On 4/10/26 my USPS mail included a postcard showing penguins at Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, with brief messages from three different people, each signed with a first name. So as not to get these people embroiled in this discussion, I’ll use their initials: E (common male name), I (uncommon female name), M (common male name). E’s message provided some crucial contextual information:
Ahoy, Arnold! Saw these really cute guys at the aquarium and thought of you.
I’s and M’s messages were about the penguins’ behavior they observed at the Shedd. E and M I couldn’t identify, but I’s name usefully picked out the only person I have ever known with this name, so I was able to send her e-mail about the card, which turned out to be deeply baffling.
The postmark on the card was:
CAPITAL DISTRICT 208
7 APR 2020
(At first I read 2026, but some printing on the card partially obscured the last digit, and eventually I saw that it was a 0.)
So USPS was delivering mail with news of E, I, and M’s penguin day of the past. Six years past.
CAPITOL DISTRICT was puzzling, but 208 isn’t a postal code (it is the telephone area code for the state of Idaho, but that was clearly irrelevant).
When I wrote her, I was astonished:
Wait, seriously? You just got that?
But she confirmed that E, I, and M did indeed visit the Shedd together years ago, when the three of them were all in Chicago (E was an old friend of mine, M a man who was the husband of another old friend of mine, D). As for the postcard, she wrote:
I have no idea where it’s been all this time.
In a later mail exchange, she reported:
I just looked it up. CAPITAL DISTRICT 208 hasn’t been used since 2020 at least. It indicated mail that was processed in Washington DC.
So it was put in the mail in Chicago IL, in 2020, with my absolutely correct and complete mailing address (in Palo Alto CA) on it; for some reason went for processing to DC that year; and then languished in USPS hyperspace until it somehow finished its magical mystery tour by getting delivered to Palo Alto last week.
As Ann Daingerfield Zwicky would surely have said:
It’s those damn pixies!
— those wicked pixies that hide things from you and won’t give them up (I learned about them long ago from Ann and her old friend Benita Bendon Campbell).
April 16, 2026 at 6:27 am |
Ann’s idea about pixies reminded me of a childhood favorite, Mary Norton’s The Borrowers; the titular creatures are miniature humans who live in the walls and under the floors of houses, and “borrow” items from the householders for their personal use.
I’m pretty sure I know who “I” is.
April 16, 2026 at 6:48 am |
Norton’s children’s novel came out in 1952; I missed it in childhood, but enjoyed it immensely in my daughter’s childhood (which opened up a whole range of wonderful literature nominally for children).
I’m sure you know who I is.