculated about where the letter had lain for months or years between attempted deliveries. The clerk asked, “Does that name look familiar?”

I pictured the house on my route. Even though I had been on this assignment only a short time, I knew many of the names of the residents. A young couple lived in that particular house, a young couple with an infant child and a common,
everyday name like Thompson, or Johnson—nothing even close to the exotic name on the envelope.

I shook my head, but the significance of what I held in my hands began to dawn on me. For fourteen years, letter carriers had found ways to push this letter toward a destination. Machines process undeliverable mail, but if the computer doesn’t have a forwarding address on file, the letter is returned to the carrier to begin the journey back to the sender. Unlike computerized machines, however, letter carriers wouldn’t let this one die. They talked to neighbors and rummaged through old records to keep it alive.

In handwriting sometimes clear and purposeful, other times scrawled in pencil or bright red ink, they had passed it along. One address was circled several times in dark blue ink to make it stand out from the others, as if the carrier had been sure this would be the final destination. Ultimately, that one was crossed out too, and now it sat in my hands.

“I’ve never seen this name before,” I said to the clerk. “And
I know who lives at this address.”

The clerk asked carriers on routes near mine to see if they recognized the name. Perhaps a number in the address had been accidentally transposed. Again, I looked at the original postmark. The stamps had been canceled in Saigon. Hadn’t Saigon fallen in 1975? Wasn’t that Ho Chi Minh City now? I was on my first route, and I suddenly felt a responsibility of historic proportions on my shoulders.
Reality
rested in my fingertips.

“It’s Saturday,” the clerk stated flatly, handing me the clipboard to sign for the letter. “Someone will probably be home. If they’ve never heard of this person, bring it back and we’ll kill it.”

His words stunned me. To “kill it” simply meant we would endorse it as attempted delivery. Under normal circumstances it would then be returned to the sender. In this case, however, it would go to the dead letter office. We would, literally, kill it.

My mind was in a fog as I cased mail for the rest of the route. The significance of 1975 in Saigon was not lost on me. I remembered the news film of the last helicopters yanking the final evacuees from the U.S. embassy before the Viet Cong overran the city. The mysterious purpose of the letter became a distraction, its contents haunting my thoughts far more than the most valuable registered letter I had ever carried. Also nagging at me was the diligence of all those carriers, through all the years, working to get this letter delivered. Now that responsibility had somehow fallen to me.

I pictured a gray-haired letter carrier, hunched over the envelope, black-rimmed reading glasses slipping down his nose as he carefully penciled in another address. Or maybe a young carrier new to her route had played at detective and passed on her hunch about a destination. Perhaps a Vietnam vet had handled it.

The sun was bright and warm on that Saturday morning. We got our customary safety talk from the supervisor advising us to be vigilant for loose dogs, more common on Saturdays. But dogs were the last things on my mind. I loaded out my mail, started up the jeep, and tried to focus on the job at hand. I walked off the first couple of blocks, but couldn’t find my stride. That letter was eating at me. It seemed I had been given a test, and I felt unworthy. All those other carriers had found ways to keep this letter alive. I feared their efforts would be wasted. Would it all end here today, with me?

I became convinced that it was a love letter, perhaps from a boyfriend or husband. The person the envelope was addressed to must have escaped from Saigon before the end of the war. My only hope was that somehow the young couple on my route would have knowledge of this person. It was a long shot, but then why had this particular address been so clearly penciled in? After all these years, and all those miles, it seemed heartless to just bring the letter back to be killed, even if these patrons couldn’t solve the puzzle.

The distraction, the mystery, finally got the best of me. The house was near the end of the route, but I couldn’t wait any longer. My heart racing with anticipation, I ripped off my mail satchel, dug out the letter that by now seemed to weigh a ton, and took off in the jeep.

As I pulled up to the house I was struck by the absurdity
of it all. This young couple had been mere children when the letter was mailed. What could they possibly know? Braced
for disappointment, I pushed the doorbell, then again studied the foreign stamps and the word
“SAIGON”
clearly stamped across them.

The door opened and I looked up to see the young man of the house, smiling pleasantly and holding a baby in his arms. I stepped forward, showing him the envelope, unsure how to begin.

“Do you know anyone with a name like this?” I blurted. Because the writing was so faded and lost among all the addresses, I held my index finger below the name. “I have to ask,” I continued, choking off a self-conscious chuckle, “because it’s a registered letter, and someone put your address on it.”

The man leaned forward to squint at the name. I found myself squeezing the paper as if he might try to steal it away from me. He stepped back. “Just a minute,” he said, and turned to call to his wife.

“Well, this is just ridiculous,” I thought. “You can’t decide for yourself whether you’ve seen a foreign name like this before?”

When his wife came to the door, he nodded at the envelope still clutched firmly in my fingers. “You better take a look at this,” he said.

