Jon Riccio Parenting Wil Wheaton Why am I comforted by the sight of a mailman buying newspapers in a drugstore, standing behind him with the medicine that thinks my liver for me? The linkages we make, staring at Valentines a shade of sangria, romance novels facing animal- striped canes. Zebra metal on reconnaissance, never have I heard a color jackal. The mailman's toothpick I mistake for a scar. He's similar in appearance to the father from Stand By Me, not Richard Dreyfuss's Gordie Lachance, who looks like Cousin Raymond, who went into the hair business first. My father followed after his stint in the VA hospital the year he was felled by a telephone pole, or so I heard the Christmas we spent on the Italian side, a train toggling us from Michigan to New York, sweatshirts of the Barcelona Olympics squared into red giftboxes, purple bows mourning their pre-Cupid tone. The mailman resembles Wil Wheaton's screen paternal, Marshall Bell as scavenged on IMDB. The letter deliverer, likely beginning his postal sojourn, given the stabability of civil service, my guidance counselor called it. His brochures purported direction in the time of mahogany trinkets, the Shophenge an elective provides. We had two mailboxes, one at the driveway's ready, the backup (in case anyone flattened the first, as I would on my brother's wedding day) behind an oak that deterred basketballs from the Herby Curby designated MULCH. Trotted out twice yearly, it was an Iago understudy for some Shakespearean landfill, high theater in the recycling director's teeth. The mailman with two Heralds, leg length obeying body traffic, Gwen Stefani ebullient post-No Doubt, her "Hollaback Girl" what your ears least expect inching past the Epsom and debriding agents. This floor is the cleanest I'll walk all day wondering who in my family will don orthotics first. Legion, the relatives with cold feet, Reynard's syndrome my mother researched when she wrote the health columnist. Kalamazoo's impresario of the op-ed visited my high school journalism class when I wore T-shirts with instruments on them. A bleached cello began the week. Me, fascinated by a Wendy's worker in ketchup loafers, his father the retired judge, gavels under his eyes when I see him at chili dinners in a county of cilantro ecclesiastics. Why cayenne, why the letter carrier comfort? My father encouraged civil service as stability's route. Tell them you'll take anything. This, after he vacated his barber capes for a collection-agency address. I'm a writer because I ran out of zip codes to be fired in. The 49000s have a way of destabilizing, not unlike jaundice to a PO Box, its combo the datum of a David who took my hand in a sauna once, sweaty twenty- year-olds sharing a Walkman in the medicine-ball past, campus mail after a three-orange breakfast, enzymes–to the letter–aligned.