Rough Job

As it says in the author description, I'm a laborer. Specifically, I deliver mail for the United States Postal Service. It's a tough job. Toughest I've ever had. But I'm reminded of a Marty Feldman quote whenever I think it can't get any worse.

Yeah, there aren't too many things more miserable than working in the cold rain. It sucks. It sucks chimp ass.

However, I arrived home to find that I'd filled in another bit in my Jack Kirby collection. My copy of FANTASTIC FOUR #19 arrived. And actually in a little nicer shape than the seller had indicated. I'm quite happy with it, and relieved to be home and out of the freaking rain.

My copy of FANTASTIC FOUR #19, written and illustrated by Jack Kirby.

The Disappearing Bird

The Disappearing Bird
A Postal Adventure
By James Robert Smith

Having just completed walking a loop, I was sitting in my postal vehicle, taking a breather and getting ready to take my lunch break. My vehicle was under a small tree, in the shade and I was looking down toward a cul-de-sac. After a little while, I noticed that there was a motion to my left, under a carport--a motion that kept repeating. Directing my attention toward it, I saw a small brown bird that seemed to fall from the door of a large blue sedan parked there.

At first, I thought the bird was flying into the raised window of the car, but actually he was trying to perch on the car and was fluttering to the ground each time. My second thought was that he might be injured, but if that were so, how was he repeatedly flying back up to the car each time he “fell”?

After watching this little bird for a minute longer, I saw what was going on.

He was landing on the door, finding some purchase there, so that he could confront his reflection in the side-view mirror mounted on the door. He would land and look his reflection in the eye. After a bit of this face-off, he would launch himself at the mirror, flutter his wings as he encountered the unexpected obstruction (not a bird!) and then land atop the mirror. There, he would stand a second looking for all the world like a completely confused individual.

“WHERE ARE YOU?!! WHAT IS GOING ON HERE?!! I KNOW YOU ARE HERE!!! WHERE ARE YOU?!!”

I imagined him screaming like madman.

He would land again on the door, sometimes losing his footing and fluttering to the ground (the movement that first attracted me to the sight). Eventually, he would find a solid perch, face his taunting opponent yet again and launch himself at this vanishing bastard.

And there he would be on the top of the mirror.

“WHERE ARE YOU??!! I SHOULD BE STANDING ON YOUR HEAD, BUT I’M NOT!!! WHERE ARE YOU??!! HOW ARE YOU DOING THIS??!!” (The madman’s voice again.)

This went on for the duration of my lunch break in the bright, warm sun (30 minutes). I started my engine and drove away, with the little Madman Bird (I don’t know what he was, but that’s what I’ll call the next one I see) still trying to find his elusive antagonist.

No Blood for Amy

No Blood for Amy

By

James Robert Smith

A few months after Dan went to work at the McCullough Station, one of the letter carriers there, a woman of rather a butch stature named Amy, “bid out” (that is, she applied for another job at a different post office). She claimed her knees were bothering her so she went to take a much easier route at the Mount Carmel Station, or so Dan was told. He barely knew Amy, had exchanged less than a dozen words with her, and only noted her because she reminded him of a really stocky guy who played nose guard on his high school football team; and that whenever he went to eat at the McDonald’s Restaurant on his route Dan could find Amy sitting in a booth with the only attractive letter carrier in the station, a shapely divorced brunette woman named Faye. Suspicious, yes.

About two months after Amy left the station the carriers were called to the supervisor’s desk for a talk. Instead of the supervisor, though, it was Faye who would be speaking. She appeared to be visibly upset and as she spoke her voice cracked with emotion. Apparently, Amy had cancer. Well, that was certainly awful news, and Dan could appreciate that many of the carriers in that station would be interested to know this since some of them had worked in that single station with Amy for fourteen years. He, however, barely knew her and was eager to get back to his case, his workstation, to get the letters ready to carry.

After the announcement, he figured he’d heard the last of this.

Oh, no.

About a week later, in the midst of getting his letters prepared for the street, the carriers were called to the supervisor’s desk again for a talk. Once more, it was Faye. To keep them abreast of Amy’s progress, or lack of same. Lack, in this case, since it turned out Amy had a really nasty form of cancer and it had not been detected until it was quite advanced. Things did not look good for Amy, Faye informed us, her voice once again cracking with emotion and her pretty, Aryan features puffing up with sadness. Alas.