I held it up for her, and watched her eyes slide from the name to the stamps in the corner. “Oh, my God,” she muttered. As she stepped back, the envelope slid from my fingers into her hand. An elderly Asian woman stood behind her. Dressed in a floor-length skirt, with a colorful scarf around her head, she moved forward as the younger woman made room for her.

With exaggerated jabs of her finger, the wife pointed at the name on the envelope. A wail exploded from the old woman. She grabbed the letter and clutched it to her breast with both hands. She whirled in circles, her long skirt trailing out, and from her lips erupted an otherworldly keening. On and on she twirled, tears flying.

The young woman looked at me with an expression of utter joy, tears streaming down her face. The baby fidgeted, startled by the sudden racket, and looked at his father’s tear-filled eyes. The husband joined me out on the front steps. He explained that their church had taken this woman in, and he and his wife had offered to have her stay for a while with them. The woman’s husband had died in the war. The letter was from her son. They had been separated at the end of the war. Over the years, she had passed through several churches and social service organizations, never bothering to change her address because she never received any mail—until now. A few years earlier she learned that her son had survived in various refugee camps, but the letter I delivered was the first and only physical proof she had of his existence.

Behind us, the wailing subsided to sobs and moans. The woman had dropped to her knees. I glimpsed the young wife bending over her, hands bracing the shoulders of the tiny
Vietnamese lady. The old face was contorted in furrows of anguish and joy.

The young man signed for the letter, effectively clearing me of responsibility. After all the determination and perseverance of those letter carriers, I got to be the one to witness the results. Now I understood why they had taken the time, and as I walked back to my jeep, I wiped the reality of it off my cheeks.

Let Me See You

I worried about Evelyn when I noticed all the cars parked in front of her house and folks going up to her doorstep. I knew she was quite old, but I could only guess at her age. Once she told me that her husband had passed away twenty years earlier, and he had been retired for ten years before that, so she had to be in her mid-nineties.

Small, trim, and wiry, Evelyn had lived alone all the years I had known her. She was somewhat hard of hearing, but we had several chats over the years. A sense of humor twinkled in her eyes. Because she lived alone and didn’t get out by herself, I insisted that I should see her every day. She didn’t have to come to the door, but I wanted to see her nonetheless. Most days she was sitting in an overstuffed easy chair by her living room window watching the daily soaps. A simple wave was all I needed to know that she was all right.

At any given time I usually have an arrangement like this with one or two shut-ins on my route. Receiving a piece of mail or a phone call from a friend or relative might be the highlight of someone’s day, and I might be his or her sole daily contact with the outside world. So waving to me isn’t an inconvenience for them, and it may very well make them feel a little safer and not quite so alone.

I STARTED DOING THIS
early on, after an incident involving another elderly woman. Living on a fixed income, she was slowly losing the battle of maintaining her house. Given her age, she could offer only token efforts at the yard work. A few perennials adorned the edges of her front steps, but the lawn had been taken over by weeds and large bare spots. One summer day I found her sitting upright on the ground in her front yard, with her legs splayed out in front and her nylon stockings rolled down just above her ankles. Using a scissor-style grass clipper, she was cutting the grass as far around her as she could reach. Then she ponderously rocked her heavy frame over a few feet to begin on a new swatch.

She was a cantankerous old lady. The neighbors told me she wouldn’t talk to anyone, and she was known to yell at children if they strayed off the city sidewalk into her yard. Approaching her one day as she worked the grass clipper, I offered to help start her lawn mower. She brushed me aside with a wave of her hand. I found out later she had sold the lawn mower to help pay her utility bills. All summer long her windows were wide open, emitting the sounds of a local news station on an
AM
radio.

For several days in a row I came by with her mail and heard the radio inside. As it happened, I usually arrived on her block around lunchtime. She had a mail slot that went directly into the house, so I didn’t see the mail accumulating. It never occurred to me that anything was wrong. I figured she was eating lunch, or perhaps taking a nap. Then one day the neighbor told me what happened. After trying to sleep with his windows open, and hearing that darn radio all night long, he had finally gone over to ask her to turn it off. When she didn’t come to the door, he called the police. They found her on the kitchen floor. She had been dead for a week.

I felt bad about it for a long time. It wasn’t as though we were friends; she hadn’t wanted that. But the thought of her dying alone, and lying there for so long, just wasn’t right. After that, I decided to be more vigilant for the welfare of my older patrons.

BUT THEN THERE WAS
the time my vigilance backfired. A lifelong bachelor once lived on my route. With curly white hair hanging over his ears and a long, thick, gray beard, he could have been an extra in a Civil War documentary. Tall and lean, with a wrinkled, weathered face, he was an eccentric character disguising himself as an intellectual. He didn’t have a garage, so he parked his old Cadillac in the yard beside his house. The interior of the car was piled high with papers and junk, leaving just enough room for a driver to squeeze in behind the wheel. His house was the same way. On one of the rare times I peeked inside, I saw books, magazines, and newspapers stacked hip-high everywhere. Narrow passageways allowed navigation from room to room.

