Battle Creek, Mich. When I was growing up in the 1960s, few places were as mysterious and wondrous. For it was to this oddly-named city that you mailed all your collected Kellogg’s cereal box tops and then waited…and waited…for a fabulous toy to return in the mail. The folks at Kellogg’s warned to allow six to eight weeks for delivery which, when you’re 10-years-old, is the equivalent of forever. Usually, it was around week two that I would begin rushing home from school bristling with excitement, absolutely certain that today would be the day that my package would arrive, and then become totally crestfallen when told it hadn’t. It wasn’t just the anticipation of a package from Kellogg’s that sent my young heart beating wildly. (My cardiologist told me 50 years later it’s called tachycardia). It was also the possibility of a package arriving from the Bazooka Joe bubble gum company or the Bruno Sammartino fan club, the latest issue of MAD magazine or a card from my loving aunt containing a dollar, cash, all mine to do with as I wished. Mail delivery was an important, exciting daily event. On Saturday mornings I would wait in the lobby of my apartment building for Dominick to arrive. He was our big, burly mailman who knew me by name and always greeted me with a “Hey, young fella!” I would watch intently as he sorted through his stacks, dropping envelopes and small packages in the various boxes, waiting and hoping that something, anything with my name on it, would appear. Sometimes he would bypass our mailbox and hand the mail to me directly. Wow! As I entered my teens, anxiously awaiting the mail became less about toys and more about SAT results and college admissions, though it was still a time of birthday cards, letters from pen pals, the new issue of National Lampoon. All of this now seems so long ago, so quaint. So little these days is reliant on the mail. My bills are automatically deducted, safely and efficiently, from my checking account. Birthday cards have been replaced by texted memes. I’ve moved past school test results and on to medical test results, which I can quickly access via an online portal. Today, a 10-year-old who sends away for something expects it to arrive the next day, or sooner. Any life lessons about patience and delayed expectations I learned from waiting for the mail, they’ll have to learn somewhere else. As for Dominick the mailman, he has been replaced by a steady stream of random, nameless carriers who never arrive at my home at the same time two days in a row and whom, it seems, neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night can stay them from talking on their phones as they make their appointed rounds. In terms of volume, the trend for the U.S. Postal Service isn’t good. In 2023, it handled 59.4 billion pieces of mail. That’s down, way down, from 2007 when the service handled 103.5 billion pieces. But before you run off in a panic to write (probably email) your congressional representative, know this: The U.S. Postal Service isn’t going away anytime soon. It continues to handle 44% of the world’s mail. So, there are plenty of Americans who still love using, what many now lovingly call, “snail mail.” A few months ago, I signed up for Informed Delivery, the free U.S. Postal app which sends me daily, early morning scans of all the mail I will receive that day. Typically, it’s nothing more than scans of junk mail — offers to change my internet provider or replace the worn-out windows in my home. I also regularly receive solicitations from charities trying to guilt trip me into sending them money in exchange for their enclosed “gift” to me — return address labels, a curious choice for a gift given how fewer and fewer people are using the mail these days. I must have a thousand of these labels crammed into my desk drawer. The postal app killed the last vestiges of any hope and excitement I used to feel as I opened my mailbox and the surprises that awaited. There are some days now when I even forget to check for mail altogether. I miss getting mail and the connections it brought me to the outside world. I miss the sense of wonder and possibilities it afforded me six days a week. I miss anxiously awaiting packages postmarked Battle Creek, Mich. Ficarra is a freelance writer.