A Warm, Wet Feeling at the Post Office
posted at 11:01 am
on Nov. 27, 2000
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I went to the post office today. I needed stamps for the growing number of Christmas cards in feel duty-bound to send. It’s not that I don’t like sending cards—in fact, I really enjoy it. It’s just that I never know if I’m creating stress in other people’s lives because they feel they have to send one back to me, or perhaps I’m slighting someone because I didn’t send them a card this year, despite them having sent me one last year. Plus I’m more left-brain than right-brain so my cards are pretty standard store-bought ones, or even somewhat cynical and sarcastic* instead of being the hand-print, watercolor, glitz and glitter and calligraphic works of poetry that people send me.
* Don’t believe me? This year, I sent out cards with a picture of a child standing in a empty lot with his tongue frozen to a metal pole. Merry Christmas!
The line at the P.O. was extremely long, filled with people in the holiday season but not the holiday spirit.
Or so I thought, until one proved me wrong.
I bought some stamps from the stamp machine (it was all out of the reindeer 33 cent ones). I took my stack of cards to the counter at the back of the room, and was standing there, peeling and sticking, peeling and sticking. I had just finished when the guy next to me turned to me and said, “Want a stamp?”
What a Christmas-y gesture, I thought, smiling and reaching out for it.
“I licked it,” he said, flapping it at me.
Oh.
He said he got carried away and had licked one more stamps than he had cards. Didn’t want it to go to waste, you see, he said. “I’ll put it on the envelope for ya.”
Well, things being what they were, I’d already franked mine, but I thanked him for the kind offer and left knowing that it was more about giving than getting.
So I’m giving you a story. And aren’t you glad you’re not getting a card with some random Samaritan’s spit?
