ON MAIL DELIVERY

Having delivered mail for 

a few weeks, I find myself 

feeling deep affection for letter boxes

and wanting to push things into them.

 

Letter boxes come in different sizes and degrees of tightness, as do the letters that they devour. An ideal combination for a mailman is a hard, heavy piece of mail and a mature letter hole, one whose cover is not too tight but not entirely loose yet either. In this case, the mail can easily be delivered with one hand, the right hand, which makes things quicker since the left arm is holding the pile of undelivered letters.

Trying to push a small, soft letter into a tight box is the worst. It requires two hands, one for opening the slot and one for placing the item inside, and can be painful, because the delivering hand often gets stuck under the stiff cover. These situations give me cuts on my fingers and make the process slow and complicated. Whenever I find myself holding a hopelessly flabby letter, I hope that the previous penetrator has accidentally left the target hole open.

Rubber bands for binding the stacks of mail

Mail and boxes

Delivery bag

These boots are made for mail delivery

Please think about your mailman – take care of your letter box!

THE PIANIST'S FINGERS

The pianist needs a hand 
more than most of us.


The pianist walked with disturbingly long strides and had a strange snap in his left knee every time he bent that leg: it was his fingerprint, it actually gave rhythm to his piano music as he pushed the pedals, they said. Each evening, he determinedly made his way to the National Opera, the architectural monster, which often hosted grand performances. He, however, did not play for these extravaganzas, but instead for the small piggy girls practicing their pliés and échappés in the uglier part of the horrendous yet glorified building.

On this day, he once again obscurely entered the rehearsal room and sat down quietly on the familiar stool in front of the black, shiny piano, the opposite in its appearance of him, the pale pianist in his worn-out greyish suit. As always, he tapped the cover three times before opening it and unveiling the beautiful keyboard. He took his fingers along the black and white keys and tried to deeply feel the instrument, his love affair for more than 20 years.

The pianist was a timid man in his thirties. He had an exceptionally boring face, not a pianist's face at all, which he had tried to lighten up the previous evening with a few drinks. His playing had lately worsened alarmingly, and he, with strong defence mechanisms, had concluded that the reason was his recent birthday: age was making his fingers stiff and numb. In a desperate attempt to stop time, the pianist had taken several sips, perhaps even glasses, of old absinthe in his dusty, dark attic room.  For that night, he had forgotten the growing pain in his limbs and enjoyed the unexpected pleasure of not being able to play properly.

The hungover pianist now bent his arms backwards and forwards and stretched. And, like so many times in the past three weeks, he felt a strange tingle between his fingers, in that small bit of skin that ties them together and keeps them from spreading out all over the place. The round girls in their white leotards took their positions next to the ballet bar. The teacher's indifferent hand gave the pianist a sign: begin, please. For a quarter of an hour everything went rather well – he was able to forget the pain, you could even say he played with ease, passion and confidence.

Unsurprisingly, disaster struck soon. Mistake after mistake after mistake after clumsy mistake! The pianist just couldn't order his lifeless hands to find the sharps and flats on the keyboard. The girls had to stop, they had to start their movements over again every time the pianist played a wrong note or rhythm and interrupted their développés, their awful arabesques and graceless fondues. At first he made a pathetic attempt to cover up with an awkward laughter. Next, he tried extremely hard to gather himself and concentrate, but it went from bad to worse. In his pain and embarrassment, even the simplest chords were impossible.

And so the pianist finally took a closer look at his hands, something he had been avoiding for as long as possible. Surely this kind of pain was not normal for his age, he now thought.

He lowered his heavy head, and in this bright light, in this terrible moment, he immediately noticed what was happening to him. Deep down he had known it for some weeks, but it hadn't been apparent until now. The skin between his fingers had begun to grow towards his fingertips, and now almost reached the first joint on each finger. It squeezed his hands into an uncomfortably curved shape and tightened the sore fingers together. Oh dear, the fragile, almost see through skin was growing quickly and visibly. 

The shocked, web-handed pianist collected his sheets, cigarettes, gloves and coat and quickly began to make his way home. Snap, snap, snap, said his knee, as he left the grand instrument, the long-legged teacher and her piglets forever. He falsely imagined them missing him deeply.