Today Isabelle Albeck asked me to post this encounter she had with a Waban postal person and it got me to wondering about our home mail delivery that most of us take for granted. “This morning, a week after the last storm, I noticed the mailman walking along Chestnut St (near the corner of Fuller). I also noticed that particular house had a very clean driveway. When I commented on this stage of sidewalks, the mailman said there were other places along Chestnut St (towards Beacon St) where he has to step into the roadway as a stretch of sidewalk is impassable. It seems to me those owners ought to not get mail. Let them go to the post office! Would they like to walk on busy streets like Chestnut St? What are they thinking?“
I know you’re all conjuring up that oft quoted saying: “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds”. FAKE NEWS ALERT! Directly from the mouth of the USPS Historian October 1999, on the USPS website, I quote:
“While the Postal Service has no official motto, the popular belief that it does is a tribute to America’s Postal workers. The words above, thought to be the motto, are chiseled in gray granite over the entrance to the New York City Post Office on 8th Avenue and come from Book 8, Paragraph 98, of The Persian Wars by Herodotus. During the wars between the Greeks and Persians (500-449 B.C.), the Persians operated a system of mounted postal couriers who served with great fidelity. The firm of McKim, Mead & White designed the New York General Post Office, which opened to the public on Labor Day in 1914. One of the firm’s architects, William Mitchell Kendall, was the son of a classics scholar and read Greek for pleasure. He selected the “Neither snow nor rain . . .” inscription, which he modified from a translation by Professor George Herbert Palmer of Harvard University, and the Post Office Department approved it.”
While I believe that our Postal deliverers serve today, as did the Persians of old, with great fidelity, I also wonder if they are under any legal/moral obligation to deliver your mail tomorrow on your slippery unshoveled walkway…and if you aren’t under a clear legal/moral obligation to shield them from being forced into a busy street to skirt around your failed snow removal duty? Whatchathink?
moil
North American archaic dialect
verb
1.
work hard.
“men who moiled for gold”
move around in confusion or agitation.
“a crowd of men and women moiled in the smoky haze”
noun
1.
hard work; drudgery.
turmoil; confusion.
“the moil of his intimate thoughts”
late Middle English (in the sense ‘moisten or bedaub’): from Old French moillier ‘paddle in mud, moisten,’ based on Latin mollis ‘soft.’ The sense ‘work’ dates from the mid 16th century, often in the phrase toil and moil.
PS I should’ve prefaced that with “I had to look that word up”
A long stretch of sidewalks near me remain unshoveled after last week’s storm, forcing pedestrians into the road multiple times. One stretch is at a school bus stop. What can be done about this? It’s extremely frustrating and unsafe.
A related snow chore that’s easy to forget – if you have oil heat be sure to dig out wherever the oil goes into your house. Those guys end up doing a lot of exploratory work in winter trying to find buried oil caps.
@Jerry: Also…if you have a natural gas generator, dig around the intake so the mechanism can work properly!
@Michael: glad I forced you to look up a great word…I loved it the first time I heard it in “The Cremation of Sam McGee” by Richard W. Service. It’s a great character and mood poem, and, in my opinion, should be read by every Middle Schooler and those older.
@All: You do recognize the intended and, I thought, unbelievably elegant pun imbedded in the title, don’t you? You made no comment… come on, credit where credit is due!!!!!!! Google it if you have to…I feel like an English teacher. Bob Jampol, are you there to save the V14 Community’s honor?
Sidewalks are city property. The city has an obligation to maintain them. Any effort by citizens to do so is a gift to the city, perhaps a service to their neighbors, and should be compensated by the city.
@Sallee – that’s intriguing!
Moil = Mail? Mile?
@Michael: Good try…If you give up, I’ll tell…but I want to wait a while to give a chance to someone to associate the title above with a line from a VERY well-known play! (Hint: The name of the play followed by the number 14, could be another name for this blog.)
Shuffle off this mortal coil! Brilliant!!
:)
Elmo: That is simply not true. City ordinance requires that owners/occupants remove snow from the sidewalk that abuts their property. You can read the city ordinance for yourself here (section 26-8D):
http://www.newtonma.gov/civicax/filebank/documents/45835
I am hoping the city council will strengthen the ordinance to fine property owners who don’t comply.
@Heather: You could ask the Superintendent of Schools to have the city clear the snow. Per the ordinance:
“The commissioner of public works shall clear snow from certain city sidewalks including portions of both school pedestrian routes and specific arterial and collector roadways… The commissioner, after consultation with the superintendent of schools, chief of police and other appropriate city personnel, shall determine the total number of miles of city sidewalks to be cleared for the purposes of this ordinance…”
@David: The ordnance also says this:
“No person shall play ball, fly a kite or throw a stone or a snowball or any other missile in any street or upon or from any bridge.”
There appears to be no penalty for transgression thereof, either.
@Robert Welbourn – uh oh. I’m just back from flying a kite on Echo Bridge. Sssssh everybody!
@Jerry: Technically, you could have been in Needham while flying your kite from Echo Bridge, The City border is in the middle of the river! Do they have a snow shoveling ordinance, too?
It wasn’t that many years ago that it was the city’s job to clean ALL sidewalks. Who can tell us when that changed and who exactly changed it?