This is a picture taken from Google Maps of a place where I spent summers when I was four and five. It’s just down river from Parker Dam on the California side of the Colorado River. The dam forms Lake Havasu, which is now a recreational vacation destination. The streets are gated and almost everything is gone. Only traces of houses and mature trees remain. I have no idea when this occurred or why exactly. My grandfather worked in some capacity at the dam and lived in what I believe was government housing. It was a long drive through the desert to anywhere populated, so the government had to provide housing, though I don’t remember any discussions of it. What I do very clearly remember is the pile of rocks above California St. that formed the back yard where my cousin Herlene and I — I don’t think people name girls Herlene anymore — climbed and explored hour upon hour. Herlene was older than I was by two or three years and a fearless climber. Oddly enough, I don’t remember being supervised. There was a bell or something that told us to come back to the house. It rang for meals and bath time. I wore a pair of shorts with no shirt and no shoes all summer and besides feeling absolutely free was as brown as a roasted coffee bean.

There was a small post office or postal substation with mail boxes in the direction of the dam. My grandmother would give us salt tablets, believed to help us with the heat, and sometimes send us off to get the mail. It seemed like a much longer walk at that age than it would today. Herlene carried a small piece of paper with the combination to the mail box on it. She knew how to read somewhat. I showed no aptitude for reading until very much later, something that caused my parents no end of concern. Anyway, it made her feel very important and obviously superior. We sometimes visited other houses on the way, about which I knew absolutely nothing. I simply soaked in the decorating, drank lemonade and from the porch considered the yard and the lay of the land. I remember finding it all very uninteresting.

What I call the post office sat by itself with nothing around it. On the left was a door leading to the mail boxes. There was a short wall of them on the left and another on the right. My grandparents' box was midway down the left.

I have now given you enough background to give this story some perspective. On a particular trip to the post office Herlene, who wasn’t nearly as superior as she pretended to be, had trouble opening the box. She fumbled over left, right, pass the number, and so forth. She tried one way after another. In the process I turned my back and looked at the opposite wall of mail boxes. I looked down the left and down the right until I spotted a box that seemed familiar. I walked over to it, reached up and spun the dial right, stop, left, stop, right, stop, and then snapped the knob and opened the door. Herlene had turned to see what I was doing and went ballistic when the door opened. She grabbed me and drug me out of the post office because… Because we weren’t supposed to do that to other peoples' mail boxes. Something like that. I didn’t play with the box and stumble on the combination. I turned the dial like I had done it a million times before and it popped open with absolute confidence. The box was empty. And that’s all the story I have because I was never allowed in the post office again.

I remember this story from time to time as the first example in my life of the conflict between spiritualism and materialism. I don’t have an exact explanation for what happened, but I do know that my knowledge, because it was that, was not the result of a material involvement, and it was not the result of chance or coincidence. I learned at age four or five that acting on such impulses was much better, or rather much safer to do in private.

In January I wrote something about my mother in 1932 Underwood Upright. She did very strange things all her life. She went to UCLA at fourteen but dropped out because of scarlet fever. She saw things that couldn’t be seen, heard things that couldn’t be heard and grew crazier with the passing of every year. She dismissed the importance of her strange abilities, thinking of herself as being absolutely normal. She, of course, was anything but normal. If I told her about the things I experienced, she would reject those too. When I share them with others they tend to become tense and dismissive. So, on this Mother's Day, I share a little story about mail boxes in a place that no longer exists, as a kind of easy introduction.