POST OFFICE DRAMA

There are little things that really aren’t so little when you think about it. Take what happened to me when I was buying stamps in the branch Post Office the other day.

Just inside the door a postal employee 1s helping us customers to choose the correct line for our purpose. I explain,

“I just want to buy some forever stamps.” 

“Do you have eleven dollars exact change?” she asks. She puts out her hand, clearly offering to jump the line to buy the stamps for me.

“I think I just might!” I say, whipping out my wallet and handing her a $10 bill.  

 “I know I have a single somewhere” I start searching my pockets. The dollar bill, unfortunately, is being uncooperative, hiding somewhere  in my coat pockets. I start to get flustered and can feel my face flushing as I keep rooting around in my jacket pocket feeling frantically among winter gloves, car keys and cough drops. 

The other customers waiting on line, with nothing better to do at the moment, are watching as the post office lady asks me, “Sir, would you please step out of the line and stand by this table.” Then, still clutching my ten dollars, starts walking away. Before I can to protest she calms me:

“I’ve got the eleven dollars here. I’ll be right back with the stamps.” As she heads for the stamp window she tosses me an explanation over her shoulder, “That lady gave you the dollar.”

I turn around searching for my benefactor among the eight customers, all wearing covid masks, of course, and all of them women. No one says anything. Everyone is waiting to see how the drama will unfold. I start looking carefully at the people standing at the end of the line, where the dollar bill must have come from, wondering who to thank. Then I see her. 

There’s no mistake: her eyes are giving her away. They’re beaming with delight, squinting the way a big smile makes you squint. A couple of the folks on the line are in on the secret, and their eyes are squinting too with unseen smiles. They know, as I do, that we’re in one of the city’s poorer neighborhoods, where dollar bills are not easy to come by. This fact makes me so grateful I hardly know what to say. 

Suddenly I find myself with a book of forever stamps in my hand, heading for the exit. I step over and start to mumble through my mask some enthusiastic words of thanks to the lady with the smiling eyes, but she waves me off, her eyes still laughing with pleasure, as if thanking me for making her day.

As I step through the exit I feel the eyes of the folks on line following me, pleased with the happy ending of the little one-act play that has just finished. 

Maybe all of us understand that woman’s warm emotion, the satisfied feeling that comes from little gestures of generosity and concern toward strangers, little signs of rebellion in this cold covid winter of hatred and racial division and discouragement.

Her smiling eyes will be encouraging me long after my forever stamps are used up.