5–27–2020
Dear Prime Mover,
I see you rushing, like a fast-moving creek after snowmelt, down our cracked cement walkway, a fiercely efficient purpose woven into your mud-brown eyes. Your chopstick frame probably gets so much exercise like this, who needs a fucking gym membership. Your mandatory Prime cap is made less corporate generic by the addition of a favorite rock band button pinned to the bill. You clutch a blue and white colored package under your left arm like an ace running back would hold a pigskin, storming towards the end zone of our off-kilter mailbox. Touchdown, but without visible fanfare. You stoop to place the package delicately between the mailbox and porch, ring the doorbell and have no idea I am watching your every move somewhat voyeuristically through the doorbell cam. Dinnnggggg! and the butter-soft chime is as calming as one of those singing bowls that you always hear in yoga classes, marking endings that are also beginnings. You aboutface in a single fluid motion, dart back to your trusty truck, and take off for someone else’s house, or apartment, or trailer, or whatever it is they might live in, belching a brackish carbon cloud and squealing your tires like some teenage desperado who just got his license. You, my not-known friend, are an undersung hero, and also foolish because you have decided to be unmasked and ungloved, facing our tainted public air with foolhardy bravado. Or maybe those accessories are just too damn hot. Easy as apple pie for me to remark on, anyhow. CDC says that masks are more to protect me than you, partner, and maybe you are sick of me already. Sick of all of us, in fact, since we are just spoiled children waiting in the creature comfort of home for you to reliably deliver more crap we probably don’t need. Crap made in some far-flung export processing zone, where the workers are just ants getting stomped on for thirteen hours a day, and some of them are just kids. But I digress. Like usual. I wish I could chat my thanks to you directly, offer some warm cookies on a plate, know where I can send a positive review online that is personal. But the delivery notification seems deliberately vague and does not even contain your full name. Maybe, that is to protect drivers like you from any unhappy customers' poorly focused wrath. But not knowing your name makes you a generalization, rather than a specific. This is supposed to be a gracious thank you note. I order mucho stuff that gets sent to your company’s hectic churning warehouses and then to my doorstep because going to stores right now is fucking scary. I appreciate you, Jack S. I do not know what the S stands for, but you seem way too unique for it to be Smith. Maybe, it’s Superhero. You are very good at doing what you do, doing it cobra strike quick, with a bottomless cup of quotas to fill. Keep up the great work, and know that you are seen. From a doorbell cam, of course. Peace, JP
