Who are the people in your neighborhood?

I met our mailman today.  Well, I waylaid him.  Once I saw that his truck was parked outside (he always parks his truck on the opposite side of the street from our house and then walks the block delivering the mail), I spent much of my afternoon peering up and down the street trying to find him so I could meet him at our door.

We keep getting other people’s mail.  I don’t mean previous tenants – I mean people whose addresses are not even on our street.  We try to return it, or in some cases, deliver it ourselves, but now I’m worried that we’re not getting all of our mail.  We have no guarantee that whoever IS getting it is making any effort to get it to us.  They might just be throwing it away!

I wasn’t going to accuse him of anything.  I just wanted to hand him the three pieces of mail we got yesterday for someone on the next block over (different street) so he could deliver it correctly, so I lurked by the windows, and I STILL almost missed him.

He is the nicest man!  Super chatty, a bit too much of a sharer, but very nice and quite happy I gave him the mail so he could redeliver it.  Turns out he was off yesterday, and he has been correcting delivery mistakes all day long.  I guess yesterday’s substitute isn’t very good at his job.  I didn’t tell him about the other times we’ve gotten the wrong mail – it didn’t seem like a good time because it turns out he was off yesterday because he was recovering from Monday’s colonoscopy, which he woke up during but was unable to alert the doctors, so he could feel it, and THEN when he woke up yesterday, the left side of his face was droopy and basically paralyzed.  Turns out he has Bell’s palsy, which he had once on the OTHER side of his face about seven years ago, and it’ll get better over the next few weeks.

His name is Ed.  He has a white brushy walrus-type mustache, and I like him.