What's in a Piece of Junk Mail?
Or, Preparing for Flight
I stand in the park near my house over the trashcan. I’ve walked, on this gloriously cool Tuesday afternoon in November, to check the mail. I’m less interested in sorting through the glossy ads piled up in our box than I am in escaping my house for a few minutes. I love working from home, but sometimes I need to stray outside the well-worn path from my office to the bathroom to the kitchen and back.
I discard the junk mail in the park trashcan. I don’t recycle it. Sue me. I throw away giant glossy cards for realtors, window installation, and dentists. I drop newsprint coupons in along with them. Sometimes I even manage to come home empty handed, which oddly, feels like victory. But lately, I’ve begun to hold on to some of those shiny mass-mailed bits.
Colleges. Our oldest is a junior, and he’s on their mailing lists. Most of them are smaller places, some I’ve never heard of, but I keep them all, piling them on the kitchen counter, and then, four days later, pointing them out to him, nagging him until he goes through them. This is the first time he’s received mail that wasn’t a card from a grandparent.
Today, I walked home clutching the mail that made the cut — my National Geographic magazine (I swear I’ll read, right after I read the three back issues still collecting dust under my coffee table) and flyers from the Universities of such-and-such at so-and-so. I wondered, why AM I keeping these?
I mean, I set them all out for him — strange little college in backwater Texas no one ever heard of, way too expensive private school, university without a soccer program (which is a definite non-starter for him) — all of them. Why?
I guess, I’m trying to show my support in whatever feeble way I can. He doesn’t seem to need a lot of help from me at this point, but I want him to know I’m interested, I’m thinking about his future.
I’m also trying to come to grips with the fact that he will graduate and go off somewhere in the blink of an eye. This physical act of acknowledging the mail and placing it on the counter helps me solidify it in my brain as a thing that will actually happen.
I am trying to encourage him to think about it. Even if the flyers are nowhere he wants to go, maybe they will prompt him to ponder where he does want to go. Maybe they will spark ideas.
Mostly, it’s my way of acknowledging we both know this is happening.
This one, stupid small thing I do, is the tip of a very large ice berg underneath. I am trying to wrap my arms around the idea that the tiny being I gave birth to, held and diapered, the one who slept in our bed until he was I don’t even remember how old, the one who struggled to come to terms with going to preschool just two days a week…
Is going to go off somewhere, maybe far away.
I’m glad for him. It makes me smile, it makes me proud, how independent and responsible and capable he is. How introspective beyond his years he has become. When he flies from the nest, he will no doubt be ready. But it is still a hard thing to wrap my brain around.
All of those thoughts I think as I walk home in the sunshine with the mail under my arm. All of that anxiousness and wonder, wrapped up in the act of saving a few pieces of junk mail. That’s one of the things that is so incredible about humans — one small act can belie so much.
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Allie strikes out into the wilderness, leaving a bloody message for her fiancé who, in his desperate and frustrating search to find her, is forced to confront his own subtle prejudices and assumptions about family. Allie and Mitch are both a mess, but events push them to try to reconcile their conflicting ideas about what each wants in life. It’s a story of someone who dares to question what her friends, family and culture expect of her.
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