IDK what this world is coming 2. How bout U?

Once upon a time, my post-office box was the center of my world. Or close to it, anyway.

For years, the highlight of my day was to walk two blocks to the local post office and pick up The Mail. We didn't have door-to-door mail in such close proximity to the post office, so we've had the same box number for almost 40 years now. It's small town living at its best.

In our old post office, we had quaint little metal-and-glass boxes with lettered combinations. I still remember the combination to my old box: You'd turn the dial right to AB; left to DE; and then stop again at I to the right. It was simple and straightforward. You could stop at the post office on your way somewhere else or while you were out pushing the kids around in the stroller. If you had questions, or needed something weighed, or wanted to buy postage stamps, you could go to the desk and talk to the quaint little postmaster, Mr. Kirk. He was awfully cute. He acted stern, but eventually you realized that his stolid face was often hiding a wry sense of humor.

Several years ago, the post office moved to "new-and-improved" quarters just one block away from our house. I'm sure it was a good thing for the post office. It wasn't always so good for me. By this time, Mr. Kirk had retired. The new postmaster wasn't hiding anything (especially not a sense of humor)--what you saw was what you got. In little old Manchester we started to understand the meaning of "going postal." It was no longer as much fun to go inside and buy postage stamps, but that was OK because you could now buy them from a little machine that spit out one stamp at a time, and sometimes even spit out one-cent stamps in "change." The kids loved that. If you wanted something weighed you hoped that the postmaster would stay in his office and that Skip or Frances would help you out.

Worse, however, was that our awesome little combination lock boxes were deemed "old-fashioned" and had been discarded. Now we all had plain, ugly boxes, that were opened with keys (which you could obtain for a fee). And we weren't allowed to forget them at home. There was no glass in the box, so you had to open it up to see if there was anything inside. My mail started piling up in the box because I could never remember to take the key when I went out for a walk.

Still, I loved the days that I remembered the key and could pick up The Mail. I never knew what kind of neat surprises my mailbox would hold. Sure, there were bills; but there might also be a nice, long, letter from the friend that I'd met in fourth grade in New Jersey. Or family members from far away. There might even be a package once in a while.

Slowly, however, The Mail was mostly just bills. And junk. People I knew were starting to communicate electronically, so my allegiance eventually turned to email. I started gathering email addresses from my friends and we could chat happily and cheaply. I joined some email lists as my realm of friends broadened out. We poured out our hearts from our computers to folks we'd never actually met in person. But you know what, I couldn't wait to log on and see who I heard from next.

Then, there was Facebook. The friend who invited me apologized for "luring me into this evil world." Uh-huh. Well, it's OK. I have gotten over Facebook a couple of times. And I'm back again. However, it now seems to have overtaken email. Seemingly, it's easier to tell the world that you have to go to the bathroom than to just walk away from your computer and come back in a few minutes to finish reading ... or writing. It's faster to just click "like" on someone's status than to actually respond to them via a private message. I still check in on people, but I will confess that it is probably more because I'm nosy than truly concerned.

And, of course, if you're posting from your phone, which you can use for texting, updating your facebook status, sending an email, and "tweeting" your 140 characters on Twitter, you are making all sorts of little abbreviations to shorten up your message. Because let me tell you--it is a HUGE pain to send messages from your cell phone. At least it is from mine.

So instead of getting some satisfying letters, cards, and/or juicy information via mail or email from our friends (which is a term used somewhat loosely in Facebook-land), we are now getting stupid, often meaningless, updates from those dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of friends/acquaintances/contacts. It's overwhelming. And not very personal.

Email has pretty much been relegated to sending "forwards" (the electronic version of junk mail) that tell you to send it to everyone in your address book, so you have to scroll down through the names and addresses of everyone in everyone else's address book that's gone before you. It's crazy. And half the time, by the time you get to the actual message, something has convoluted it and it's either there in duplicate (it's kind of like the email version of carbon paper) or it's disappeared entirely into some kind of an .html attachment that you don't know if you should open for fear of getting the newest virus hatched by some hacker in India who has nothing better to do while answering your phone calls for tech support.

Quite succinctly--I need to get back to some simpler ways of staying in contact with the people I really care about. I think I'm going to start using my cell phone for what God intended it to do--talking. What a concept.