We were enjoying a leisurely Saturday morning breakfast when my husband spied the mail truck in our driveway.

“There’s the mail truck!” he announced, with excitement.  At that, he sprang up and raced outside to retrieve the anticipated surprises the mail carrier deposited in our box.

I could maybe understand this a little better had it been pre-Christmas.  After all, a lot of goodies come in the mail around the holidays—Christmas cards from friends we only hear from once a year, Christmas gifts, the Discover bill . . . oh, wait, thankfully, that comes in January.  But this was after Christmas, so we weren’t really expecting anything exciting.

“Well?” I said when hubby returned.

“Interval wants us to upgrade our membership,” he replied, tossing the opened letter on the table.

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

Hhmm.  It seemed to me this piece of junk mail hardly merited the neck-breaking race to the mail box to retrieve before it even had a chance to warm the box for two minutes.  But my husband has always been like this.  He has a mail fetish.  Mail cannot sit in the box if he spies the mail truck.  Sometimes if I see the truck before he does (admittedly a rarity), I will call out, “The mail’s here,” just for the fun of seeing him drop everything and hustle out of the house like Ed Mcmahon is standing at our doorstep to hand us our Publisher’s Clearing House prize.  It’s equivalent to telling the dogs, “Squirrel!”

If somehow he misses the truck, he checks the box multiple times during the day until mail has appeared.  As most of what we receive is junk, I fail to grasp the importance of immediate mail retrieval.  He would probably be appalled, but there have been entire days when I’ve forgotten to check the mail box.

When we were dating, whenever he went TDY, I had instructions to collect his mail every day.  I don’t know why, exactly, as there was nothing he could do about it until he came home; but still, every night when he called, I was quizzed about the mail.  This was a bit of a pain since I had to come home from work, drive across town, get his mail from his box and deposit it on his kitchen counter, then drive back across town, pick up my father for dinner, go home and make dinner, then drive my father home.  Don’t tell him, but there were a few times I skipped the nightly mail ritual and simply collected two days-worth of mail the next night.  He never knew the difference.  And as we have been married for twenty-eight years now, I would hate for him to discover I deliberately deceived him.  He might decide I’m untrustworthy and rethink his decision to marry me.

“You know,” I ventured, “you’re a bit anal about the mail.”

“You’ve discovered another quirk,” he sighed.  “I don’t know why you put up with me.”

“So I’m supposed to divorce you because you’re anal about mail?”

He didn’t answer.

“But I do feel another blog coming on!” I informed him, cheerfully.

“I’m so glad I provide you with blog material,” he said.

I may be wrong, but he didn’t sound all that glad.