Alan Gutierrez

Wandering out of 910 Esplanade today with Becky Houtman in tow, off to see the opening of the new Farrington Smith Gallery, when, to my surprise, I encoutered a letter carrier, with my letter box opened. I have no mailbox key, so this was an fleeting opportunity to check my mail. I produced my driver’s license, the one recently aquired for the sake of domestic travel, the one that says that I live at 910 Esplanade Ave Apt 5, New Orleans, LA.

She begins to extract letters and magazines, compacted into the bin for apartment. They’d been mashed down, the letters at the bottom were soaking from today’s rain.

Nothing had my name on it. My motor voter registration did not take apparently, as I expected to at least have recieved my new voter registration card. The only message I had that belonged to me was, in fact, addressed to resident. It was to inform me of the arrival of a new neighbor, a sex offender.

The letter carrier asked that I give her the letters that were not addressed to me. Becky and I fretted, and tought to get a plastic bag for the dripping wad of mail, but my carrier was ready with a rubber band. She inisted that first class mail be returned to the post office to be forwarded to the indended recipient. The letters were flattened and banded. As I handed her a particularly soggy magazine, she addressed my quizzical look by saying, “We know how to dry them out.”

And so we parted, our representative of the United States Post Office having given us a sense that all was right with the world. The rules attached to a particular class of postage were being adhered to strictly, in the lower French Quarter or New Orleans.