Our Extraordinary Mail

Every day in residential America, millions of adults approach small magical boxes located outside their homes and apartments with fear, excitement, and disappointment. This custom ceases to fascinate me. In fact, the daily interaction between Americans and their boxes is so amazing that it must be examined and shared.

The practice of going to the box has occurred throughout my entire life and, as I have been told, it has occurred throughout America for a couple hundred years. It seems that going to the box is inevitable and unavoidable, because otherwise almost no one would do it.

The slips of paper that appear magically in the boxes by the day's end usually seem to have an upsetting quality. The person sent or compelled to gather the paper bundles will shuffle through the paper slips and often display olympic disapppointment. Occasionally, a slip of paper will cause the person holding it to smile, laugh, or even dance. Positive interactions are most likely to occur the bigger and more brightly colored the papers are. This is a rare occurance. Even rarer is the day when no paper bundle is to be found in the box. Oddly, this also has a negative impact on the emotions of the paper gatherer.

Once the papers have been gathered and brought into the person's dwelling, the papers are distributed. Men, women, and children each receive a share of these papers and the emotive quality of each piece of paper never seems to lose it's potentcy. The emotional interactions with the papers keep occuring no matter how many people in the house or apartment touch the papers.

Once each recipient has either throughly examined his or her paper slips or dismissed their contents entirely, the papers are stored. Some people place the paper bundles on bureaus and in desks, or on top of refrigerators and in cabinet drawers. Others throw the entire contents away in waste baskets. Some people cry and burn the slips while others cry and store the papers in shoeboxes. This practice of storing the papers is so complex, but one thing is clear: Americans will do whatever they have to to deny that these paper bundles ever existed.

Once or twice a month Americans will procure magic paper bundles of their own and place them back into the box located outside their residence. Once again, the outgoing papers are interacted with in the very same manner that the incoming papers were.

In conclusion, this look at the magic practice of receiving and sending paper bundles has certainly shown that millions of Americans will subject themselves to daily disappointment despite the terrible odds of ever receiving a happiness-producing paper. Perhaps this ritual is reflective of an overall American tendency to seek out happiness in the most unlikely places.