Short Mailbox Quotes

A short woman might be difficult to see on a crowded city street, particularly if she has disguised herself as a mailbox, and people keep putting letters in her mouth.

Joan and the Judge had gone to a Sunday brunch with friends. They would be home shortly, in good spirits probably, unless of course they saw their boy frozen to the mailbox. So Claire and Maggie had no choice. They each grabbed a shoulder and hooked under an elbow and yanked suddenly without warning. Scotty brought his hands quickly to his mouth. All three stood quietly staring at the miniature pink circle of flesh still stuck on the mailbox. "It looks like a little pizza," said Maggie without thinking.

Well, my epic freedom moment was short-lived, because I realized my cell phone was dead. I walked down the road to a gas station and asked if I could use the phone. I called Tracy and told her where I was and asked her to pick me up. When Tracy arrived I hopped in the car and the very first thing I said to her was “I gotta get home. I have to print out some TV guides and I need to write a letter to some of the guys in there.” She started laughing and when she could compose herself enough to talk said, “My sisters and I all said we guarantee Noah is going to come out of jail with new friends. He’s going to be friends with everybody.” I got home and immediately wrote a letter to Michael Bolton. I put my email address at the bottom. I printed out TV guides. I printed out crossword puzzles. I even printed a couple of pages of jokes and riddles and whatever would be fun to read and do and folded them up and put them in an envelope. All that was left to do was to write the address, put a stamp on the envelope, and put it in the mailbox. I put the envelope in the car in between the seat and the center console to take to the post office. I must have been distracted or had to do something else because the envelope sat there for months. Every so often I would look at it and go, Oh crap, I haven’t sent that yet. And then at some point I spilled something on it so I knew I would never send it now. I threw it out. To this day I’m worried that one day I’m going to be at the gas station in line and hear a voice behind me say, “I’m Michael Bolton and you never sent me my damn TV guide. You’re just like the rest.” He’s going to shank me in my side and that will be the end of the Noah Galloway story.

In this value vacuum, Randy became increasingly incorrigible, resorting to vandalism of mailboxes and stop signs, hotwiring cars, committing petty thefts, unfunny pranks like squirting unsuspecting people with stolen fire extinguishers filled with paint, and similar anti-social acts that served as an outlet for his aggressions and frustrations from his family life, as well as a means of creating his own identity. In short, Randy became a juvenile delinquent.

I cried in the Chevron bathroom stall. I cried near the confederate jasmine vine on the left side of the mailbox. I cried in conditions of suburban sprawl. I cried on the couch, in the black bucket seat, near the diaper, halfway between the Little Free Library and a nearby house, in the funeral home parlor, in the late afternoon traffic which turned every light orange, in the mega-box store with low prices for milk. I cried in the grass and pressed my face into the driveway pavement.

I’ll always worry about you. Every moment you’re not in my arms, I worry. I’ll worry about a short trip to the store, or a simple walk to the mailboxes because I’ve seen too much shit in my life. I’ll try to curb it, but you should know I’m going to be über-protective. Probably annoyingly so.

Just as much as an ash splint, a sheet of paper is a tree’s life, along with the water and energy and toxic by- products that went into making it. And yet we use it as if it were nothing. The short path from mailbox to waste bin tells the story. But what would happen, I wonder, to the mountain of junk mail if we could see in it the trees it once had been?

her mind. Get away from here and sweat. That was all. Then she’d be all right. Then she could think straight again. Oh, God, please . . . Her hands shook violently as she twisted her hair up onto her head. Trying in vain to turn off the questions pounding through her brain, she stripped out of her clothes to don jogging bra, long-sleeved T-shirt, shorts and running shoes. Then, on impulse, she walked into her den, ignored the stacks of work and checked her e-mail. Maybe Kelly had sent her a message . . . She was surprised she hadn’t thought of it before. She clicked on her mailbox but saw nothing other than the usual offers of low-mortgage rates, discreet Viagra or a free peek at some porn site. Nothing from Kelly. ‘‘Damn.’’ She clicked off the computer and with Oscar at her heels, hurried downstairs, where she peeked out the front blinds and saw no trace of reporters on the street. Still, she’d be careful. She slapped a pair of sunglasses over her eyes and added a baseball cap to her disguise, as if she were some high-profile celebrity, for God’s sake, then clicked on Oscar’s leash. She

