The Bureau of Hards

One year at summer camp, I met a girl who told me about all the different things she’d managed to send, unpackaged, through the US Postal Service. I sorely wish I remembered her litany of unexpected items. The one thing I do recall is that she had once addressed a shoe, a Converse All-Star, she said, and it had made it across town to its designated destination. The postal system was amazing. I can’t confirm the absolute truth of the story, but whether it’s apocryphal or not, what struck me at the time was the miracle of the handwritten address: how a name, a street number, a city and state, and a zip code, Sharpied on the rumpled canvas of a sneaker, was enough for a system as vast as the USPS to locate a particular person and deliver to her a message as cumbersome and unconventional as a shoe.

I’m fairly sure, from this vantage point, that the appeal of the story lay in its illustration of an unlikely communication reliably transmitted. About a dozen years after hearing the story of the shoe in the mail, having dropped, precipitously, out of a PhD program and landed, jobless, in Los Angeles in the middle of a heat wave, I began having a genre of anxiety dream that I came to call the “Failure to Communicate” dream. I had gone to LA to write, to get into the TV-writing business, and these were dreams in which I tried, frantically, and failed, to make myself understood, or even just heard, by other people, and which always, eventually, unfurled into a full-blown panic attack (the kind where you actually run out into the street in the middle of the night in your somewhat seedy Hollywood neighborhood because you can't breathe and it feels like the walls of your apartment are closing in on you). One dream in particular featured my all-at-once acute awareness of people somewhere above me — really just voices — who were dismissing out of hand something I’d written. From down below, I called out to them, these detached voices far above me, tried to explain that they were reading the wrong thing, they had the wrong draft  — that that was not what I meant at all, that was not it, at all, etc. But the voices above me were oblivious to whatever noises I was making beneath them. It was at this point in the dream that I realized where I was  — and here was the big reveal that would launch the inevitable panic attack: I was buried under layers and layers of sedimentary rock, formed over millions of geological epochs, and no one could hear me at all. Whatever message I had would never be received.

Maybe half a year later, having fled L.A. and wound up in its antipodes, the depths of a Minnesota winter, the “Failure to Communicate” dreams still in heavy rotation, something caught my eye one day as I looked up from my desk. From my second-storey window, the snow-shrouded lawns and neatly shoveled sidewalks of my residential St. Paul neighborhood were spread out before me like the inside of a motionless snow globe. It was one of those dismal, sub-zero, midwinter Saturday afternoons, when people only leave their houses to hurry to their cars, which they then park as close as possible to whatever Target or Arby’s or school gym they’re driving to. No one was outside.  And yet here was someone — a solitary figure moving steadily across the snow-dusted sidewalks, between the snow-smothered lawns, head down, like some figure in a post-apocalyptic landscape. The solitary figure, large and sturdy, bent slightly by the weight of a bag over one shoulder, was clad in something like livery — dark blue, banded by a narrow blaze of red and white. It was the mailman, of course.

I think the idea of the postal system has always sort of amazed me. I signed up for penpals from far-away lands when I was in high school: France, China, Benin. What I remember was just the slight bit of awe I felt at seeing the par avion, foreign-stamped envelope show up in the mailbox at the end of our rural Wisconsin driveway, its fractal street address (20 ½ St.) determined by the expansive grid of country miles. Someone had dropped an envelope in a PO receptacle in suburban France, or Beijing, or Djougou, and, by virtue of a few lines scrawled on the front of the envelope, it had found its way, across a continent or two, an ocean or so, through a state that even people in my own country rarely thought about, into a town that even people in the state had never heard of, to my rural mailbox, and onto the kitchen snack bar, next to the napkin basket where my dad left the day’s mail. There’s a moment in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man when young Stephen, overwhelmed by the scope of the world as presented in his geography book, is moved to write on its flyleaf: Stephen Dedalus, Class of Elements, Clongowes Wood College, Sallins, County Kildare, Ireland, Europe, The World, The Universe. The same kind of feeling overtook me when I’d look at one of those hand-addressed airmail envelopes that had turned up in the mailbox.

