with William Wardill

Mailbox Madness
I try to visit the local post office five times a week. My interest in this Ottawa-run corporation is not casual. I used to be a postmaster and so was my father before me.
My term of office began when Canada Post was the Canadian Post Office Department and offices were open six days a week and mail bags weren’t stuffed with unaddressed advertising. I remember mail carriers (usually local draymen) shovelling their way to snow-stranded trains to bring the mail bags into town in the wee, small hours of the morning. I remember beginning to sort incoming mail at 3 a.m. – the motto then was THE MAIL MUST GO THROUGH.
In my father’s day, a significant portion of the mail was delivered across the counter rather than through a mail box. This service was called General Delivery, a bucolic practice which Canada Post has discontinued. Also banished is the friendly practice of picking up mail for country neighbours housebound by bad roads and weather.
My father owned the mail boxes and made them available to customers for a small annual rental. Some customers paid with potatoes, chickens, butter and eggs. One tried to pay with a jug of homebrew. This my father refused because Mother was the self-appointed representative of the Anti-Saloon League. She waged an unrelenting war, even destroying Grandfather’s stock of home-made parsnip wine. The old fellow immediately developed a disease which required the daily consumption of a patent medicine with a very high alcohol content. After the first bottle, which he claimed was effective, he announced nobly that he would buy no more and would endure his agonies bravely rather than place an undue strain on the family budget. The ladies immediately took responsibility for procuring the stuff and medicating him at regular intervals. But I digress.
Mail boxes are now owned by Canada Post, which used to collect rent for them, but since the discontinuance of General Delivery, boxes are provided free to registered users.
At intervals, re-registration is required. This is the rub. On re-registration day, a customer who was known the day before becomes a stranger. He is required to establish his identity by presenting some official photo-identification such as a driver’s licence. When my turn comes I will create havoc by showing up with somebody else’s licence or an autographed picture of Michael Ignatieff. There is really no need for re-registration; they could wait for the obituary.
A couple of years ago, postal bureaucrats insisted customer should sign forms authorizing themselves to sign for their own signature mail. Wives, if they chose, could sign a form authorizing their husbands to pick up signature mail for them. Those who refused are suspected of conducting illicit liasions by registered mail. I exclude my wife from this because she has been a big winner in the matrimonial sweepstakes. (Whenever I remind her of this, she becomes highly emotional, goes into another room and whimpers.)
I believe all of this postal psychopathy is additional proof that society is teetering on the edge of madness. The proponents of privacy laws, political correctness and terrorism are winning. When will Canada Post require fingerprints, DNA samples and body searches?
Perhaps the bureaucrats in Ottawa think the old gentlemen who congregate in post offices are carrying bombs in their odiferous jockey shorts. Not so. They are not carrying much of anything there – only a little more than post office rule-makers are carrying in their heads.
William Wardill of Eatonia is still deeply involved with the prairie landscape he loves and with the community where he was born in 1927. Enjoy more of his work at speargrassspecialties.com.