Haunting the Mailbox

I have a yellowed clipping from the New York Times, easily more that 10 years old by now, describing celebrity ghost tours available in Manhattan. Many of those alleged to be dwelling ethereally in the Big Apple are phantasms of famous figures for whom New York was merely a stopping point on the way to bigger and better things elsewhere.

What made the article “clip-worthy” was how oddly it struck me. Why would ghosts of those who found their greatest fame or fortune elsewhere choose to haunt sites where they lived only briefly – sites where they neither died nor experienced profound life events?

Setting aside arguments about whether ghosts are even real, the idea of being psychically tethered to unexpected places has a reality of its own. For example, if I were to pass away today, those seeking to commune with my disembodied spirit might improve their chances by looking to a mailbox in front of a house where I haven’t lived for thirty years.

Even now, when I dream of being in a house it is nearly always this house. Never mind that I have had some 11 other addresses and two marriages in the ensuing years (not counting a P.O. box when I was in college, living in a dorm room.) It matters not. When I dream that I am in a house, I am once again at this simple single-storey wood and brick home on a rural two-acre lot.

But more often when I dream, I find myself not in the house at all, but at the mailbox.

In real life, there was nothing special about the mailbox that I recall. Like most mailboxes, it sat at the end of the driveway, just beyond a shallow ditch, a few feet from where my siblings and I caught the school bus each morning. Our mailing address on this rural route was Rt. 1, Box 13-B, Albany, Georgia. The “13-B” was clearly advertised on the box itself with characters printed black-on-gold on one side of metallic stick-on squares.

In my conscious memory, I am at a loss to recall any event which might explain why this mailbox would be the setting for my most commonly recurring dream.

I’m certain that I received mail in this mailbox on occasion, but nothing out of the ordinary. In the days before email and inexpensive long-distance calling, the US Mail was my only means of communicating with friends who lived out of town. But frankly, I didn’t write or receive many letters. The only deliveries that I remember eagerly anticipating were record catalogs, and the records that I ordered from them. My severely limited grass-cutting income only allowed me to place these orders on occasion, so this was hardly the stuff of dreams. And yet… so often, in my dreams, there I am.

The dream is always the same.

I am in front of the mailbox, standing. I open the lid, lean down to peer inside and find that the box is stuffed with items addressed to me, many of them packages in cardboard boxes or padded envelopes. There are letters, too, hand-addressed to illustrate that they are personal missives, not junk mail. Typically, there is more mail than I can comfortably carry without restacking the items as I pull them out.

I, or my dream-self, always find the experience both exciting and gratifying.

What does it all mean?

I’m not one who thinks that all dreams have meanings. But I believe that some of them do. Because I have this dream so often I believe it’s one that is meant to deliver a message, though exactly what the message is has escaped me to this point.

Maybe I haunt the mailbox because I’m still expecting a particular item that hasn’t arrived, in spite of all the good things that have come my way. In which case, you and your Ouija Board may find me patiently waiting there when I’ve passed on.

Or it may be that the meaning is something I won’t fully grasp until I’ve left this mortal coil.

Or perhaps the letters and packages represent the gift of days to come, to be opened and enjoyed one at a time. If that’s the case, one day I’ll probably find the dream mailbox empty, and I won’t awake.

What then? Hopefully, I won’t hang around for eternity like the ghosts of New York, checking and rechecking the mailbox, waiting for a postman that will never come. Instead, I hope that I’ll be smart enough to step over to the end of the driveway, where I’ll wait for the bus to take me back to school.