There’s a rumor going around that Eugene is going to lose a post office. Not just any post office, but the one I go to, University Station.
No big deal, right? There are other POs in town, even quite nearby. In fact, I now live closer to the main station than to University Station. No one is going to be prevented from sending and receiving their mail, in no small part because, as Obama recently reminded us, there are many private companies now willing to take part in that transaction who are “doing just fine.” Yep, “it’s the post office that’s always having problems.”
Be that as it may, I would be greatly saddened if University Station is closed. Fundamentally, I think that every university should have a mail room. In fact, it surprised me to find that the University of Oregon had a post office, not a mail room, when I arrived, but I guess there’s a matter of scale that makes the mail room at Oberlin viable, and that at Oregon a post office (Though perhaps the problem lies somewhere in that inequality).
The mail room of a university or college serves its students tirelessly, providing a stable address for those orbiting campus. It is a place for paying first bills. It’s where really good things happen when you’ve been away from home for a while – a care package arrives, or just a postcard, when you thought you had been forgotten. It’s a portal to a place far away.
Amongst the little cubbies or up at the window, you have the sense of really being in a physical place. You see the postman heft a box of letters dropped into the slot for the 1:45 pick up. You’ve written on paper with pen, folded that paper, tucked it into an envelope, and licked the envelope closed. Now you lean against the counter with the envelope in hand and ask for stamps. You look in the folder proffered – you select from the objects at hand. You’ll drop your letter in the empty box, they’ll wheel it out with the 5:30 mail.
Perhaps it’s a relic of things past, but I think that’s why it’s so valuable. There’s no scrolling through options, imagining the shapes and sizes and weights of things. Here, things are measured, they’re displayed in their corporeality. Keys are turned and doors are opened, objects are filed and sorted. That’s not to deny the electronic scale or scanner, but it is to say thanks for the man behind the counter, wearing his blue ringer polo shirt, affixing that label to that package.
I think students need to have a place so connected to objects, since many times they’re living a life so overstuffed with ideas. They need a place that is neutral in the way that government places are; where freedom of speech is practiced in a dramatically different way than in their classrooms. They are lucky to have a place devoted to their physical connection with those far away, and a place that so effortlessly combines responsibility and spontaneity. When all of that is at the heart of campus, it becomes an important place for chance meetings or reality checks amongst the craze of finals; when it’s that convenient it doesn’t take away time from studying or socializing.
Against the realities of the federal budget, my fondness for and belief in the importance of University Station will probably weigh naught. Yet, for that foreign student, or for the man in the blue polo, I’m hoping that my thoughts are worth more than their weight.