By Mel Carriere
The best part of my Postal day is my half hour lunch. The edible fare is not particularly inspiring - variations on the theme of peanut butter, chips and yogurt, but the reading material I lug along in my orange Homer toolbox takes me to other times and places, providing a temporary refuge away from mundane postal reality.
My lunch spot, as such, is an inviolable temple, where supplicants approach with hesitant humility, and only on an extremely legitimate pretext. No, I don't know where your package or letter is, especially if you don't live on my route. And no, I also don't know what time your carrier will be there and, another no, I certainly do not have their phone number to ask them. The latter is probably not true. I probably do have his or her number, but I'm not going to give it to you, and I'm not going to wreck their lunchtime Zen by calling about your bullshit.
However, if you just want to dump off a letter and run I will take it with a smile, as long as your definition of letter is not a trailer full of prepaid parcels. For that you'll have to wait, for my half hour lunch is sacred.
I have been taking my midday break in the same spot, off and on, for about twenty years. This shady lunchtime Eden is a church parking lot. In winter, when the shadows are long, I park in the lee of the church building, but in summer, when the sun is high in the sky, I move to the shade of some trees on the other side of the asphalt. Everything is scientifically calculated and astronomically correct. A decimal point deviation from the norm and my island of tranquility is inundated, swept away in the deglaciation of this cataclysmic climate change.
In other words, I don't like to be bothered on my lunch break and generally, nobody bothers me. There are really not many people afoot in the midday hour anyway, with the unfiltered sun beating down from its Zenith. The only people out in those sweltering noontime doldrums are old Asian ladies pushing their groceries home from the store on their little handcarts, or the occasional homeless person, availing himself of the same shady sanctuary of the church lot.
This latter group never bothered me either, until recently when some newly transplanted transient arrived in the neighborhood. This man seems determined to wreck my personal lunchtime zen, and to disrupt the normal flow of life everywhere around him.
My first knowledge of this newbie came when I heard him shouting obscenities one day from across the street, where I was delivering mail. I could not immediately pinpoint the origin of this non-stop flow of verbal toxic waste. Then a little later I approached my lunch stop, and saw a homeless person beneath my sacred tree, sitting like some profane Buddha of an anti-enlightened cult, spewing his warped wisdom. He had a large dog in tow, but the canine seemed to be either deaf, or had constructed a psychological barrier around itself, to buffer its sanity against the non stop rants of its so-called master.
In other words, the dog was the calm one of the pair. I wasn't afraid of it, but because the attitude of its human freaked me out somewhat, I prudently pulled around to another tree.
The Do Not Disturb sign on my lunchtime leisure was starting to rust on its shingle. A portent of perturbations to come?
A few days later our little street corner prophet was back in action, sitting by the exit of the supermarket next to the church, holding a cardboard sign that said GIVE ME MONEY, then flipping off all motorists who refused to comply with his humble appeals.
So far, however, Moses bringing down the wrath of God from Sinai had not particularly affected me. I had not been the subject of his obscene sermons, and his single digit blessings had not been directed my way either, as far as I could tell.
That changed last Friday. Friday was a particularly sweltering day by our spoiled San Diego standards, so I think I parked beneath my Bodhi tree about the same time our ragged oracle was seeking shade too, after a hard morning raining damnation down on the Israelites.
I had just eagerly cracked open my book, a particularly good one, when I was shaken by the voice of judgement.
"Hey you, this is the FBI. Come out of that vehicle with your hands up."
I recognized the voice by now, so I wasn't particularly startled, just surprised it had turned its attention to me. Despite my lack of worry, I double checked the door was locked. You can't be sure what kind of wrathful actions the voice of God in the heads of these major or minor prophets might direct them to do - smite the Philistines with the jawbone of an ass, or some such.
"Yeah I said you. This is the FBI. Federal Bureau of Investigation. I said come out with your hands up. I don't care if you're a government employee."
Of course I didn't get out of the vehicle. I didn't even stick my head out of the window. But the homeless deliverer of doom was undaunted, unleashing a string of unprintable Mother Hubbards. Yet as intimidating as the voice pretended to be, it was receding into the distance. Being a 6 foot 3 Goliath-champion of the Philistines myself, I think homeless guy decided that if he was going to bring my big ass down, he needed something with more firepower than a slingshot.
A mailman has his finger on the pulse of a neighborhood better than anyone, and I could see the balance of power among the neighborhood homeless shifting. I really don't have a problem with the unsheltered inhabitants sprinkled throughout my route, but the harmless homeless are fleeing before the fire and brimstone of this invader. There is a humble homeless who shares the lunchtime lot with me, carrying his green Living Bible and not interacting with anyone in a bummer way, but I have not seen him since the seventh seal was opened and this new plague was unleashed on the Earth.
I'm not trying to be some sanctimonious defender of the downtrodden. I just don´t want mean homeless guy to wreck my lunchtime Zen. Can´t he allow me one measly half hour a day in the church lot, by virtue of I was there first? Instead, he seems to be throwing down the gauntlet. What's the big deal, just give me my half hour and then he can curse and fling birds from out of nowhere, like a Vegas magic act, the rest of the day. That is - if the priests don't boot his butt for blasphemy.
