In the moment, in the mail

Into the future

New moon, aging month, another post when I’m not in town. True to my pattern around Substacking to date, I’m sitting down to write this when I’m miles from home. This year hasn’t been so much about travel but a decent amount of mini-trips have certainly peppered this first third of 2025. First third! WTF??! I found myself thinking this morning as I assessed the date from our hotel room in San Diego. I thought I’d enjoy a few days of warm weather and continue plugging away on my various event prep while K was working here, but I woke up to rain and cloudy skies. Alas, the cool weather many of us in the San Francisco Bay Area have been experiencing for the past week hasn’t been exclusive to that part of California. I’m not complaining: Soggy or not, I have a view of the San Diego Bay and city skyline from my desk du jour. And I remembered to bring a rain jacket, making a nice walkabout before noon comfortable if not ideal.

Figuring out how to do basic tasks in a strange place is sometimes the best way for me to get to know the lay of the land and its customs. I have great memories of spending a day getting keys made in Florence, Italy, and searching for ingredients for a meal at a fresh market in Paris. There are also the not-so-fond-if-character-building recollections of trying to pick up a FedEx package in Mysore, India (getting to know the local way of doing things is not synonymous with loving those ways). Those moments of having to pay that much more attention, to actually learn, the sometimes slog of it all, are the adventure. Being called upon to communicate in a different language, or navigate streets far off the typical tour route, can’t help but be expansive. Though I should add that these particular, memorable-if-mundane moments were completed amid extended stays. If you just have a few days in a cool foreign place, I’m not going to endorse using that much time on such humdrum stuff.

Today, in my home state, albeit in a town I’ve never visited before, my small challenge was to mail the remainder of my postcards from a time-sensitive Activate America campaign. Even though the campaign was simply about urging people to call their Congressman to save Medicaid, I didn’t feel that comfortable leaving them with the concierge. Was there a post office box or actual post office within walking distance? As I set out, my question started to morph into where people actually mailed things in Coronado?

They do, though it did take a minute.

Beyond the waterfront, I found a nice neighborhood with a smattering of American flags, ‘Jesus saves’ and ‘Go Padres’ signs peppering the various yards. Most had mailboxes but it was too early to see a mail truck. I did find a small, triangle-shaped pocket park in the middle of three streets with one big tree containing multiple Great Blue Heron nests (San Diego is another great place for birds), and the local grocery and hardware store. The one post office, it turned out, was further across the island.

Coronado, I learned upon arrival, is a ‘tied island,’ a piece of land that is literally tied to the mainland by a spit of beach which is connected to land at both ends. If I squint, the view of the San Diego skyline over the top of my laptop is not unlike that of the view of Oakland from Alameda. Only, instead of looking across the Oakland-Alameda Estuary, I’m looking over a stretch of the San Diego Bay. There’s a Naval base taking up a chunk of the island. It’s all familiar, if bigger in scale. Instead of the four-lane, 21’ Park St. Bridge to the right, I’ve a view of the five-lane, 200-foot Coronado Bridge (which like many Bay Area bridges, has resident Peregrine Falcons, one of whom I was pleased to see shortly after arrival).

But back to the mail. The USPS, like so many of our institutions, is struggling financially (which makes it another target for our current administration), in part because people use it less. I’m one of those people, but I still love the fact of mail, the art of stamps, and — and in the case of the activist-oriented postcards in my bag, the combination of the personal with the political. I hope the USPS is able to hang on, though hope is meaningless without action. I’m reminded of running into a friend in Alameda near our local post office recently, who told me he “was buying up as many stamps as he could.” Stamp prices are another thing that will be going up this year. I bought an extra roll of postcard stamps that day.

Today, right when I was about to give up on getting my postcards in the mail, I found a faded blue box near the Ferry Plaza. Phew. Fly free postcards! Call your Congresspeople, dear voters. Days and months and minutes and seconds…time keeps on slipping and now is what we’ve got.