Tag: post office

Friendly Goodbye

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Checking the mail in North Dreadful
Yesterday, I visited the North Dreadful post office for the last time to close our post office box. This transaction involved standing in line, filling out a form, and receiving $6.00 in cash in exchange for the keys. There was another customer there buying stamps for a big stack of invitations, which he had not counted in advance. Probably not more than 30 years old, the other customer had on long plaid shorts, large old school glasses and an interesting hat. For the first time since I moved here a year ago, this stranger in the post office seemed genuinely interested in talking to me, and I had to tell him that I was moving out.
The housekeeper is sad to see us go. Her opinion of the Landlordsis that they are “crazy.” She is incredulous that they can rent out the house and “make money on it” while the furniture is “all garbage.” There are slipcovers on the upholstered furniture, so until you take those off to wash them you do not notice that underneath it is indeed garbage.
The listing agent’s attitude about our leaving is a mystery to me. About 30 hours before the last big, bad storm here, she sent me an email:
I spoke to [Landlord] and he mentioned he might consider a reduced rent  month to month if you want to keep it for a while or until we rent it. Fall is so beautiful up there. 
Between the power outages and the loss of internet access, I was not especially keen to answer her. Furthermore, the lease on our new city apartment had started already, and I was busy dealing with problems there. I did not want to make a nasty reply, thinking it would not do anyone any good, so I thought I would wait until I could say something pleasant.
Almost exactly ten days later, I heard from her again:
Hi, I may have a showing for tomorrow  Tuesday morning around 10:30. I am waiting to confirm but will that work?
Our lease stipulated that we would get 24 hour notice of showings. This email had been sent exactly 26 hours in advance. I replied immediately after reading her message, saying that I was going to be in the city all day that day and the next,dealing with issues at our new apartment. I explained that my children were in charge at the Red Barn, that the dogs would bethere (in their kennels), and thathousekeeper comes on Tuesdays in the early afternoon. I summed up saying that it was not the “day to show it at its best,” and that, “Any other day this week or next would be preferred.”
I had two replies. The first:
Hi, It is not my client and it is the only day she has her so I had better go with what we have if that is ok.
You have a new apartment eh. I guess you don’t want to take [Landlord] up on his offer to keep the house on a month to month if it does not get rented.
And the second:
Hi , They definitely want to see it tomorrow morning at 10:30.. I know you said it is not the best day but It is too difficult to get the other agent and her client at a convenient time for us so we have to go with the flow. Please confirm received.
At this point, I had Leveled Up to “Had Enough.” My reply:
I don’t know if you are trying to be funny here.
Your query coincided with our fourth or fifth prolonged power outage. I was hoping to reply when I could say something polite and positive, rather than be blunt.
 The neighborly North Salem you presented to us in the aftermath of Irene is not the one we have experienced this year. When the power goes out, the Red Barn is the only one on Mills without a generator, so while our milk spoils and we flush toilets with buckets of pool water, we hear our neighbors going about their normal days, generators humming away.
I am leaving North Salem with no local friends at all. The immediate neighbors see us coming and going but I rarely even get a wave back. The school made no effort to incorporate [child]into the class, and the PTA did not call to invite me to join. 
As far as [Landlord]‘s month-to-month offer goes, I spent the whole year feeling gouged on the price of rent here. Remember, you all teamed up to raise the rent once we said we needed to stay on after we were moved in. Had the rent stayed at the original rate for the full year, we probably would have signed on for another six months, at least. 
I have spoken to my kids about tidying up and being ready for the 10:30 am appointment tomorrow. 
I realized that I was not going to accomplish anything productive. I also realized that I had not been pleasant. Sometimes, though, telling the truth is irresistible. Her reply: 
Wow, I am shocked I never heard a peep about any problems. When I met you on the road walking the dogs you said all was great. I have lived here since I was a kid and we have never had power outages like recent times. People are just starting to get generators. Not all have them. As far as a “friendly” town all I hear and do are good things. I wish I had heard of your feeling isolated as I would have done something. Apparently a lack of communication could have been the problem. As to gouged on the rent?? We had been getting [more] in the past but dropped to go along with the market. As I said I don’t think your disatisfaction should have gotten this far.
I will be there tomorrow.
I have not truncated her message, omitting the “I’m so sorry you had this experience in my town.” My takeaways: I was supposed to somehow know that this year was unusual for power outages; she is “friendly” and so is her town; had I told her I was feeling isolated, she would have done something about it.