I have since discovered that early users of the USPS, which was then just called the Post-Office, felt some version of this astonishment, too. “Why, this is a machinery,” declared a New Haven minister in 1843, “which, in a sense, extends your presence over the whole country, even to the edge of the wilderness, where the last traces of government and of civilized life disappear." “The ink is scarcely dry, or the wax cold on the paper,” wrote an enthusiastic country curate in 1820, “before we find in our hands, even at a distance of hundreds of miles, a transcript of our dearest friend’s mind.” That these were men of God, exclaiming over the postal system as they might the miracle of the loaves and the fish, seems appropriate. What they are describing, after all, is the elision of distance. "Time and distance are annihilated," is how a Ladies’ Magazine and Literary Gazette columnist put it in 1831, marveling at the arrival of a letter from a far-away friend.

Maybe my own wonder at this kind of delivery, even now, in the twenty-first century, in this era of video chat and instant messenger and civilian rocket ships, has something to do with how sending a letter lays bare the distance to be crossed in any attempt at communication. And then it bridges that distance. If this flimsy piece of paper can make it across city and state lines and national borders and continents and oceans and isthmuses, and eventually into the hands of the person at whom I aimed it, maybe the other kind of distance between us — the one I am always trying to vanquish with words and sentences and fully formed paragraphs — can also be bridged.

Another memory from that long, long winter I spent in Minnesota: I'm sitting at the door-sized industrial plastic table I used as a desk. I have formed an assembly line of sorts atop the desk. First, a stack of pages of my own writing, then a stack of cover letters, then a stack of business-size SASEs, a pile of paper clips, and, finally, a stack of nine-by-twelve manila envelopes. This was back in the late aughts, when most literary journals (from the Alaska Quarterly Review to one called Prairie Schooner) still required you to submit your writing through the mail. The SASE was so you could know, definitively, when they rejected your work. I remember sitting there, in what, in the shades of my memory, is always the gloom of a winter afternoon. After signing a cover letter and paper-clipping it and the SASE to the pages of my writing, I'd address a manila envelope to the corresponding literary journal, after which I'd slide the whole of the cargo inside it and seal it up. Then I would repeat the process. When every manila envelope had been addressed, filled, and sealed, I would bundle myself up for the freezing if not sub-zero weather and drive several miles along an industrial road to the nearest post office, where I would wait in line to present the clerk with my stack of manila envelopes that required postage. That any of those salvos ever made it through still seems astounding to me.

The delivery of a single letter begins to seem even more miraculous when you consider the convolutions of its course. It’s thrilling enough to think about how, in the ages before any sort of postal system for the masses, a single message, painted in maybe black ink or red ink on the inner surface of a minutely folded strip of leather, issued from Cyrus the Great to a satrap in the far-away satrapy of Lydia, was handed off, from one horse to the next, one messenger to the next, at each of the 111 posts along the way, from Susa to Babylon to Opis to Arbela to Melitene to Comana to Gordium to Sardes — like, according to Herodotus, “the torch race among the Greeks.” This small artifact of someone’s thought, pressed onto parchment or papyrus and escorted hundreds of kilometers, or hundreds of parasangs, to its provincial destination. But once you reach 1792, which is when George Washington signed into law the Postal Service Act, committing to the continued expansion of post roads and post offices, reaching even the most isolated villages, the path of a single message moving from point A to point B is no longer linear, and the message is no longer singular. Because now, once you drop a letter at the post office, or slot it into a mailbox, it joins the mass of letters that everyone else has dropped into a mailbox. A letter like the small plain-enveloped kind — the kind where you have to fold the sheet of paper in thirds and then in half — I would send to my boyfriend, who went away to college while I finished out the final year of my high school sentence, became just one in a whole mass that had to be sorted at the local post office and transported to the regional processing center in a much bigger town an hour south, where it would be sorted again and sent on to another regional processing center, this one in Chicago, and sorted again, and sent on to a post office in a neighborhood on that city’s southside, whereupon it would be packed into one of those bulky, double-pouched mail carts with the rubber bands ringing its handles, to be pushed along by a single person laden with an entire route’s worth of Pottery Barn catalogues and Home Depot circulars and Columbia House Records orders and issues of The New Yorker and Sports Illustrated and AT&T bills and credit card solicitations, city council member updates and birthday cards and other actual letters, subject to the vagaries of weather and road conditions and human error. So that the event of that letter’s arrival into mailbox #715 in the lobby of a dorm on the southside of Chicago — the address scrawled on its front, or occasionally squeezed into the minuscule boxlet allotted on the back of a picture postcard — does seem to rival loaves and fish.

