Holiday Journal:
$1.56 x 50
22 December 2010
At the post office yesterday, a clerk and I engaged in a passive-aggressive encounter about the mailing of about fifty small parcels. Each one contained a VistaPrint desk calendar featuring Kathleen’s photographs. The clerk wanted to give me stamps. I wanted her to print them. Being the customer, I won, but I was made to feel awkward. It turned out that I’d negligently proceeded from the general queue to the “stamps only” window. The clerk really ought to have sent me back to the head of the line, but that wouldn’t have been passive-aggressive, would it? Instead, she weighed each and every one of my identical packages, printing out postage in the amount of $1.56, while commiserating with customers who came directly to the window (which can have its own queue) and advising them that “this gentleman” would be taking “quite a while.” I thought how, had I been waiting for stamps only, I’d have bored rays of hatred and contempt into my back, rocking with indignation each time I bent over to pick up yet another batch of buff envelopes from the shopping bags at my feet. But I wasn’t waiting for stamps only; I was discharging a daunting holiday obligation that involved going to one of my least-favorite places, a United States Post Office. I apologized to the clerk several times, but each time she told me that it wasn’t my fault. There you have it, then. When it was all over and I took the extremely long receipt — you can’t just print fifty postage stickers, because each one contains all sorts of priceless information, such as the destination’s ZIP code, so the receipt reported fifty transactions — my discomfort simply vanished, and I went on with my day of slow-motion holiday bustle: Staples (new landline telephones); the bank (cash, sweet cash — which is what we used to say Notre Dame’s “C.S.C.” stood for); the Shake Shack (an imprudent but scrumptuous lunch al fresco); Yorkshire Wines (champagne for the doormen; can you believe that someone tipped our Dominick $500?); a Christmas tree stand (perfect! and only $40!); Radio Shack (batteries); the East 86th Street Theater (The King’s Speech); and the New Panorama Café. In between the second shack and the movie (which I saw with Kathleen), I read from a profoundly unseasonable book, Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones, about which more anon.