He was sorry, of course, but eager to get back to work.

A few days after that talk, work was interrupted again for, yes, another speech about Amy. She was unable to work, even in a limited manner, and was at home quickly using up her sick time. Dan rarely used his sick leave and any wise letter carrier accumulates such sick leave just in case he (or she) really needs it. He had hundreds of hours of such, and he knew carriers who had thousands of hours of sick leave. Amy, apparently, had used hers up over the years, rather than saving it, and now needed volunteers to step forward and donate vacation time for her.

He was very covetous of his vacation time, and had plans for each and every hour of it. However, that said, he was willing to donate eight hours to her. And he was ready to get back to work.

A few days after this, they were called to the supervisor’s desk for a talk. Uh-huh, about Amy.

Now, don’t get him wrong; he felt sorry for her. But he barely knew her. He had worked with her for, maybe, six months and had never spoken to her save to say “hello” a few times. And here he was, being forced to endure another talk about her, preventing him from working. And, as anyone who has ever worked for the wonderful USPS will tell you, time is of the essence. One was pressed for it, punished for wasting it, and constantly beaten down over it. He needed to get back to his case to prepare the day’s mail!

This time, they were asking for cash donations for Amy. A box would be set up at the front of the station where they could drop in cash, or checks. Fine. Okay. Just let him get back to work.

A few days later they were called, again (yes, again), to the supervisor’s desk to hear about Amy. Apparently, the take in the box was less than satisfactory for those who had instigated the scheme. So one of the carriers, an old guy named Alan, stood up and said, “You WILL give at least twenty dollars. Each of us WILL give at least that much by payday.” As far as Dan was concerned, Alan should have added “bitch” to the end of each of those two sentences.

They had to realize, of course, that this meant war.

There was no way Dan was now going to donate leave time, nor cash for Amy. He didn’t actually know her, and she was really, really (even in her absence) getting on his nerves.

In addition, over the following days, his work was interrupted too many more times for talks about Amy by this employee or that employee, but usually by Faye, and that each time a request for money or donated vacation time was made. And each time Dan resisted; indeed, he refused. As time passed, he became more and more resentful of this woman who had been for him merely a passing acquaintance, if that. And he was convinced, now, that he never wanted to know her at all. Her cancer-ridden body had become a real pain-in-the-ass for him.

Slowly, as the days dragged on and the bits and bites taken out of his schedule continued to annoy him, he began to ask a few questions about this Amy-person. How long had she worked for the USPS? Almost seventeen years, it turned out; which meant that she earned top pay, more than Dan made, and had had eleven years more than he had to accumulate sick leave. What did her husband do for a living? Well, he was a bank accountant and made more than a postal employee made and he had full benefits. What kind of insurance did Amy have? Indeed, it was better than Dan’s; plus she had fortunately added a cancer-rider to her policy some months before she was stricken.

Dan was starting to get pissed off. Especially considering that his wife had fallen and shattered her arm about the same time Amy had gotten sick and the situation at his house was that his lone salary was now supporting his entire family without the benefit of his wife’s paycheck. In short, his family was financially and medically worse off than Amy’s. When more requests were made at work for dough for Amy, it soon became obvious to those demanding these things from Dan, for Amy, that he was not forthcoming and was not likely to be. And, he realized, his frustration with the whole situation was becoming known in the office, and his reputation as a grouchy asshole was growing exponentially.

He didn’t care.

A day came when Faye appeared for one of her regular whines, to stand before all as she cried and blubbered and announced that the end was near for poor Amy. Dan rolled his eyes and peeled away from the main group of letter carriers to return to his case and the work that waited for him there. In the coming weeks, as soon as he became aware that the stand-up talk was about Amy and not about USPS policy, he would fade from the mass of concerned idiots and continue at his chores.

And then, after a brief vacation, (you better believe he used his vacation time on himself) Dan returned to work to find that Amy, in his absence, had died.

THANK GOD!

You cannot imagine how happy, by this time, that news made him. He was so happy that it was hard to keep a grin from his face. Dan was so happy that he would no longer have to be torn from his labors to hear yet another sob story about the state of Amy’s health or the grief of her husband and teenaged son. In future, he was to be spared from this, and no one would ever again ask him to donate cash or vacation time to the departed Amy.