Of course, the thing that everybody knows is that the vast body of mail is now made up almost wholly of online purchases and what the USPS calls bulk business mail — not letters. Not letters like the multi-page ones I labored over circa 1994-95, written on the flip side of local ephemera like a co-op flier or church bulletin I'd taken to repurposing as nonchalant stationery, attempting each time to overtop the wit and irony of my previous efforts, and hesitating over the valediction, before addressing a 3 ⅝- by-6 ½- inch envelope to a boy in a dorm in Hyde Park and placing the envelope in the black box of our rural route mailbox and raising its red metal flag to alert our mail carrier of an incoming.

A close friend of mine has told me that she believes the best version of herself is the written version. Her sentences are exactingly designed, each a small garden of Versailles, its syntax punctuated with allusive sculptures and glittering fountains that rhythmically rise and fall.  I understand the dream of the self perfected through writing, of the presence of mind it affords you to locate an idea that's otherwise only a hum in your head, to elaborate that idea in words you can rarely call up in a moment's exchange. Certainly, this is what I was trying to enclose in those 3 ⅝- by-6 ½- inch envelopes.

“I don’t use it anymore myself,” an uncle of mine, formerly of the USPS, said to me when I called him up for some color commentary. He told me that he doesn’t know of anyone who uses the postal service for conversational correspondence anymore. He has, in fact, moved on to texting almost exclusively, to the point where, I realized, I had to text him to tell him that I’d sent him an email. A USPS PR person made the same point when I spoke with him over the phone. He asked me, in the sort of smug, sort of melancholic way that people do these days, if the topic arises: when was it that I’d last applied a stamp to an envelope and popped it in a mailbox? The point here is not that I had in fact, recently, done just that — but that I don’t rely on it. It’s not the channel I use to convey important messages. The very occasional messages I do send to friends through the mail today seem to exist outside of any ongoing exchange we have via email. They have the novelty effect that the early picture postcard had, that I suppose postcards still have — where the point isn’t dialogue but a ready-made souvenir. The material fact of the paper and envelope or postcard, of the handwriting and the stamp, of its arrival after a journey across state lines or national borders, or occasionally just across town, is really the main attraction. In other words, a USPS-delivered letter has become a novelty item.

This, in truth, is not a state of affairs that upsets me. I like email. I like how it eliminates the inevitability of an excruciatingly long period of waiting between letters. I like how it presents, right there before me, the layers of an ongoing correspondence, like drawers I can pull open and revisit at any time. I like how I can type in a name or address and instantly summon, in a shimmer on the screen, all the messages I’ve ever sent or received from that particular person.

Nothing is lost, all is preserved! I also like how, as opposed to the utilitarian demands of an all-thumbs text message, writing an email still allows for the expansiveness of a letter, for sitting down at a keyboard — hands spread out before you, thoughts spread out, too, which gives me the feeling of actually composing those thoughts. I write infinitely more emails than letters in stamped envelopes. Between my close friends and me, regular emails constitute a whole dimension of our relationship.

And yet, as technologically astonishing as email is in its own right, what I remain actually agog at is the insane fact of that flimsy piece of paper. In another anxiety dream of the Failure-to-Communicate genre, I find myself in some kind of crowd. A mob, basically. Most often it's a startlingly crowded classroom full of students I’m supposed to be teaching. The room is chockablock with other bodies and the din of their voices. I try to speak up. I try to make my own small voice heard above all the other indistinguishable voices in the room. But of course — because this is a Failure-to-Communicate dream — my voice just isn’t capable of making itself audible. There’s a visceral element to the dream, where I can feel my vocal chords straining, which is about the point in the dream where, most usually, I cough myself awake. The workings of the postal system, then, their reliable ability to ID one letter among many letters, to reach into that physical mass of nearly identical white envelopes and recognize my envelope, is a soothing thought.

