July 31, 2023
Greetings from the doofus,
Ordinarily, I don’t need to bring attention to my ignorance, it will manifest itself sufficiently without any support from me. But as a public service, I will posit this example.
The building was kiddy-corner from our school. It was imposing and formal, with pillars and engravings and icons, and to me it might have been another church. Our own church, attached to the school, had many of the same intimidating features, plus a cross, just for emphasis.
There was half a dozen such edifices within a few blocks, all mysteries to me since they were not the correct faith and there would be no point in looking inside them. They all frightened me a little, but in grade school, if we are honest, most things do.
But this building was not a church. I didn’t understand what it was and wasn’t interested in it any more than the Presbyterian building in the other direction. Until the Perrines said we should go in there. They said it was a post office.
The Perrines were my friends. If you had an old encyclopedia, you could look in the P’s and you will find an enormous history devoted just to their mischief. There are school policies that were written just in response to their reputation.
For various reasons, we would find ourselves unsupervised in the busy city, and the nearest place to capitalize on that freedom was the building that was kiddy-corner from our school. (Some kids said ‘catty-corner’ and that made no sense, and so they would be ridiculed like Protestants.)
“Let’s go to the post office,” one of the Perrines would say. I would feel this twinge in my lower stomach, which is where I kept my parents’ warnings about doing wrong things. It was easier to ignore there than in my head, or in my soul, which is where the sins were cataloged. I was unclear which part of the body was the soul-part, and never got the courage to ask.
And so we went to the post office. We would jaywalk across Church Street, (another reason to think the post office was a church) and slip in the side door to the building. From there we could explore the place unfettered. I would already be filled with adrenaline from the jaywalking sin.
Inside were marble steps and polished floors, dark heavy doors under imposing arches. It was not as quiet as a church, but it still inspired a certain reverence.
We would run up the back stairs to the second floor, where, among other less interesting rooms, there were the recruiting offices for different armed services. As often as we dared, we would go in and ask for bumper stickers to support some imaginary family member in the Navy or Marines. I was compelled to confess this later as a venial sin and say several acts of contrition by way of penance.
But the most interesting part of the post office wasn’t the wide hallways lined with mysterious portals to some important mail-oriented business. It was in the basement.
There we would visit the snack shop. It was a small stall tucked between other more official-looking doors, labeled with painted names and numbers. The shop had things that would be appealing to grown-ups, but I have no memory of those. All we cared about was the candy.
Along with the possibility of candy, there was another thrilling attraction. The man behind the counter was blind. Here I will confess, which I failed to do with Father O’Malley, that our intentions in coming to the snack shop were duplicitous. Once we discovered a blind man was there taking money for candy, our intention was to work that to our advantage.
We learned that the blind have a way of touching coins and to identify them, which was fascinating, even though it thwarted our initial plans. I cannot remember with any certainty if we attempted any other deception there, but I will say I feel that twinge in my lower stomach.
We went to the post office often, sometimes just to roam the halls, making squeaking noises on the waxed floors with our gym shoes. Sometimes a post office guard would shoo us out, but that rarely mattered for long.
One winter day we were in school and I ended up in the boys’ bathroom with the Perrines. They had the idea to climb out the window and go to the post office. This would have been an impossible idea on ordinary days, but outside the window was an enormous snowbank, which allowed us to climb out and later back in. I don’t think any of us thought of why we would want to, other than it was possible. It was another little post-it note that features the post office.
I pose this memory in order to frame my previously mentioned ignorance. Recently my wife had jury duty, and she asked me to help her figure out where she was to report. I took the address and then, without telling her, double-checked it. Because it was the post office. Except it’s not the post office, and it hasn’t been for over sixty years. It wasn’t the post office when the Perrines lured me across church street to try to swindle the blind guy in the basement.
Maybe Mr. Perrine called it the post office and we just adopted the title, after all, it had once been a post office before we ever came to St. Matthews school. But for the rest of my life, it’s been a U.S. District Courthouse. I drove by it on Church Street a bazillion times and saw the mailboxes out front and simply assigned it the post office label it has always held in my tiny third-grade brain.
It is interesting to tell this story, although if my wife reads this, she will discover how stupid I am, as if she needed further proof. Interesting, though, because it makes me wonder what else I have wrong, what other impressions and memories are built up around a flawed bookmark from years gone by.
I’m sure not going to ask the Perrines for any clarification.
Hope this finds you willing to learn,
David
Copyright © 2023 David Smith
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