But Dan’s fellow employees, of course, at this point, felt it very difficult to let go of the cause. He was cursed with, among other things, announcements for Amy’s memorial services; announcements for Amy’s funeral; announcements for a fucking blood drive in honor of Amy! Each time, he was only too, too happy not to oblige. (He kept his leave time, his money, and not one drop of blood left his veins).

And then, seemingly finally, the talks about Amy at the supervisor’s desk came to a halt. No one mentioned Amy anymore. No one asked for a donation of any kind whatsoever to the cause of Amy or her husband or her daughter or her mother or her favorite charity, or her little dog Toto. Occasionally, Dan would hear a snatch of information that made him even happier that he’d given no money to her cause. One of these tidbits being that her husband had shelled out many thousands of dollars for a top-of-the-line casket emblazoned with the logo of her favorite football team! That she had been buried wearing a cowboy hat in honor of her beloved Dallas Cowboys! (Dan was almost curious what her chemo-ravaged face had looked like in the open casket with that silly hat on her shaved head.) The conclusion, however, was that these were not people to whom he would willingly donate anything whatsoever: The Beans of Egypt Maine with a few bucks in their pockets. Dan sighed, ate food, worked, shit, and never thought at all about Amy.

Weeks went by. No one mentioned Amy. Dan didn’t mention Amy. Sometimes when he spoke to Faye, he noticed that she only replied reluctantly and was usually curt. That was okay. She’d spent maybe too much time with Amy and was resentful of Dan’s refusal to donate to the loving cause. He could live with that. He didn’t care. The days of Amy standup talks were in the past.

Until.

Amy’s husband appeared before them at a talk at the supervisor’s desk to thank them for all that they, had done for Amy. Dan supposed the several thousand dollars the crew had raised had helped pay a small percentage of that Dallas Cowboys casket. Faye stood at his side, her face gone all red and puffy with grief for Amy, the linebacker-sized woman gone to that great cancer ward in the sky. When he was done, Dan clapped. Not too loudly, but he wanted to freaking yell and pump his fist and do a goddamned victory dance and high-five the poor bastard who’d been Amy’s husband. This was, he fervently hoped, the period on the running sentence that had been the Ballad of Amy with Cancer.

May it, at last, be ended.

Dan had his fucking doubts.

The Cat I Never Saw

The Cat I Never Saw
By James Robert Smith

I deliver mail.

When I first started I worked at a station that was in downtown Charlotte. A lot of the neighborhoods in which I worked were in very poor neighborhoods. Lots of run-down houses and clunkers parked in the streets. For whatever reason, there were always empty lots filled with junk and scrap wood and overgrown with weeds and sometimes the rusting hulks of abandoned vehicles. In the summertime the rollout garbage cans would be at the sidewalks where I walked and the stench of maggoty food rotting in the heat would be stupefying in its intensity.

Often, I would have to dodge nipping dogs, or wade through mewling kittens, or keep an eye out for trouble of various types. On three occasions I got caught in the crossfire of angry people shooting at one another with handguns. Sometimes the job was most definitely not much fun.

One day I was delivering mail in Wilmore. I’m not sure how the Wilmore Neighborhood got its name. But it was a lovely place, and you could see the old luster of respectability underneath the flaking paint and weedy yards; and through the screams and the odd gunshots, there was sometimes silence.

On a particularly hot and sticky day, I was hoofing it down what I knew was a very bad street in this very tough neighborhood. About one-fourth of the houses on the street were vacant. They’d been bought by speculators who knew the whole Wilmore area was going to be gentrified soon, and they were banking on making a killing once the white yuppies moved in to replace the poor black and Hispanic inhabitants. In fact, Wilmore was the last such neighborhood in the downtown area that had yet to be so gentrified. Houses that were once practically worthless were selling for high five figures, and sometimes six figures for the more well preserved estates.

I was nearing the end of the street, where it intersected with a major thoroughfare when a very old, very thin black woman came walking toward me from her driveway. It was a concrete driveway, probably poured sometime in the late-40s when the residents there had all been white folk. The drive was still concrete, but now it was cracked like glazed porcelain and broken by the roots of a dozen trees, both living and dead.

“Hey,” she said to me.

“Hello,” I replied.

“Would you like to see the biggest rat I’ve ever seen?”

