THE POSTSCRIPT: The Post Office

BY CRESTA MCGOWAN

The post office is a magical place. That is a bold statement, given it isn’t a castle with wands or an adventure through Middle Earth, yet it holds more enchantment for humanity than all the worlds of fiction. The post office carries our secrets – our wild unknown desires across the world, and it’s the communication we cherish most because the words, the gifts, the packages live and breathe in us. It reveals triumphs and tribulations with the simplicity of a postcard and a stamp, and we save this art throughout time immemorial.

The Customs House Museum & Cultural Center here in Clarksville, with its timeless beauty, used to be the local post office. Built in 1898 and considered quite flamboyant in its structure, it was home to the communications of the past. It existed when mail lived as loopy script across paper with deliberately chosen words. Magical. But with time, the post office moved down the street, and that is now a new venue for dining paying homage to its roots as “The Mailroom.” Modern post offices populate our city en masse, and many of us probably don’t know our mail person's name despite the daily visit to our homes. Over time, the excitement of “snailmail” abated with electronic transmission and texting taking over the “page.” Letters have become something scoffed at with little appreciation for the time it takes to write in script, to carefully consider our phrases, to reflect on what to say and how to say it.

My grandma ran the local post office out of a mint green shot-gun house in Creedmoor, Texas. I helped her in this small relic of the past while she drank coffee and smoked Lucky Strikes. She always had a cigarette in her wrinkled lips, her jet-black hair in a bob above her shoulders. I don’t remember her hairstyle ever changing or even a slip of gray disrupting her locks, even through the cancer that took her from me. She would let me sit on the front counter and greet people as they came in to mail their letters before the days of self-service and internet shipping, and she talked and laughed and knew everyone and everything in their tiny slice of the world. When mail came in from Austin, I helped her sort it, placed the epistles in twenty or so rusted cubby holes with numbers delegating their proper person. When the day was slow and heat dragged into the summer of Texas, she let me sit on the back counter and play with the postage stamps. Not the self-sticking square of today, but a bevy of wooden carved rubber stamps with important information embossed on each. I would take envelopes and create designs and artful masterpieces with my stamps and ink.

Post Office, Clarksville, Tenn. Postcard, n.d.

Austin Peay State University Felix G. Woodward Library, Archives & Special Collections

This time with her, with letters, has never left me. When my husband and I left junior college, we went our separate ways to separate states. He joined the Army, and I went on to university. We wrote a few letters, mostly sappy love prose (on my behalf) and general upkeep, because back then, long-distance phone calls were expensive and the impersonal abbreviations of text didn’t exist. But in July of 1999, I wrote him a letter and bared my soul. I wrote my love down on cream colored paper with red and pink flowers about the edge. I wanted to know if he was still in love with me, because I was still in love with him. I chose my scripted words carefully. We were married in July of 2000, one year later.

I think about that letter. How it went through the steps of the post office, the mail truck, the transition into bins and the placement into his mailbox. I think about his reply and how we slipped back together as if never apart, how the words I wrote by hand, this form of communication, became the way the love of my life returned to me.

The post office is more than a place to send things. While it seems on the surface a business of impersonal transactions, what comes to pass in this somewhat sterile environment is deeply personal. Ernest Vincent Wright talks of mail in his novel Gadsby. He shares the idea that mail, a postcard, a piece of paper, a stamp means nothing in the world until they cross the partition into action. It is there that “a magical transformation occurs; and anybody who now should willfully purloin it, or obstruct its trip in any way, will find prison doors awaiting him.”

My grandma never saw the inside of a massive post office like the one the Museum used to be, nor did she dine in restaurants with names showing loyalty to time gone by. But she played her role in this heartfelt communication. The little post office in Creedmoor, TX isn’t there anymore, and my husband never met my grandma or saw the magical place with vintage rubber stamps. Yet, as I wrote those words to my now husband and held my breath, I believe she smiled in Heaven, guided my hand as I composed my heart on the page, jet black hair, holding a Lucky Strike.