The joy of mail

It may not be safe, but it sure is sexy

by Jerry Fraser

It’s a good thing they came up with computers because right about now email is about all any of us wants to open.

I can remember looking forward to getting mail. When I was in prep school, an “article too large for box” notice at the campus post office usually meant my mother had sent me some homemade brownies. These kept me in the good graces of my ravenous neighbors in the dorm and on the occasional frigid winter night spared me the long, uphill trek to the dining hall.

Sometimes my mother would send me a 10- or 20-dollar-bill, which in those days would buy a lot of soda. On weekends, when the students’ store was closed, that was about all there was to spend it on — assuming you had the correct change. A can of soda was 15 cents, and the machines around the campus inevitably filled with quarters. It was axiomatic that finding nickels and dimes for the soda machine on a hot Sunday afternoon was out of the question.

(You could, however, get rid of your quarters with the mercenaries who peddled cigarettes, which were of course contraband, for 50 cents apiece. This was a considerable premium, given that in those days legitimate outlets sold an entire pack for half that.)

But while packages from home were great, because they meant food, and letters meant money, what really drew us to the post office was the prospect of letters representing young love.

The school I went to, Mount Hermon, was all boys, but its sister school, Northfield, several miles away, was all girls. There were no co-ed classes until my senior year, but this didn’t stop the administration from describing the relationship between the two campuses as “co-education with a five-mile hyphen.” Student bodies did, however, commingle twice weekly, on Saturdays: During afternoon sporting events, known as “privs” (for athletic privilege), and at evening dances, known as “social events,” which were segregated by class.

Privs were OK, but under the circumstances — broad daylight and a requirement for sensible attire — afforded little opportunity for sexual experimentation. When the football game or whatever was over, the girls would be bussed back to Northfield, where those who had dates would pretty themselves up for the coming evening.

For some reason, most social events were restricted to couples only. Those that were not were known as stags. Whether this is because the administration did not want free-range teenagers grazing on the darkened campus of the opposite sex I cannot say. At any rate, it was a regrettable policy and created among students a caste of boys and girls — losers, they would be called today — who socialized only at affairs populated with people as undesirable as themselves. A caste, I should say, that was not entirely unknown to me.

Lots of planning went into each social event to ensure that it was fun-filled, wholesome, and original. Most of it, I believe, was done by classmates who were sexually out of step with their peers. It was my view, and I suspect the view of most others, that social events were but preamble to “recitation,” the 20-minute goodbye couples exchanged Saturday nights in the parking lot of Recitation Hall, where the buses picked up the girls.

“PDOA” — public display of affection — was forbidden during social events, and subject to severe disciplinary action, but this proscription was lifted during recitation. There was a vast — and more important, unlighted — lawn nearby, and couples who drifted in its direction were left alone as long as they remained upright.

For most of us, this was enough, and for a quarter hour or so we exchanged saliva and felt up our dates, and then we went back to our dorms and regaled one another with stories of “bare tit” and “lovers’ nuts.”

In an environment in which you were unlikely to meet someone of the opposite sex in class or at, say, a soda fountain, and in which students did not have cell phones and could not take calls, letters took on awesome importance.

We knew that if we mailed ours early enough the girls would get them the same day, and we knew what time the return mail was out the day after. An empty post office box was a dagger in the heart. But the silhouette of an envelope wasn’t enough until you could see that it was colored, in which case it was unlikely to be a letter from home. You put it to your nose for traces of perfume and all was well.

If I put as much effort into writing today as I did then, I would be a much more prolific — and no doubt better paid — writer than currently is the case.

For all of this, my most memorable trip to the post office occurred during the fall of my sophomore year. It was a Saturday afternoon, and although the postal workers were gone for the weekend you could still get in to check your mailbox.

There was no letter, but I did run into a classmate. I did not immediately recognize him because he was on his knees in a corner not visible from outside and his head was underneath the overcoat of his priv date, whose sensible attire was down around her ankles.

Email may be safer than snail mail, but it doesn’t come with oral sex.

Jerry Fraser can be reached at cfraser@maine.rr.com