Those seeking eternal life should give up on priests and scripture, and instead examine the American commercial and legal system, where some things never die.
While most of our mail comes to a post office box, we do get some delivered to the home we’ve owned for 21 years. About twice a month, I find mail from an ambulance company in Texas. It has our street address, but the name of the previous homeowner.
Several months ago, I called the company to tell them they were sending this to a place where the addressee had not lived for more than 20 years.
The local post office did not have a forwarding address for her, and I had no idea where she might be. But she wasn’t here (I suppose I could clean the cellar to be absolutely sure), and they should quit wasting postage.
I was told “We’ll get back to you on this.” They don’t need to. All they need to do is quit sending this to the wrong address.
But there was another one in the mailbox Wednesday morning.
However, a mere two decades is piddling for one other company. Every three or four months, we get something from a life-insurance company addressed to another woman. The first time one arrived, I didn’t recognize the name, so I asked my next-door neighbor, a long-time resident.
He had to think for a bit. “They owned your house in the 1970s,” he recalled. “Don’t remember the exact years, but you could go to the courthouse and find out.”
I called the insurance company to ask them to quit sending stuff to my house. “The law says we have to send these notices to the last known address,” I was told, “and that’s the last address we have on file. So there’s nothing we can do about it. You can just throw them away, though.”
Perhaps this makes sense, at least when compared to another process that refuses to die. Early in 2005, I read about a proposal to change the name of Devils Tower National Monument in Wyoming.
It inspired me to write a light essay for High Country News about how, even if that name were changed, there would still be the Dirty Devil River in Utah and the Devil’s Armchair on Mount Ouray above Salida. Indeed, the West abounds in infernal place names with devilish backbones, corkscrews, bathtubs, dance halls, etc.
One person who enjoyed reading it was an assistant editorial page editor at the Los Angeles Times. He called to ask me to revise it to focus more on California’s satanic spots, like the Devils Postpile, Devil’s Anvil and Devil’s Playground.
Naturally, I jumped right on it and dispatched the revision that afternoon. The piece wasn’t printed, but the kill-fee paperwork entered the system.
Thus, when the Tribune Co. (which owns the Times, several other newspapers and the Chicago Cubs) filed for bankruptcy in 2008, I was listed as an unsecured creditor.
So every week or two, my mailbox provides eye-glazing material from a New York law firm providing “Notice of extension of deadline to submit votes to accept or reject amended joint plan of reorganization . . . .” Sometimes it’s a 200-page bound document accompanied by a CD. And at no time is it worth toting home from the post office.
But a call to the law firm told me what I’ve come to expect: They have to send me these notices. There’s no way to get off the list, even though as a $100 kill-fee creditor, the sun will rise in the west before I see that money.
Another waste of time, money and postage. But on the bright side, I may have found the secrets of eternal life — and perhaps perpetual motion, too.
Ed Quillen (ekquillen@gmail.com) of Salida is a regular contributor to The Denver Post.