Cat Panic 3: Revenge of the Bureaucrats

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Yesterday I made my (almost) daily visit to the local post office.  I found a letter in my box that was intended for the box next door, and stood in line for a while, waiting to hand it to a staff member.  I am always alarmed by mis-delivered mail, viewing it as a sign that things just aren’t as reliable as they should be. The woman ahead of me in line was trying to mail a greeting card in a square envelope. It was carefully addressed in her large, loopy cursive, and she had chosen a decorative stamp and applied it in the corner. Because of its unusual dimensions, it was going to require 20¢ extra postage. The customer produced a plastic bag full of a large number and variety of carefully organized postage stamps from her purse and explained to the clerk that she had 5¢ stamps, but felt there was not enough room for them on the envelope.
The clerk looked in the stamp drawer (which is no longer at the counter but is instead somewhere in the back and off to the side) for a 20¢ stamp to sell her, but they had none. They also had no 10¢ stamps, so four 5¢ stamps was her only choice. Together, the clerk and the customer placed the stamps in the remaining space in the upper left hand corner of the envelope. Then, the clerk hand-cancelled the envelope with two rubber-stamps.
Next, I drove over to the local UPS store to send my youngest son’s clothes to summer camp. I was greeted cheerfully by a staff member as I walked in.  The cheerful clerk took my heavy boxes from me and struck up a conversation with me about the retailers whose boxes I had used and about summer camp and about how long it might take the packages to get there.  Customers are listed within UPS’s database by their phone number, and the process is so quick and confidence-inspiring that it was not until I was driving away that I had time to reflect on the contrast to the post office.
Right before we moved in to the Big Red Barn, I was strong-armed told by the belligerent detail-oriented listing agent to apply for a post office box instead of using the mailbox at the top of our drive way. Her argument was, “Yes, you need to.”
The post office in this community is staffed by grouchy detail-oriented people who send back any mail addressed to our street address rather than the post office box number. In large grease pencil they write: NO RECEPTICLE (or sometimesNO RECEPTACLE). The post office is approximately two miles away from our house, which makes it just far enough away not to be a walking destination. It also has a lot of signage about allowing no dogs except service dogs, about the special penalty for robbing a post office, about their brief hours of operation, and about their rates for various sizes of boxes for their state-of-the-artslow shipping.
The mailbox that is/isn’t at the top of the driveway
If you come to visit the Big Red Barn, you can find our driveway between our trash hutch and our non-existent mailbox. If you open our non-existent mailbox, you will find a single letter to a former tenant and several receipts for filling the propane tanks last December. I look in there all the time, just to see if anything happened. If I had a large rubber spider I might want to put it in there when we move out in September.
Within 24 hours of my cat-bite, I had been contacted by Beth at the Westchester County Health Department, who left me a message saying she wanted me to know that they have a process she wanted to explain to me.  We then played phone tag for about a day. When we did have a conversation, Beth told me that as the pet owner I was going to be receiving a letter from the health department which I needed to fill out and return after a 10 day quarantine. She may have described the letter as “harsh,” or even “threatening,” and she assured me it was for public safety.
 There is really nothing funny about rabies, or the possibility of people getting rabies. Even though my cat is now and has always been an “indoor-only” pet, I have always kept him current on all of the recommended vaccines, including rabies.  I am aware of various educated and otherwise law-abiding people in this country who do not vaccinate their pets and/or children based on some sort of logic that common vaccines cause bad things to happen to them.  I don’t know what to say about that kind of thinking other than to wonder about how science is taught in this country.
I do marvel at Beth’s job: she gets to send out a letter to people that is so threatening that she needs to pre-empt it with a friendly phone call. In my case, the post office never delivered my letter, because it was addressed to our physical address and not our post office box. I had the forms emailed to me.
Here are the three emails I received:

Just print out the attached documents. I will call you on 5/31 to check on Schwartz’s health status. Beth
 
Maggie…for some strange reason, I cannot print this document. Would you mind faxing to me instead..Let me know Beth
Maggie…was able to print out. I am closing this case..Beth

Something that Came in the Mail #1

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I have a few friends with whom I have long shared a correspondence. Email nearly killed it (there is no cute shoebox that a sentimental friend keeps email in—though this is a product idea), and Facebook and Twitter have not improved the situation.  I feel a personal responsibility to write and send a real letter from time to time, and I also feel a personal responsibility for the decline in fortunes of the U.S. Postal Service. Obviously, I need to write more letters again, and so do you.  Perhaps then I might have the courage to stand up to that one woman who works at the North Salem post office and insist she stop yelling at me when people use my street address instead of the P.O. Box number.

A friend sent this flyer with a note which says, in part: “It is so awful that I had to send it to someone and you are the only one I know who might appreciate its awfulness.”
Creepy is easy for dolls, especially the realistic looking ones: their soulless eyes and empty heads, their frozen expressions and stiff limbs.  This officially licensed doll is a study in contrasts: hyper-realistic creases and missing nipples; naked but for his hat and diaper; sitting up and pouting at a size and age he should be lying down and sleeping. It’s “Hand-crafted like a true champion.”
Go Niners. 

Suburban or Rural?