Now, I had expected her to say something. I had expected her to ask me about the mail, or whether I had a package she’d been expecting, or if I’d take some greeting cards to the post office for her. Something like that. I have to say that to be asked if I’d like to see the biggest rat this very old woman had ever seen was not anywhere on any list of things that I would have suspected would be mentioned by her.

So I thought about it for a second or two. Long enough so that she maybe thought I was going to pass.

“You really should see this rat,” she told me. “It’s enormous.” Her diction was very good, and I suspect that she may have been either a teacher or a secretary in her youth.

“Sure,” I finally said. “I reckon I would like to see the biggest rat you’ve ever seen.”

“It’s over here,” she said. And I followed her up the slight incline of the drive to side of her modest brick house. She pointed.

And there it was. Ratzilla. It was, as she had advertised, the biggest goddamned rat I had ever seen. Thankfully quite stiff and dead, and the biggest she had ever seen, she had said. It was bigger than a large puppy. And, no, it was not a muskrat, which we do have in this area. And it was not nutria, which we do not have in this area. It was just a huge freaking black rat. It must have weighed more than two pounds, easily. It was bigger than my foot, not counting the ugly, gray, naked tail.

After being horribly aware of its enormous size, the next things that I noticed were the wounds on its neck. It had a couple of puncture wounds that appeared to have been formed by something the size of a sixteen-penny nail.

“What did that?” I asked her, pointing at the punctures on the neck.

“Oh. That. My cat did that.””Your cat? I’d have thought a big dog bit it.”

“No, that cat’s huge, too. Biggest cat I’ve ever seen. He doesn’t come inside. But he showed up here last year and I feed him.”

I looked away from the rat and scanned the empty lot next to her house, searching for a sign of a cat that had teeth big enough to make those kinds of wounds. My bare legs suddenly felt really vulnerable.

“Well, ma’am. I don’t know what you’re feeding that cat, but I’d keep it up if I were you.” Then I waved to her and wandered on down the street.

I never did see that cat.

Augh. By James Robert Smith.

Work.

Horrid.

Come home exhausted.

Eat.

Sleep.

More work.

Too tired to write

novel.

Sleep.

Thanks the gods

for

poetry.

Kittens.

"Kittens"By
James Robert Smith

When I first became a letter carrier, I never knew where I'd be delivering mail. That's the curse and the blessing of being a new Part Time Flexible employee of the USPS. The Part Time label is misleading. There's no "part time" about it. I’d do fifty plus hours a week. But the flexible: ah, there was the rub. Until I walked through the door in the morning and went to the desk of my supervisor, I didn't know precisely where I’d deliver the mail. It might’ve been to a neighborhood where the houses all cost over half a million bucks apiece and the streets are fifty feet wide and lined with hundred-year-old oaks. Or it could’ve been a public housing war zone with not a tree in sight and stray dogs roaming about looking for a mailman to bite, and crackheads trying to figure out a way to fool me into thinking they live in a unit where I'm about to deliver a welfare check they can steal. I never knew.

One day I had the best of both worlds. I delivered to a war zone, and I dropped mail among the jillionaires.

In the low income area I tromped about in the sun, the temperature as usual was well into the nineties and approaching one hundred. Sweat poured off of my head and into my eyes and soaked my clothes from shoulder to ankle. But I didn't mind. I only had to think of merely one of the minimum wage jobs I’d had before the Postal Service rescued me and I was resuscitated. So I moved along, went from house to house and watched for mean doggies in this strange place.
Along one of the streets I happened upon a yard in which a rather large Rotweiler strained against chain and collar to get at my flesh. I gave the big doggie perhaps a wider berth than was necessary. And there came a young voice from behind me. "Hey," it said. I turned my head as I continued to pound the steaming pavement and noticed a group of kids following me. About seven or eight kids, one of them a white boy who glided silently along with the others on his bike.

"Hey," I returned.

"Are you scared of that dog?" The speaker was the kid in front, bigger than the rest of them and I figured he was their leader.

"Heck, yes, I'm scared of that dog."

There was a moment of silence from the kid. None of the others said anything. I got the distinct impression that they'd never heard a grown man admit that he was afraid of something. Finally, he spoke up as I approached my next stop.

"I'm scared of him, too," the kid said.

"I'm scared of all dogs," I told them. "They can all bite."