I saw the old guy often. Sometimes in the winter he sat in the old Cadillac working a crossword puzzle. The car would be idling, heater on high, the window open halfway. He always wore a distinctive white fur hat in cold weather. He couldn’t have known—or cared about—what his neighbors had to say about his lifestyle.

He was very aware, however, of the schedule for delivery of his social security and retirement checks. He often met me in the yard on those days, wearing no coat or jacket; the familiar fur hat was always perched high on his head. So I thought it odd one spring day when he didn’t show up to take his government check from me. The Cadillac was parked in its usual position. I considered knocking on his door, but he was a cranky, independent sort, and I didn’t want to invade his space.

The next day, though, when I added his retirement pension check to the social security check in the mailbox, I did knock. No answer. A neighbor had once mentioned that they belonged to the same
VFW
post. He had seen the old bachelor having a beer there from time to time. I walked over to this neighbor’s house and inquired after my lost patron.

“Haven’t seen him,” the man replied. “That piece-of-crap car hasn’t moved in days, either.”

I explained that his neighbor hadn’t picked up his checks. “Do you know his phone number?”

He laughed. “The old coot didn’t pay his phone bill, so they disconnected him. He hasn’t had a phone in years. Hell, who’d ever want to call him, anyway?”

This sudden absence nagged at me, though. I swung by at the end of the day to find the checks still there. I returned to my station and related my concerns to the supervisor. He immediately called the local police precinct. The authorities assured us we had done the right thing. They dispatched a squad car and I rushed back out to the house.

When I arrived, two officers made quick work of breaking in the front door. I waited as they entered, watching them file through the cluttered passageways. Finally, one of them emerged from the shattered doorway.

“He’s not in there,” he said. “Of course, I suppose he could be hidden somewhere in all that junk,” he added with a snicker.

For several days thereafter I noted the deserted car, the plywood barricade the city had screwed on over the broken front door, and the mail filling up the mailbox. Then one morning his neighbor from the
VFW
met me. “Well,” he began, an I-told-you-so smirk playing across his face, “the old geezer finally came home.” He nodded up the street toward the old bachelor’s house. Chuckling now, he told me, “One of his World War II buddies came to town, and they went off on a week-long bender. All the way down to Iowa and back.”

After my initial sigh of relief, I had to laugh at the image of the old warrior carousing around the countryside with an old comrade-in-arms. I was still grinning as I approached the plywood doorway. The old man came stalking around the back corner of the house, and his look wiped the grin off my face.

In a voice way too loud for the short distance between us, he bellowed, “You know some son-a-bitch called the cops on me? They broke my damn door down.” His language startled me, and as I met his glance head on, the scales in my mind tipped from eccentric intellectual to complete lunatic. Spittle clung to his beard and red veins glowed in his eyes. “If I ever find out who did it, I’ll rip the prying nose right off their face.”

I feigned ignorance, and since then, I’ve fine-tuned my vigilance, understanding that each situation is unique.

THE WAVING ARRANGEMENT
that Evelyn and I used had served us well for years. I had never seen so many cars parked in front of her house, though, and as I approached I vividly recalled seeing her the day before. She had held her head canted to one side to better hear the television set, giving me her bright-eyed smile and a quick wave.

When I climbed the front steps, the door opened and a well-dressed young man met me. “Hi,” he said, smiling. I dared to hope that everything was okay inside.

In an effort to confirm it, I asked, “Is Evelyn home? I have some mail for her.”

“She’s right here,” he replied. Reaching out his hand, he introduced himself as her grandson. Behind him, I could see Evelyn talking to a room full of relatives.

“Grandma?” he called in a voice loud enough to be heard over the din in the room. To me, he said, “It’s her birthday. Ninety-nine years old today.”

Evelyn scurried over to the door. Her smile was wonderful to behold.

“Happy birthday,” I offered, at a loss for anything better to say in front of a room full of strangers. Then, overcome with relief and the obvious pleasure in her smile at seeing me, I wrapped an arm around her frail shoulder and gave her a hug.

“Oh,” she tittered, drawing back when I released her. “Is that all I get? A hug? You know, it isn’t every day a girl turns ninety-nine.”

Amid laughter from her gathered family, I planted a big kiss on her cheek. “Happy birthday, Evelyn!”

On her one-hundredth birthday we repeated the ritual, and again for her one hundred and first. After that, she moved into an assisted-living housing complex, and the married grandson took over the house.

It’s wonderful to watch new life being restored to the neighborhood. After all, it’s the younger generation that has the energy to update and maintain the old houses. Now great-grandchildren play where Evelyn once sat watching for my arrival. And I can see her twinkling eyes in theirs.