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On the discussion sites of licensed real-estate appraisers, they have a witty saying about how to tell the difference between urban, suburban and rural homes.  This witty saying involves standing on the porch (maybe naked) and peeing off the porch (or not) and whether anyone can see you and whether the police come if they are called.  Even though these postings come from licensed real-estate appraisers, I do not believe that this is how you determine if a community is rural or suburban.  
I have not yet decided whether I believe that North Salem, New York is suburban or rural. I struggle to describe it to people.  Efforts are clearly made by those in power in this community to emphasize the rural flavor of the place.  The North Salem Open Land Foundation, founded in 1974, protects over 900 acres of land here, through purchases, donations and the maintenance of conservation easements.  The Foundation is practically invisible in the community, but their efforts are not.
There are no sidewalks in North Salem, but I often see snakes sunning themselves on the pavement.  Many roads have no lines painted on them and no shoulders.  Some roads not wide enough for two cars to pass, and there are still plenty of unpaved roads.  I see hunters in our yard and in the post office.  The mailboxes are on posts here, and some bear the scars of people driving by and attempting to smash them.

Yet for all these rural features, there is no smell of cows.  Our next-door neighbor had  swimming pool water delivered, by water truck.  The other neighbor keeps a car in the driveway under a car cover.  Many homes have Invisible Fence installed to keep the dogs close to the house.  Even more have elaborate deer fencing and decorative fencing, two things I would not expect to see outside of the suburbs.  The community is served by hourly MetroNorth trains to New York City, even in the middle of the night.  The North Salem Architectural Review Boardminutes include lengthy discussion of color and roof shape of a proposed installation of pre-fab pump house not visible from the road. 

There is decorative informational signage marking historic sites throughout North Salem. And there are BMWs.  But the one thing that convinces me that I live in a suburb is the regular presence of the North Salem Parking Patrol cruiser.

Friendly

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If you take the Harlem Line on MetroNorth and get off at Purdy’s, there is a town up in Westchester County called North Salem. This is no real town in the typical sense of the word, but a town in the sense of a corner of a county. A map shows spots like Grant Corners and Peach Lake and Salem Center. When you drive around (and if you have anything to do at all you will be driving around), you see signs that say Waccabuc (which is fun to say silently to yourself) and Golden’s Bridge and Cross River. The signs are the official green road signs, so I presume they are intended to inform, but I find them very confusing.  The only way they make sense to me is to view them as labels, as if the section of the road requires a branding strategy, so drivers will never mistake it for another stretch of competing road.  Old Salem is not to be confused with South Salem, Katonah is not to be confused with Bedford Hills, and so on.
I think that places which can be reached by a commuter train are probably suburbs, even if there are dirt roads and tractors, which I consider to be two of the tell-tale signs of a rural area. I see more SUVs here than I do pick-up trucks, and the cyclists wear shiny spandex.
Having been here less than a week, I know no one here but the realtor who arranged for the rental, and the three administrators I spoke to in an effort to enroll my son in school. I have a P.O. Box, which I check every day and it is almost always empty. One day  I did have one piece of mail: it was from the U.S.P.S. informing me of the failure of the change-of-address I attempted from our prior address. It seems the temporary apartment in the city is a business, and only they can forward my mail. I also noticed the other day that the post office hours have changed to now include an hour’s closure for lunch, from 1:15 to 2:15. This lunch closure is perfectly timed to coincide with the end of school at 2:10, so that it is impossible to check your mail on the way to school: it must be checked after. 
The timing of the afternoon school pick-up always sends me into a panic, since it is a full fifty minutes before it ever occurs to me that I might need to go pick him up and eighty minutes before what I consider to be a reasonable time to end the school day. I usually emerge from my mid-afternoon stupor at 2:15, realizing I am already late. Soon, I should look into the yellow school bus thing, since it seems to be an option. Sometimes I follow them all the way in to school in my efforts to deliver the boy by 7:28 am. 
I am not the only mother that drives her child to school here, nor am I the only one who picks up after. A line forms at pick-up time, starting by 1:45. Few parents interact with each other at all in this line, and while I have been tempted to introduce myself to the driver of the next car in line, I have not done it yet.
Monday mid-day I took the dogs for a walk. We got a good long look at a huge turkey vulture pecking at a carcass in the road and spied quite a lot of chipmunks. It was a beautiful late summer day. We were passed by a few cars. For the first time since we’ve been here, I felt like it might be tolerable to be here for a few months. 
Within a quarter mile of our rental house, we passed a woman with a small dog on a leash. Her dog grew noisy and excited about my two, and I offered to come over and introduce them, since mine are “friendly.” “Friendly” is a password among dog-owners which I have come to understand to mean “my dog probably will not try to rip your dog’s head off, probably,” or “my dog will jump on you and leave muddy foot-prints on your jeans.” One of my “friendly” dogs has a history of being quite nasty to other dogs, and it has only been since she spent three days a week at doggie-day-care in New York City that I have re-assessed her ability to greet other dogs reliably. 
The dog we met was feisty and full of himself, which no one finds surprising in a small fluffy dog. My dogs were polite. His owner and I chatted briefly about dog temperaments. I introduced myself.
As it turned out, I was introducing myself to my landlord.