I was outside searching for something for the daily picture and coming up with bupkis. I wound up looking at our Canada Post “Super Mailbox” and realizing how inconsequential postal mail has become over my lifetime. Thus I wound up with one picture and a story…
Mail was an essential thing when I was a kid. It was how you got any important document or any sort of package. And, of course, bills. I originally grew up in the town of Innisfail, Alberta. We had a community post office where everyone got their mail from their assigned box. There was a brief period where we lived in an apartment in Edmonton, Alberta, when I was around age five and we got our mail from a box in the lobby. It seemed much more convenient to me than crossing town for your mail.
I never experienced home delivery until we moved to Calgary, Alberta, in the seventies when I was around nine. Having a carrier come around and drop your mail in a little box outside your door? Wow. That was service. Most of the mail turned out to be bills. The bills weren’t really my concern when I was a kid, other than I had to read the mail to my mother after she went blind. I remember her getting a sick look whenever I read her the bills. Money was always tight.
What I always looked forward to were the small white envelopes with my grandmother’s familiar scrawl on them. I would usually get one a week and they were always a treat. I would write her back right after, carefully using my neatest printing. Long distance phone calls were very expensive back then, so mail was an affordable way for family members to update each other at a distance. She would occasionally slip a fiver into my letter, and you didn’t get those over the phone! Cha-ching.
Canada Post was losing money like crazy back in the day so the federal government forced them to start installing Super Boxes, a.k.a. community mailboxes in the newer communities. Man, was there an uproar over that in the late eighties. It didn’t seem like that big of a deal to me as I had grown up with one community mailbox in town known as a post office. I would miss having the mail at my door, but I didn’t get wound up over it. Besides, I was an adult at that point and didn’t really snail mail my gran that much anymore. (Which I regret now.)
Email came onto the scene in the nineties and the community mailbox became more and more of a quaint curiosity. Now, in 2024, it is that thing across the street I keep getting flyers in that I have to recycle. I occasionally get a Temu package there or something from eBay. That’s it. Not even bills come in it now. It is amazing how quickly and easily something once essential drifts into disuse and obscurity.
I wonder if Super Boxes will still be there for my daughter when she is my age? I doubt it. I hope she does email me occasionally if I am still alive at that point. Or if we still have email.
Today’s image is from a mobile phone. I not only mailed today’s post in, I phoned it in as well, so there. Suck it.
