Mark Story: Degradation of the letterbox

Photo / File

The letterbox is in peril.

Excepting newspapers (naturally) nothing worth reading for the better part of 15 years has passed through the slot.

Bills, invoices, letters authored by civil servants and screeds of glossy junk have silently sullied the once virtuous standing of the letterbox.

This, of course, is no fault of its own: the digital letter has precluded the pen. To boot, the proliferation of junk is evidence this ghastly, glossy marketing tool works. Shame.

Some of my personal top-drawer moments were shared only with a letterbox. Inhaling a love letter's perfume, my first pay cheque of more than $20, the agony of fishing out the School Certificate result, a 50 note from London mailed by my best man at the birth of my son, exquisite handwriting in birthday cards sent from grandma and intrepid letters inked from friends abroad.

Now, it's just a box.

Given its newfound banality, I ignore it. Its only function is to show our home's numerical standing in the street, a co-ordinate for pizza deliverers.

Little of merit comes from it, as little of merit comes to it.

I hand everything addressed to me to my home-accountant wife. She's the filter. Anything that needs to get back to me goes through her. "You might want to look at this one," she'll say. Minded not to, I press her for more information to avoid acknowledgment of whatever it is violating the former sanctity of the letterbox.

Still, there was a slight reprieve last week courtesy of a letter addressed to me from the IRD. Said filter informed that the final payment of my substantial student loan was imminent.

It was bitter-sweet news. If you had told me when I applied for a student loan at 17, that it would take me 25 years to square up with the Government, I'd have eased up on the ale. University thirst materialised as a 25-year financial hangover.

It dawned on me I was born a generation late. Not only did my generation come out of university $40,000-odd in the red, we faced buying property inexorably pricier than the generation before us.

But I'm not complaining. Baby Boomers, in my experience, are an overwhelmingly generous generation. The trickle-down effect to Baby Boomers' children can't be discounted. My only fear is how much trickle-down there'll be from me to our children; I fear for the Baby Boomers' baby's babies.

Yet while they garnered their degrees for free, it was nonetheless a generation that honoured the letterbox.

My kids will never know it as a medium of considered exchange, will never realise its role as a public-private portal between the footpath and the house, a drawbridge over the moat connecting castle from kingdom.

It sits handmade, cobbled together with a roof of weatherboard, topped with a pastiche of blackbird droppings under the cherry tree. It's still there. But it's vestigial. I miss its former function.

Ignored by design historians, the understated item is now, like the power pole, the forgotten aesthetic.

• Mark Story is deputy editor at Hawke's Bay Today.