In a short, somewhat psychedelically inflected promo movie the USPS made in the late 1960s, the movement of the mail is compared to the flow of a mighty river: first, single drops of water, each time a letter is dropped into a mailbox; then, cross-cut with a robustly flowing river, a deluge of envelopes emptying into what’s called a processing and delivery center. At first, distressingly, the postal clerks in the movie seem to be picking up and tossing these envelopes willy nilly, as if they were playing 52-card pickup. There seems to be too much mail to handle: bulging canvas sacks of it keep belching out their contents on the floor, metal shoots keep spilling masses of white envelopes, none distinguishable from any other, on a table. Eventually, though (to the tune of some kind of swinging sixties music), we see the machinery, both mechanical and human, kicking into gear — keys being punched, conveyor-belts moving, letters being slotted into pigeonholes. The postal system, you come to see, is a factory whose product is sorted mail.

It’s an impression that’s even starker when you look at the 2014 version of the USPS promo, now called “Systems at Work” (as opposed to 1968’s more bucolic “River of Mail”), which takes you through the vast, shiny, whirring, blinking, shooting, rotating machinery of what looks like a series of factories that happen to be churning out already-addressed envelopes and brown paper packages sealed off with shipping tape. At last come the troops of mail carriers, the solitary soldiers on the frontlines, driving or walking their way to each individual mailbox, the John Williams-esque score now soaring, the newly manufactured mail — the sorted mail — slung over each one’s shoulder.

Sorting (or “sortation,” as the USPS people call it) seems to me the guts of the postal system. Distinguishing one category of mail from another, one zip code from another, one street address from another, one apartment from another. Without the sorting that takes place at every level of the system — from the mammoth machine that culls the letter-size envelopes from the sea of other shapes and sizes, to the involute of an address-scanning machine that spools those envelopes through it at a rate of something like 30,000 per hour, to the mail carrier who distinguishes #41B from #41C and #41D and pushes the envelopes into the intended mailbox — there could be no distribution, no delivery. That’s part of why delivering the mail in twenty-first-century America is maybe more incredible than the process of delivering a fifth-century B.C. shah’s message to a satrapi, or a fourteenth-century king’s to a sheriff, hundreds of parasangs or miles away, even if it did require a standing line-up of messengers and horses and special way stations strung along the course. A single message remained a single message; it wasn’t part of the mail. Nothing, I think, better drives home this difference than an official Post Office publication of "Law, Instructions, and Forms," revised and reissued throughout the nineteenth century. Instruction VII, which gives detailed instructions for sorting a given day's intake of letters and newspapers, is titled "Making up the Mail." There’s actually a point in the instructions, the variously sorted letters having been tied into separate bundles now headed in disparate directions, when the postal employee is informed that these bundles are now called the mail. As if up to this point, the mass of undifferentiated letters had existed in some ur-state, some primordial soup of paper and words and numbers that couldn’t otherwise be apprehended.

From what I can glean from USPS annual reports and instruction manuals and the surprisingly large trove of video documenting the various machines that constitute the innards of what are no doubt model processing and distribution centers, the technology for this sorting has only become more elaborate in the last fifty years. It seems to be a point of pride. When I visited Manhattan’s square block of a processing and delivery center, where all the city’s incoming and outgoing mail is sorted and sent on to the next leg of its journey, my tour guides — two managers of different stripes — referred to the sorting machines in terms of levels of zip-code refinement (three-digit, nine-digit, eleven-digit ) as they walked me through the involute of chutes and conveyor belts all packed, intestine-like, into the middle two block-long levels of the building. When I called up my uncle to ask him about his years with the USPS —first in L.A., then in Reno, NV — what he wanted to talk about was sorting. This comported with my interests, so I mainly just listened. A revolution in sorting had taken place during his time, he said. You see, from Ben Franklin's day up to when he (my uncle) started as a distribution clerk in 1968, the mail-sorting method remained almost obdurately the same: strictly manual. Squadrons of people, at every stage of processing, eyeballing an address and flipping it into a sequence of first broad and then increasingly narrow receptacles  — bins to pigeonholes. “[C]arefully assort the letters,” instruct the early nineteenth-century editions of Post Office Law, Instructions, and Forms, “putting those for each post-office in the state in which you reside into a separate parcel, and those addressed for places out of the state in which you reside, into four parcels ... such as are to pass from your office to a state southward, eastward, or westward."

