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Monday, July 18, 2005
Life's Little Pleasures: Mailbox Flags
Today I had two pieces of mail that I needed to send off today. Since I am staying in the upstairs bedroom of my buddy’s house for the remainder of the summer, I was pleased to realize that because he lives in a house, he has a real mailbox. As I walked down the driveway toward the mailbox, a man was walking by on a late morning stroll down the tree-lined street on which my buddy lives. We greeted each other with a brief "hello" and a nod of the head as I reached for the mailbox. I placed my letters inside, closed the door, and slowly raised the little red plastic flag that alerts the mailman of the documents inside awaiting post. At that moment, I realized that I hadn't raised a mailbox flag as long as I can remember....ever.
When we lived in Texas, I wasn't old enough to mail anything. Our next two houses in Winston-Salem had flagless mailboxes, the kind with the top flap and decorative metal emblem or image on the side that doesn't really mean anything but gives it an aura of pseudo-prestige. For two years I lived on the campus of UNC-Wilmington and was reduced to a combination of numbers to a small box of a few square inches. One among hundreds. For the past two years at my apartment, I was upgraded to a small box with an actual key. Still, if I wanted to mail something I only had a community box which, of course, had no red flag: the chances of having outgoing pieces must be statistically greater if a few hundred patrons are concentrated to one or two boxes in which to place their mail. That or the postal service simply got tired of hundreds of really tiny red flags on each individual box.
My life's little pleasures can come in any form, like a seemingly insignificant yet completely necessary red plastic flag. That's what pleases me. Where as most people get pleasure out of money and attaining material things, I get pleasure out of observing things that nobody else has given any thought to. In other words, the flag itself does not please me (that would be too creepy) but rather the fact that they are almost always overlooked because they aren't normally thought of as having any meaning outside of their obvious function.
Check out Sam's Mailbox Picture Collection. Apparently I'm not the only freak who finds mailboxes interesting.
Posted by Will at July 18, 2005 12:43 PM in Personal Reflections