We all rummage through the bin in essentially the same way. The experienced rummagers can quickly pass over books that they're not interested in. Who in their right mind wants a 1987 edition of DOS for Dummies? When you can’t see the title easily, you have to pick the book up, flip it around, make a snap judgment (so much for not judging a book by its cover!), and either add it to your growing stack or dump it unceremoniously back into the bin. It's fun to watch how each person approaches the contents of the free bin, especially when the McKay's guy comes out and dumps more free books into the bin. Perhaps we are more like book vultures than mongrels.
Anyway, the pickings were pretty slim this particular afternoon, and it didn't take the few of us who were there long to go through them. We just had to trade places as we each finished with the books in our section of the bin. I picked up a book that several other people had already rejected. It wasn't obvious from the title what the subject was, so I flipped it over to read the back. As I did so, I noticed something sticking out of the book, which I at first took to be loose pages. It was an envelope—a thick one—already addressed and stamped. The stamps were old—several cents off from the current postage rate—but the sender had ensured its delivery by putting two stamps on the letter, clearly more than were warranted by the weight of the envelope. The distinctive cursive writing indicated a recipient in a small town in Tennessee.
Let us now enter into a thought experiment. And let us assume two premises: we do not know the name or address of the sender, and we absolutely will not open the envelope to discover the contents of the letter.
My first instinct was to just drop the thing into the nearest mailbox. Clearly, it was the intent of the writer to mail this letter, and they somehow forgot to do it. It seems likely that they stuck it into the book they were reading at the time, planning to mail it the next day. I could only imagine the flukey set of circumstances that led to the book being taken to McKays—with the letter still in it. They probably didn't realize that they had given the letter away; maybe they never even realized that they hadn't mailed the letter.
There was, of course, no way to know what the date of the letter was, but from the stamps on it, we are not talking about a long-lost letter from WWII or something like that. Still, it was intriguing. Maybe it had been enough years since the letter had been written that the recipient would be especially delighted to get it. Surprised. Shocked. Grateful. Perhaps it would be a bittersweet letter to receive: written by someone who has since gone out of the recipient's life. Maybe they died in a car wreck. Maybe they wrote this letter just before they left for Afghanistan, from where they never returned. The possibilities are endless, and I mulled over all of the ones I could think of.
I decided to stick it in the mail the following day, but for the time being, I had to be off to meet a friend for dinner.
As I drove to the restaurant, I couldn't help thinking about the letter. Maybe there was a reason that the writer didn't send it. Maybe it was one of those “I'm going to get this off my chest and then think about whether I should actually send it” letters. Have you ever written one of those, and then, in the cool light of the next day, you realized what a bad idea it would've been to send it? Wouldn't you be horrified to learn that, years later, some jerk, who didn't even know what you and so-and-so had been through, found the letter and sent it? I shudder to even think about it.
What if it was a Dear John letter, and then the couple had made up the day afterward, before John ever knew he'd been dumped? What if it was a “let's make up” letter and the next day, after the writer sobered up, they realized what a terrible idea that would be? Again, the “what ifs” came flooding in, and I determined not to mail the letter the next day.
Now I'm balancing the guy who went off to war and got killed against the woman who told off her fill-in-the-blank and then decided not to send it. Which of them should get top priority?
I know that you are thinking, “Just open the damned letter and see what it says!” But no. I will not do that. For one thing, I really do have a very strong privacy standard myself. I also won't open e-mails that I know accidentally got directed to me. I delete them, then delete them from my Trash folder, then notify the sender of his or her mistake, assuring them that I didn't read it. They probably don't believe me, but that is their problem. My conscience is at peace. But the second reason I won't open the letter is that it would be just too disappointing to learn that it's just a letter to Aunt Jen, asking how her prize roses are doing, and what the scuttlebutt is around her small town. I prefer the intrigue.
But, once the intrigue wears off, I'll still have this letter, which I hate to just throw away. Then I have to go back to my dilemma: to mail or not to mail.
What would you do?
