Postal post

The U.S Postal Service has been a pretty handy operation to kick around for as long as I remember. It is often characterized as a lumbering, backward, bureaucratic, and inefficient dinosaur.

Compared to the instantaneous gratification of texting or your favorite social medium,  the postal service might seem to have a hard time fulfilling our idea of service.

Maybe that’s because our idea of service has evolved to mean something smotheringly expedient.

For myself, there is something limiting in a service where I can only “attach” an image that I most likely did not “make,” but only recently “captured”.

So I want to sing the merits of the postal service which, for all their alleged failings, nonetheless tolerates the creative urges of an artist-friend of mine.

Beyond the content that the envelopes enclosed, the “vehicle” of his messages says as much about him as the text of his letters. That they were actually delivered festooned as they were seems to demonstrate a more robust idea of customer service than 140 characters and a hashtag.

Alas, I use both.

If I’m feeling urgent and utilitarian, I use the spare, direct super-highway of a keypad, but if I want to send a chunk of who I really am, I  return to the world of actual dimension where the marks I make as well as the words I choose carry me with them.

To see more letters by Wayne Franklin, visit this Dropbox file.