Over a century later, Charles Bukowski’s somewhat garbled account of sorting, in his novel Post Office, is no more technologically evolved — just more complicated. By then each city itself was divided into what are called schemes, each of which, in a city the size of 1950s Chicago, contained multiple zones comprising hundreds of streets and street sections. A clerk working in a processing and distribution center — aka, a PD&C — had to memorize these schemes so as to sort each day’s small Everest of mail in a jiffy, all by hand. Bukowski’s hardly fictional proxy, the perpetually hungover Chinaski, at one point tries to memorize his assigned scheme by recording it on tape and absorbing it with a nightcap: “I read the scheme sheet onto the tape, got into bed with my beer and listened,” he recounts. "NOW, HIGGINS BREAKS 42 HUNTER, 67 MARKLEY, 71 HUDSON, 84 EVERGLADES! AND NOW, LISTEN, LISTEN, CHINASKI, PITTSFIELD BREAKS 21 ASHGROVE, 33 SIMMONS, 46 NEEDLES! LISTEN, CHINASKI, LISTEN, WESTHAVEN BREAKS 11 EVERGREEN, 24 MARKHAM, 55 WOODTREE! CHINASKI, ATTENTION, CHINASKI! PARCHBLEAK BREAKS …” (The “breaks,” apparently, in this kabbalistic-sounding recitation, are the points where a long street gets broken into another zone.) Fever-dream-like sections of the novel are given over to the training sessions in which clerks have to practice sorting a pack of cards with street addresses into their zone-appropriate pigeon holes. “100 cards in 8 minutes or less with at least 95 percent accuracy” was apparently the standard. 1963 was the advent of the zip code, the five-digit Zone Improvement Plan that did, eventually, help clerks more quickly sort mailpieces (also a USPS term) into the right delivery areas (region of the country, city processing and distribution center, city zone). But all of this sorting still had to be done by hand. “Pigeon holes,” my uncle said. “It was all people standing in front of pigeon holes.”

“But then came 1973.” My uncle announced this date to me like a herald of Great Moments in History. “This was when the post office entered the Age of Automation.” You can quibble over the exact date of entry, which might take into account earlier, limited rollouts in particular cities — like when the Detroit PO got the first and, for a long time, only letter sorting machine, in 1959. But starting with something called the single-position letter-sorting machine (followed by various instantiations of its more-advanced sibling, the multi-position LSM), helped along by four more digits tacked onto the ZIP code like an extra 200 mm on a telephoto lens, through various generations of address-scanning optical character readers hooked up to barcode sprayers and barcode readers, all of them superseded by machines with names like Advanced Facer-Canceler and Delivery Bar Code Sorter and Upgraded Flat Sorting Machine 1000, it would appear — at least in theory — that the USPS has gotten better and better at reducing the noise of the mass of mail down to the signal of a single address.

This doesn’t mean there’s still no sorting by hand. When I asked my building’s mail carrier, a no-nonsense woman who works with her tunes clipped to her faded red-white-and-blue-blazoned bag and was stuffing handfuls of mail into the line of narrow boxes she’d keyed open in one fell swoop, like the bellows of an accordian, she rolled her eyes. Sorting the mail for just her route, a three-by-five-block span in upper Harlem, she said, took two to three hours – on a good day. She rattled off some PO argot: flats, DPS, hot case, but didn’t have time to elaborate. It turns out that carriers arrive at their post office each morning to find the mail for their route machine-sorted into what’s known as DPS, the delivery point sequence, which means the order in which a given carrier delivers the mail on her route, street to street, street number to street number. But a carrier is also, every morning, confronted with big bundles of flats (circulars and catalogues and magazines) that have to be broken up and slotted into the DPS. Ditto for the hot case (a term of art that I initially thought was “hot cakes,” until a very polite USPS PR person gently corrected me), a category that includes any kind of mail that a machine failed to sort the first time through.