The kid considered that for a second as I put the mail in the box on the front porch of the house and turned toward the next one. "You're scared of all dogs," he asked.

"Yep." I moved efficiently along and the kids followed me, silently.

"Are you scared of cats?"

I smiled. "Nope. Cats don't weigh one hundred pounds and bite your ass," I told him. He laughed.

"Well, goodbye," the kid said. And he and his partners peeled quietly away and vanished down a side street. I walked on.

At the next house in this "bad" neighborhood, as I walked up to the front porch, I noticed that the stairs and the porch itself were covered in kittens. Yes, kittens. Little, furry, delightful kittens. They all turned my way and mewed oh so faintly and made me want to take them home with me. As I stooped to pat a particularly friendly little tabby on its tiny head, the front door opened and out came a young black man.

He smiled at me, said "hi" and I returned the greeting and handed him his mail. He was dressed in a uniform and obviously works for a big landscaping company here in town. I asked him about the kittens. "What are you going to do with all of these kittens," I said. "Are you giving them away," I added before he can answer.

"Yeah," he told me. "You're welcome to one. Me and my wife are buying a house. Moving to a much better neighborhood," he added. "She feeds these cats and they take up here and start having kittens, and I don't want them at the new house so we're giving them all away."

"Wow. Did one cat have all these kittens? They all look the same age." I indicated the dozen or so baby cats lying about.

"No. Two cats." He pointed to a calico. "That one had all the colorful ones." And he showed me a yellow cat lying under a chair. "And she had all the dark ones. About a day apart."

"Well, I can't take one right now. I just started the day and a kitten would die in my jeep on a day like this. But can I come back some time and get one?"

"Yeah. Sure. Just come by after work and you can have one. We're moving soon. To a nice neighborhood," he reminded me.

I waved at him and said goodbye, left. As he drove off I mentally kicked my own ass for not introducing myself.

And this dumb little poem comes to me.

Kittens here and kittens there.
Kittens, kittens everywhere.
Kittens on the porch
and kittens on the lawn.
Kitten siblings and kittens' mom.
Now I don't know if this is bad,
but there was no sign of kittens' dad.

We all have our ways of staying sane. So, there. There was my day. Another typical day in the life of this mailman.

Harry Potter and the Wage Slaves.

“HARRY POTTER AND THE WAGE SLAVES”
By
James Robert Smith

Well, it was a first for the Postal Service, as far as I knew. Granted, I’ve been with them less than ten years, but a standup talk concerning the legalities of delivering a newly released children’s book had to be unique.

There we were, called away from our cases where we’d all been busy getting the mail ready for delivery. These talks are almost a daily occurrence, yes, but they generally involve safety issues or changes in protocol. This time, however, the talk was about HARRY POTTER.

And the “something or other”.

The USPS had an exclusive contract to deliver some unknown hundreds of thousands of copies of this book. They were to be delivered on Saturday. The station manager reinforced this fact a number of times. “Saturday only,” he repeated. If we were to find any copy of the book in our parcel bins before said Saturday, we were to turn them in to our supervisor where they would then be locked in the manager’s office until the proper date.

Anyone caught delivering a HARRY POTTER (“and the something or other”) before the aforementioned Saturday would be fired.

That’s fired. Not spoken to. Not written up. Not disciplined.

Fired.

I returned to my case after the talk, sweating the possibility that one of the hideous novels might be in my parcel bin early and that I’d deliver it by accident to some horrid kid who would rat me out. It could happen, I supposed. How would I know if I had one? Aren’t they delivered in plain brown wrappers, I thought? I asked my shop steward about that.

“No,” he told me. “They have HARRY POTTER written on the package.”

“You’ve seen them?” I asked.

“No. But I’ve been told.”

Great. Something else to worry over. I began to think of them as something more like THE NECRONOMICON than a children’s book. Maybe one would worm its way into my mailbag and wreak havoc. When, an hour later, I was ready to hit the streets, I pawed through every package very carefully. Maybe my skin would crawl when I touched one. There were a number of brown boxes in there from Amazon and B&N. None of them had ‘HARRY POTTER’ printed on them. Cool. I was safe.

But the USPS is notorious for blaming employees for events far beyond the control of those employees. I’d been dressed down for not delivering mail that arrived in the office long after I’d left for the street. As if I could do anything about it. Cold sweats again, so I pushed it out of my mind.

