Not That You Asked (9780307822215) Read Online Free PDF Page A

affection for the post office is that in 1900 there were seventy-seven thousand of them. Today, with three times as many Americans, there are only forty thousand post offices. You can bet the thirty-seven thousand they closed were all good, small ones.
    It might be a better country if we didn’t have mail delivery at all. One of the healthiest things for any community is a post office where everyone comes to pick up the mail. When people have to go get their mail every day, it’s not only good for people, it’s good for the community.
    We still pick up our mail in the little community where we live in the summer. Even the fact of having to do it is good for you: “I gotta go get the mail,” you say, and no one contests that. It takes precedence over any dirty job you’re doing. If you gotta get the mail, you can get out of anything.
    If you didn’t have to go get the mail in our community, you might never know why the fire siren rang at 3:45 A.M. You might not know that the old Peabody house has been sold to two men from New York who are going to live there. You wouldn’t know why Ed Wright isn’t speaking to Paul Webberly. Going to the post office is a good thing to do even when you don’t get anything but a boxful of junk.
Do Only Women “Wed”?
    Pamela Bankert, a third-year law student at Rutgers University, and Rupert Brandt, a carpenter, were married the other day, according to
The New York Times
. The little headline read PAMELA BANKERT WEDS .
    No men ever get wed in the
Times
, just women. It doesn’t say a thing in the headline about Rupert getting hitched too. Most society pages in newspapers put more emphasis on women than men. You don’t see pictures of the men all dressed up in wedding clothes. It’s always the picture of the woman in her wedding dress. I resent this. Men get married just as often as women and, when they do, it’s justas important. I don’t know why society editors think it’s more important to tell people a woman got married.
    The short story of Pamela Bankert’s wedding leaves a lot of unanswered questions. How does a third-year law student get to know a carpenter? Can a lawyer find happiness with a carpenter and, if so, can a carpenter find happiness with a lawyer?
    One thing Pamela is sure to find when the phone begins ringing off the hook in their house is that lawyers are a dime a dozen, but everyone is trying to find a carpenter.
    The most interesting part of this wedding story is the last line. “The couple,” the story ends, “will use the surname Bankert.”
    Why, do you suppose? Is Rupert just an easygoing guy who went along with the suggestion they use her family name instead of his? Are there class overtones in this? Is Pam’s family reluctant to have her take the name of a carpenter? I don’t envy Rupert the rest of his life. From now on people will ask him, “What was your name before you were married?” Is there an equivalent to the phrase
maiden name
for a man?
    Mr. Brandt’s parents apparently are divorced, because the story says he’s the son of “Harvey Brandt of Somerville, N.J., and Pauline Perkins of Brockton, Mass.”
    We don’t know from the item whether his mother, Pauline, reassumed her maiden name or got remarried to someone named Perkins. I think the
Times
owed us quite a bit more or quite a bit less on this story.
    The idea of a man taking a woman’s name is new to me. I’d probably be a male chauvinist pig in Gloria Steinem’s pretty blue eyes to oppose the idea, but if the practice becomes popular it’s going to cause a lot of confusion. Having the woman assume the man’s name may be unfair to women, but it is the established way of doing things, and to change is going to play havoc with public records.
    When Pam and Rupert’s children grow up and apply for a passport years from now, what are officials going to think