Notes from Maine - 2022/05/29

I’m supposed to send an email to Officer Gomez. He was the Patrolman who came by the other day while a person was wandering up and down my road, picking up pieces of mailboxes. There were two cars involved in the accident. I’m not sure why the other person wasn’t collecting mailbox parts. Maybe their car didn’t hit anything?

I lose my mailbox at least once a year. 

“Lose” isn’t the right word, I suppose, since I always sweep up the pieces, carry them down to my cellar, hook them up to jumper cables, wait for lightning to strike, and then scream to the heavens, “It’s alive!” My mailbox is metal, wood, zip ties, gorilla tape, and glue. My fingers automatically know to avoid the jagged seams when I reach inside. 

Officer Gomez said, “Shoot me an email (poor choice of words for a man who had his hand parked on his hip, right near his sidearm) and I’ll give you this guy’s insurance info.”

What am I going to claim? Mental anguish?

My neighbor across the street, Nate, was watching the whole thing from one of his many buildings. Nate doesn’t like to talk to people either. When I spotted the accident and called him, he said, “I know. I’m watching.” I asked if he was going to talk to the policeman, already knowing the answer. 

He said, “No. I’ll wait until tonight and then I’ll fix it.”

Nate beat me to it and fixed both of the boxes. We’ve shared a post for a long time. Snowplows used to take out both at once. We would both be out there, trying to set a temporary post in the frozen ground until one time Nate had the idea to make a horizontal piece so both boxes could share the same support. 

So I talked to Officer Gomez and saved Nate the interaction.

Down the road a little, the car destroyed the mailbox of Nate’s mom as well. One year, she got all three of us insurance checks. That’s what I’m hoping for—a small sum of money for the three of us for our mental anguish. When he fixed the boxes, Nate attached a plastic army guy to the top of his. The protector is brandishing a tiny grenade, practically begging for someone to mess with it. 

“You want a new one? Robert has a dozen,” Nate asked me. Robert was the guy who lived a little ways down. Nate and his family all took care of Robert until his death last year. He was a collector. One day, Nate had me glance over the old radios and stuff that Robert left behind to sort the trash from treasure. There were at least ten safes in one of the low-ceilinged rooms. Apparently, Robert had a vein of used mailboxes stashed there too. 

I said no to a new/used one. Nothing wrong with the beat up one that I couldn’t fix, and turned out I didn’t even have to do that, since Nate fixed it.

The previous time my mailbox was knocked to the ground, some idiot ran his driver’s side mirror into it. Can you imagine how far off the road (in the wrong direction) you would have to be to clobber a mailbox with your driver’s side mirror? And the accident happened at very low speed, as well. That means that the driver, off the road, facing the wrong direction, hit the box and stubbornly kept going until the mailbox was ripped from the post.

I know a lot about that accident because I saw it up close, from behind the wheel of the SUV I was driving as I broke my own mailbox.

I just sent the email to Officer Gomez. We’ll see what happens. Nate’s mom had the best mailbox. Painted like a tractor, it had a lock and everything. I think it was properly destroyed. I wonder how much I should claim for it.