Saturday, the books arrived. I had a dozen of the little bastards. HARRY POTTER & THE SOMETHING-OR-OTHER. My shop steward was right: it was printed on the outside of the packages. I got the mail ready and hit the streets. I placed the novels in mailboxes, put them on porches, leaned them against doorjambs and rang the bells.

I handed one over to a mom who happened to be waiting at the door. She called to her daughter. “Your Harry Potter book is here,” she yelled. A blond-headed ten-year-old appeared from within the air-conditioned depths of the house. “Oh my God,” the little girl yelled. “It’s here!”

Indeed.

My job was safe for another day. But, last week, word in the office was that more than one letter carrier had been fired for delivering that damned book a day early. Anecdotal material, unverified by either management or union, but there it was.

All I cared was that I was home free. Harry Potter be damned.

Etiquette

Etiquette
By
James Robert Smith


According to Robert Graves, that nastiest of curses (you know, the one that begins with “f”) is derived from the Celtic word fachen, which means, literally, to seize.

I had been holding down the route of another carrier who was out on maternity leave. She was going to be gone for a couple of months, so I was getting spoiled doing her route. It was a nice one in a safe, secure neighborhood with lots of trees and wide lawns. A pleasure to walk.

One particular elderly couple had taken to talking to me every day. Eventually, they began to expect me to take a seat on their porch if the weather was really hot and humid and they’d offer me a glass of tea or a soft drink so I could cool off for a few minutes and talk with them. They liked square dancing and, it ended up, had met my in-laws who were also into that.

I enjoyed the brief respites from the labor of lugging the mail across that section of the route. On the occasions when they weren’t at home, they would leave me a canned soft drink in the mailbox and it would always be frosty since it would be in one of those can insulators. I’d take the drink and the packet of crackers that would also be left for me. It was all rather pleasant.

The only drawback to this section of the route was a particularly nasty Dalmatian that lived across the street from the old couple. I’d have to pass the dog each day and it would roar and bear its fangs at me and I always thought blessed be the fence-builders, for my ass is safe. But I knew that if that dog ever got out, I’d be in big trouble. Some dogs, you just know are going to tear you apart if they get the chance. This was one of those.

A day came; you get into a groove after a while and it’s all very comfortable doing a route. You cross this street, you walk through this yard, you detour around this flowerbed, and you walk up this set of steps. The day was nice, not too hot, and partly cloudy, I was happy and oblivious and across the street from the old couple’s house. I walked past the fence where the Dalmatian usually waited to snarl, growl, and slobber at me. But he wasn’t there and I figured he was in the house.

I was wrong.

The dog came roaring at me as I approached the front steps. He was out in the yard and I didn’t see him until he was bearing down on me full speed. The dog’s owner was standing about twenty feet away, watching, talking on a cell phone. I froze. The owner continued to stand and talk. The dog ran toward me and all I could see were teeth.

Just about the only thing you can do in a situation like this is to get your mailbag between your flesh and the dog’s jaws. At the last possible instant, I was able to do this. I dropped the mail I was carrying and put my satchel as a barrier between my flesh and the dog’s muzzle. The dog bit the mailbag instead of me, tore at it, and actually tugged me from side to side (and I’m not a small man).

I looked up. The owner was still talking on the phone, casually, as if nothing was going on.

The dog let go of the bag and lunged at my legs. And once more I got the bag down low enough so that he got a mouthful of canvas instead of my calves. I screamed for some help from the dog’s owner who continued to chat on the cell phone. There was another lunge, and the Dalmatian got canvas again, tearing at it.

Finally, the dog’s owner put the phone in his pocket and walked over, very casually, as if this were no big deal. He grabbed the dog by the collar and pulled him away, the hound slobbering and snapping and growling all the while until he was shoved into the house.

The dog’s owner stood at the front door and looked at me, saying nothing. I looked at him.

And at the top of my lungs I burned his ears with my rage. I stood there, surrounded by the mail I’d had to drop to defend myself while he talked on his cell phone. Larry Flynt wouldn’t print what I yelled. The dog owner said nothing and retreated into the house while I picked up the scattered letters and magazines.