For all the enhanced sorting technology of the USPS, I think I'm still more amazed by the human element, and the tiny contingencies that thus linger in the whole convoluted process. I’m reassured, of course, by those stories of a letter that, despite being addressed in opaque terms or an indecipherable hand, finally makes its way to the person intended. Like the scrap of lore recounted by a former mail clerk at the mid-nineteenth-century Philadelphia PO, about a letter, postmarked Belfast, that was simply addressed "To My Mother — America.” Or that of a friend of mine who recalls addressing a letter simply to GRANDMA, followed by the name of a village, which, incredibly, found the addressee, among a virtual settlement of other grandmas summering in the Catskills. Or even how the various permutations of my name, usually drawn from nearby dictionary entries or rendered phonetically, which my long-distance boyfriend would print on the front of the envelopes he mailed to me during my last year of high school, did not in the least prevent these letters from arriving in the mailbox at the end of my family’s driveway in our outpost of a Wisconsin town.

In the post office of mid-nineteenth-century New York, apparently, there was something called the “bureau of hards,” a special office for deciphering especially obscure scrawls — the really hard ones, that is — on the front of envelopes. One infamous hard required, according to a Harper’s journalist on the beat, “the same intellectual speculation that would result from studying the footprints of a gigantic spider that had, after wading knee-deep in ink, retreated hastily across the paper." And yet, ultimately — wonderfully — through some strange convergence of intuition and luck, the fellows in the bureau of hards ended up dispatching the letter up the river to Chappaqua, which is exactly where it was supposed to go.

A 1998 USPS report I found online, titled "Progress Made in Implementing Automated Letter Sequencing, but Some Issues Remain," notes that, occasionally, when the system's optical character reader can't decipher an address, and a "remote computer-reading device" can't either, an image of the illegible scrawl is booted up to "off-site locations," where actual humans, their minds more at ease with idiosyncrasy, eyeball the hard and, having deciphered it, move it along. This still happens, the very nice USPS PR person for NYC told me. He also told me that if the people at the off-site location still can’t decipher the address, the actual letter’ll get kicked over to the manual sorting center within the P&DC, where other people eyeball it non-virtually. If the address remains as difficult to decipher as the inky footprints of a giant spider, the last-ditch attempt is the carrier’s. “Carrier knowledge is huge,” the PR person said to me, not without a touch of promotional pride. “Maybe somebody writes, Hughie who lives on 27th St. next to the windmill. The carrier is the one who’s going to be able to figure out, or already know, who that is.”

That any of these “hards,” the ones that, even today, can’t be deciphered by a machine, still find their way to the obscure addressee, reminds me again of the Converse All-Star sent through the mail. It’s reassuring to think that a structure exists, within the USPS, that allows for idiosyncrasy and contingency. And that, in some ways, the entire postal service allows for that. Apparently, in 1912, when the Parcel Post Act was signed into law, people tried their hand at sending all sorts of unlikely things through the mail: pitchforks, brooms, bees, eggs, even a five-year-old girl (a 58-cent stamp was cheaper than a train ticket). These things were delivered. Today, the usps.com page about sending items other than letters and postcards offers advice on How to Prepare a Domestic Shipment, but nowhere does it explicitly say that such items must be packaged. Indeed, an experiment run in 2000 by a group affiliated with the eccentrics behind the annual Ig Nobel Prize found that the great majority of the unpackaged items they sent through the USPS made it to their destination. A football, a rose, a feather duster, a single ski, a coconut, a large wheel of stinky cheese, and, in fact, a pair of new, expensive tennis shoes. When the shoes were picked up at the neighborhood PO, the laces had even been tied more tightly together. “The Postal Service appears to be amazingly tolerant of the foibles of its public,” the research crew concluded, exuding, in their acknowledgments, a kind of warmth toward humankind as represented by the USPS.

