“Through rain, sleet and snow the mail must go through.” Well, forget about that.
We had an envelope in our box for two days and no one picked it up. We’ve been collecting our neighbor’s mail while they are away and their box was empty as well. So I called the Post Office. “Monique (our regular carrier) was on vacation and the substitute got lost.” That was the excuse for the first day. On the second day (Monday) we had some snow, not too much, just enough to freshen up the ski paths through the woods. But I guess it was enough delay the substitute carrier and at five thirty or so they all the delivery people were called off the roads.
So the New Yorker was a couple days late.
The apartment building where my father lives has a subscription to the Wall Street Journal and my father picks it up at the end of the day. He cut out a few articles for us, one on books about the Spanish Civil War, one on the abstract expressionist, Franz Kline, and one on cultivating new brain cells.
Frederick Gage of the Salk Institute says our brains regenerate new cells while taking long walks. Because we are still evolving, thank god, “our bodies associate the exertion with moving from an existing territory, which had perhaps become depleted of food or too dangerous, to a new, unexplored territory whose details must be learned. In anticipation, the brain releases new cells and growth factors, which create a more plastic state and make possible new neural connections.”
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