Shaken, my head aching, the blood pounding in my ears, I continued my route. It was some time before my heart stopped hammering in my chest. Back at my postal vehicle, I just sat and collected my wits. This happens a lot, but I never get used to it. All you can do is try to put it out of your mind.

The next day, the dog was behind the fence again. No one else was there. I delivered that mail and crossed the street to the old couple’s house. The woman opened the door a crack as I was placing the mail in the box.

“Hello,” she said to me from behind the door. I could just see her in the space she had opened.

“Hi,” I said. “How are you today?”

She ignored the greeting. “Was that you yesterday yelling across the street?”

“Oh. Yes, ma’am. The guy over there let his dog out on me and wouldn’t get it off of me.”

She closed the door without another word.

I never saw either of them again, and that was the end of the soft drinks and packs of crackers waiting for me in their mailbox.

Seize the day.

I do believe in ghosts, I DO believe in ghosts...

I’m a skeptic. And I mean that in the hardest, most adamant terms. For me, the scientific principle holds. If there’s no evidence, I’m not convinced.

When I was younger, and would hear tall tales by others that they’d seen, or heard, or felt the presence of a ghost, I would roll my eyes if I was in a good mood, and tell them they were full of shit if I wasn’t feeling very gracious. I didn’t then, and don’t now, believe in any kind of an afterlife. There just can’t be anything like a ghost. Show me one, or show me how to detect one, and maybe…just maybe, now…we’ll talk seriously about it. Until then, it’s just so much hot air.

So what I had concluded, after some little thought, was that anyone who claimed to have seen a ghost was either:

A: lying like an incumbent politician.

Or:

B: Doin’ some ‘shrooms.

There was no middle ground, and no other alternative. If you told me you saw a ghost you were either a liar or you were floating wrong-side up.

And then I became a mailman, and within two weeks, everything changed.

It’s not that I saw a ghost. Well, not exactly. But what happened was that I gained…well…a new perspective. I began to see things a little differently. What I’m talking about are dogs. As in, dawgs. Mongrels. Flea-bitten mutts. Filthy, snarling, barking, biting, stinking fecal-factories. Those generally large, highly territorial, extremely aggressive carnivores that Mankind has dragged along for the ride into oblivion.

No, I did not see the ghosts brought to me by a dog. Although, I genuinely wished to send many hounds into the hereafter. (You know that movie, All Dogs Go to Heaven? For me, that’s not a title, but a reasonable proposition. All of them. Like, right now.)

No, no ghosts. What happened was that, as a new letter carrier, schlepping mail in the worst possible sections of the worst routes in town, I began to encounter dogs by the dozens. By the scores. Dogs tied up with rope. Dogs restrained by battleship chain. Dogs behind fences. Dogs on the other sides of doors. Dogs raging through closed windows. And, Jove help me, dogs running loose and slavering like speed-freak zombies for my precious flesh.

Within a week I was quite frightened of dogs. Within two weeks I began to hate them with a white-hot passion. Within three weeks I was carving notches in my postal vehicle steering wheel; one for each dog squashed.

I learned, in short order, fear of doggies. Yes, I was a caniphobe.

And here’s where I found a new respect for those who claim to see the ghost of the old maid who used to live down the block and at whose yard they rolled with tp in their junior year; for those who said they heard their drowned little brother calling out from the drainpipe in the sink; for those who said their husband’s spirit was haunting them for screwing around that time five years into their marriage.

I found that new respect because, by the regal head of Anubis, I was seeing dogs every-freaking-where I looked. I’d be lugging my mailbag down a garbage-strewn side road near the corner of Crip Street and Blood Avenue and look up and see a German shepherd waiting to pounce. Only to realize I was looking at a holly shrub. Or I’d be rounding the corner in the Hicksville Apartment Complex and see a Doberman scratching to leap from the edge of a building, only to realize it was nothing but a broom propped against a brick wall. In short:

I was seeing ghosts.

After about a year of being a mailman, I stopped seeing these dog shades. I learned how to just stop being scared witless of them all of the time and just be cautious and careful. Yeah, I’m still a little bit afraid of the worthless ass-licking bags of stench. But not to the point that I see them where they aren’t.

And I found, along the way, that while those people who say they see those ghosts aren’t really seeing anything at all, I do believe that THEY believe they’re seeing ghosts.

As for the notches in my steering wheel? Sixteen and counting. In mailman parlance, I’m an ace three times over.