That friend of mine who prefers her written self to her spoken self — a friend I first came to know in words on a screen typed in a serifed font, then through the inimitable flourishes of her minute cursive hand, and finally, five years later, face to face — is known for sending what she long ago dubbed “epistolary objects.” There have been many of these over the years, but the first I received came packaged in a Wise Owl matchbox, which opened to reveal a verdigris pendant on a chain and the puzzle piece-like fragments of a letter that had been written on an index card and then scissored into sixths. When I asked this friend, just recently, about the pleasure she takes in epistolary objects, she was quick to point out that she doesn’t fetishize the snail mail letter — although I wonder if she does, in the way we all sort of do now, making a special occasion of the very act of hand-writing and sending a letter. She and I exchange many more words over Gmail and text message and in meat-space tête à têtes. But what these words and objects she sends (and receives) through the mail allow, she wrote me, is specificity, palpability, an invitation into a kind of worldmaking — a world that’s made up not just out of words but the materiality of the paper and the ink and the stamp that someone’s chosen, the particularities of a given person's handwriting (to learn for the first time what someone's name looks like in their own hand!) and of objects like the pendant (owl-shaped) and puzzle-pieced letter in a matchbox, not to mention the knowledge that someone’s gone to the trouble to actually mail the package (which involves, she notes, at least marginal effort). At least marginal effort.

There is, I know, a complex circuitry behind every text message or email sent today. Packet-routing networks. Encryption. Wifi radio signals. An underground system of fiber-optic cables that extends across continents and oceans. But that circuitry is obscured by the smooth interface that appears on my screen, by the identically formatted addresses and contents. There’s never a question of some internal postal clerk or carrier taking an extra step to decipher an address: an address is either right or wrong, it’s typed correctly or incorrrectly. Nothing like human intuition, or luck, is required to ferry the message on its way. My Failure-to-Communicate phobia should be assuaged by this. I think, in some ways, it probably is.

Every day, I email communiqués both brief and traditionally letter-sized  — the kind that once required the entirety of one of the co-op fliers or church bulletins I’d write to that long-ago boyfriend on the flip side of. Between another close friend and me, the end-of-day reports we email each other, of moods and workaday minutiae, of the shape and slope of a day, have become a constant in our lives, a sort of mutual captain's log. I sense that I would be unhappy were this particular messaging system to disappear. I rely on email. And yet. Those smooth surfaces of my Gmail interface, the immediacy of the clear-blue send icon, the shimmer of a second in which a new message materializes on the flat screen of my inbox, suggests that human communication is just as smooth, just as effortless. But it isn’t.

What my friend hits on, in her reply to me about epistolary objects, is the effort that goes into every aspect of them. Finding the materials. Cobbling them together. Taking the trouble to find stamps, to find a post office box. And then the exercise in faith, as she puts it, that is casting your words to the wind. There is no guarantee that they’ll get there, that they’ll be received. I also remember how that first letter of hers, all poetry and sympathy and quiet warmth, from her snow-globed Midwestern winter outpost at the time, to mine, took some work to apprehend — to piece its six fragments together, to make out the minuscule hand. If I like thinking about the convolute of high-tech mail-sorting machines, or of the intuition of a carrier on her route, it’s because they allow for idiosyncrasies of address or orthography or handwriting, because they still operate in the realm of the physically clunky and cumbersome. Of shoes and coconuts and Wise Owl matchboxes, and the inimitable flourishes of minute penmanship. They admit all of this. They can’t deny it. And in this way, I think, they’re a much better approximation of what it’s really like to try to make yourself understood.

A 2016 report on Manhattan’s sprawling Morgan Processing and Delivery Center, the one that’s responsible for sorting the mail I send and receive, found that this PD&C was 25% less efficient than the national average. In part, this was due to high “jam and reject rates,” meaning that the machine operators “did not properly align [jog] the edges of the mail ... or remove [cull] mailpieces that were too thick, stiff, long, or tall … for automated processing.” This sounds about right.