I smiled and we both just stood there. Neither one of us made a move to go, even though it was late. A mischievous grin crept across her face. “Are you tired?” I liked the glint in her eye and I had no intention of ending this night if she didn’t want to, no matter how tired I was. “No.” “Do you want to go TP Sloan and Brandon’s house?” My laugh made her eyes dance. “I know it’s a little tenth-grade retro,” she said. “But I’ve always wanted to do it. And you can’t TP a house alone—it’s a rule.” “We’ll have to show up there tomorrow and help them clean it up. Pretend it’s just a lucky coincidence,” I said. “Can you borrow a tool from Brandon? I can text Sloan in the morning to tell her we’re going to pick it up. She’ll cook if she knows we’re coming. Then we’ll get breakfast and atone for our sins.” She grinned. A half an hour later I was crouched behind my truck two houses down from Brandon’s, game-planning with Kristen. She still hadn’t taken out her curlers. “If they wake up,” she whispered, “we scatter and reconvene at the donut place on Vanowen.” “Got it. If you’re captured, no matter what they do to you, don’t break under interrogation.” She scoffed quietly. “As if. I can’t be broken.” She snatched her roll and darted from behind the truck. We made short work of it. Operation TP Sloan and Brandon’s was completed in less than five minutes. No casualties. We got back into the truck laughing so hard it took me three tries to get the key in the ignition. Then I noticed she’d lost a curler. I got unbuckled. “No curlers left behind. It’s Marine Corps policy.” We got out for a recon mission on Brandon’s lawn. I located the fallen curler under a pile of TP by the mailbox. “Hey,” I whispered, holding it up. “Found it.” She beamed and jogged across the toilet-papered grass, but when she reached for the curler, I palmed it. “You’re injured,” I whispered. “You’ve lost a curler. The medics can reattach it, but I’ll need to carry you out. Get on my back.” I was only about 50 percent sure she would go for this. I banked on her not wanting to break character. She didn’t skip a beat. “You’re right,” she whispered. “Man down. Good call.” She jumped up and I piggybacked her to the truck, laughing the whole way. Those thirty seconds of her arms around my neck made my entire night.

One thing more makes these men and women from the age of wigs, swords, and stagecoaches seem surprisingly contemporary. This small group of people not only helped to end one of the worst of human injustices in the most powerful empire of its time; they also forged virtually every important tool used by citizens’ movements in democratic countries today. Think of what you’re likely to find in your mailbox—or electronic mailbox—over a month or two. An invitation to join the local chapter of a national environmental group. If you say yes, a logo to put on your car bumper. A flier asking you to boycott California grapes or Guatemalan coffee. A poster to put in your window promoting this campaign. A notice that a prominent social activist will be reading from her new book at your local bookstore. A plea that you write your representative in Congress or Parliament, to vote for that Guatemalan coffee boycott bill. A “report card” on how your legislators have voted on these and similar issues. A newsletter from the group organizing support for the grape pickers or the coffee workers. Each of these tools, from the poster to the political book tour, from the consumer boycott to investigative reporting designed to stir people to action, is part of what we take for granted in a democracy. Two and a half centuries ago, few people assumed this. When we wield any of these tools today, we are using techniques devised or perfected by the campaign that held its first meeting at 2 George Yard in 1787. From their successful crusade we still have much to learn. If, early that year, you had stood on a London street corner and insisted that slavery was morally wrong and should be stopped, nine out of ten listeners would have laughed you off as a crackpot. The tenth might have agreed with you in principle, but assured you that ending slavery was wildly impractical: the British Empire’s economy would collapse. The parliamentarian Edmund Burke, for example, opposed slavery but thought that the prospect of ending even just the Atlantic slave trade was “chimerical.” Within a few short years, however, the issue of slavery had moved to center stage in British political life. There was an abolition committee in every major city or town in touch with a central committee in London. More than 300,000 Britons were refusing to eat slave-grown sugar. Parliament was flooded with far more signatures on abolition petitions than it had ever received on any other subject. And in 1792, the House of Commons passed the first law banning the slave trade. For reasons we will see, a ban did not take effect for some years to come, and British slaves were not finally freed until long after that. But there was no mistaking something crucial: in an astonishingly short period of time, public opinion in Europe’s most powerful nation had undergone a sea change. From this unexpected transformation there would be no going back.