Dear Penthouse

Many of my contemporaries “read” Penthouse magazine in their late teens and early twenties.  I was no different… what?  You were expecting me to say that I read the complete works of Chaucer instead?  Nope.  It hasn’t happened.  Shakespeare and I have never been introduced either.  As a matter of fact, you can probably name any great author from history and I’ll return a blank stare with a, “huh… who’s that?”  It’s amazing that, with my lack of interest in great literature, I’m even able to write my own name, let alone a complete sentence!

Ah, but back to Penthouse.  One of the more, uh… interesting… features was the column “Penthouse Forum”, where people wrote in about some unbelievable sexual exploit that they were somehow involved in.  The letters would always start, “Dear Penthouse, I never thought this would happen to me, but…”  Of course it was also common belief that whatever tale was being told never really did happen; it was just some lonely college kid sitting in the dorm on a Saturday night after quaffing a few beers writing down what he’d wished would happen to him.

So it seems almost inevitable that as a letter carrier someone will ask the question, “so… has anyone come to the door without any clothes on?”  (They probably read stories like that in Penthouse Forum when they were younger!)  And the answer is… drum roll, please… no.  What a mood killer an answer like that is!  Everyone somehow expects a salacious tale, and they seem almost insulted when normal life hits them right between the eyes.  What I don’t tell them is the whole truth.

So sit right back and you’ll hear a tale,

a tale of a fateful trip.

With a box of cheese in hand,

I ascended up her steps.

(OK… how many of you just sang that little poem to the tune of the Gilligan’s Island theme?  You’re dating yourselves!)

Dear Penthouse,

I never thought this would happen to me.  It was my second year as a letter carrier, about half way through December.  The various Christmas mailings were all in full force, along with boxes of fruit, fruitcakes and cheese.  I’m not sure why cheese was a Christmas item, or (for that matter) why this box of it required a signature, but it did.

So on that grey, dreary and windy afternoon I ascended the steps up to the porch of that little non-descript white clapboard house in the middle of the block.  I rang the bell and waited… and was about to give up and leave a notice for the parcel when she opened the door.

“Oh, hello” I said, as I reached for my pen.  “I have a package for you, but I need a signature before I can give it to you.”  I smiled, and held out my hand with the pen for her.

She reached out for the pen, releasing the grip on her housecoat.  The wind caught it just right, and opened it up before my eyes like the unveiling of a statue.  The only downside to this was that my twenty-nine year old eyes were now beholding a “statue” in her mid-eighties.  So if everybody in life is entitled to one wild adventure… I just totally wasted mine! 

And so, Dear Penthouse, not only do I not believe that this would ever happen to me, I really wish that it hadn’t!