On snow
Snowflakes the size of stamps . . . frozen in the verges.
I remember sitting in the passenger seat while my father drives down an icy road. I’m supposed to be going to school but for some reason he takes me to the place where he works instead. Maybe there’s no other way to get to school that day? No bus? Whatever the reason, I can picture the snow and the ice on the road, and the grey forms of the houses and shops in a town I have no other real memory of at all.
That’s the thing about snow: it greys out all recollections, smothers the senses, especially vision but also sound and taste. My father drives (slides?) down the road but we somehow arrive safely at the bank. It’s not yet open. Now it makes sense: my father has taken me to work to kill some time before dropping me off at school.
My father works in a bank. We’re out the back, in the office behind the main area where customers come to withdraw money, or make a deposit. It’s the mid-1970s. There are no automatic teller machines, no plastic cards, no computers. Instead, everyone has a passbook, in which the bank staff write your current balance (or print it on a basic dot-matrix computer).
Even though I’m only in kindergarten, I also have a passbook from the national bank, in which I (or probably my parents) occasionally deposit twenty cents. You could even deposit the money at school, and receive an updated balance in your passbook a few days later. Crazy to think that’s how money used to work.
Anyway, I’m sitting on a chair out the back of the bank while my father and his colleagues open the day’s mail. In my mind there are multiple hessian bags filled with hundreds, maybe thousands, of envelopes. Although perhaps it’s just the one big bag, of indeterminate material.
But that’s the other thing: in the 1970s almost all correspondence was carried out via the post, sent in sealed envelopes. I’m thinking of correspondence between individuals and businesses, mostly, but also personal communications: letters, postcards, birthday cards, invitations, RSVPs. Everything we do electronically today.
I remember my father and his colleagues (maybe it was just one other teller, or even a receptionist) opening each piece of correspondence using a metal letter opener, the discarded envelopes piling up on the floor and the letters and forms stacked on the table in front of us.
My father, being an avid stamp collector, would save the stamps. We only very rarely received correspondence from overseas, so the stamps my father collected, some of which he brought home for us to look at, were all pretty similar, depending on which series the postal service had recently released. There were stamps to celebrate the Olympics or the Commonwealth Games, royal visits, sporting heroes, lifestyle campaigns (e.g. “Life: Be In It”), racehorses, that sort of thing.
The pile of empty envelopes grew larger, and the sack of mail grew smaller. Outside it continued to snow. Maybe I never made it to school that day, although I would surely remember if I’d been forced to remain out the back of the bank for the whole day.
It’s more likely that, at some time between eight a.m. and nine a.m., my father and I got back into the car, and he reversed it, somehow, back out into the street for the short drive from the centre of that town I can’t picture to the school where I spent just one year as a student.
Maybe the other reason why I can’t remember much about the experience is the fact that I was suffering from significant hearing loss at the time, due to severe ear infections. The onset of snowy weather may have exacerbated the numbed soundtrack playing in my mind: one in which my heartbeat and pulse loomed large, at the expense of other sounds.
Snowy landscapes are quiet ones; the cold sucks sounds out of the air. That’s how I remember it, anyway: a snowy day, driving silently down an icy road. Even the sounds of the envelopes being opened, the sealed flaps tearing from the force of the steel letter openers, seem muted to me now.
The empty envelopes falling onto the growing piles like something softer and warmer than snow. Their insides, featuring faint blue patterns or wavy watermarks, there for anyone to see. Empty of meaning but still alive, like pea pods, egg shells, Christmas wrapping.
My father, driving down the treacherous icy road, with a box of stamps on his lap, a path opening before us like a handwritten letter. Snowflakes the size of stamps, still attached to torn pieces of envelopes, frozen in the verges •
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Davey
