A friend of ours confirmed her story. It seems that a late-night jogger routinely runs down the street leading out of a nearby housing development. When he comes to the entrance, he casually stops to catch his breath and than picks one or two large rocks off the decorative wall that garnishes the entrance. From the number of rocks missing, it appears that he’s building a wall of his own. There’s crime in the suburbs and it gets even worse than stone stealing.
Batter Up
We’ve lived in several housing plats since we moved to Ohio. They’re called “plats” because that’s the sound your mailbox makes when a group of rowdy teenagers speeds down your street at 2 a.m. and knocks your mailbox off the post with a baseball bat. If your street has ten houses on it, a game of mailbox baseball sounds like this: “Plat, plat, plat, plat, plat, plat, plat, plat, plat, plat.”
Mailbox baseball does have its positive points. It’s more difficult for your mail carrier to deliver bills when your mailbox has been hit for a triple into your shrubs. The game is also good for the economy. An entire industry has evolved to replace damaged mailboxes.
There Should be a Telethon for this Epidemic
One solution to mailbox baseball is the patented Vangalgard mailbox, which is made of 40 pounds of ASTM-621-a carbon steel and can’t be damaged by baseball bats, beer bottles, rocks, bricks or shotguns. It can’t even be blown up with an M1 firecracker. An actual Vandalgard mailbox ad claims “76 percent of the rural mailboxes in North America have been rendered unserviceable — over thirty-five million nationwide. On moderately traveled roads it is not uncommon that home owners must replace their mailbox three, four, five times each year.” I guess that’s why the rural hardware stores sell 12-packs of mailboxes.
Mailbox baseball has traditionally been a rural sport. Combined with cow tipping and pumpkin bowling, you have the Dukes of Hazzard Triathlon. But mailbox baseball has found its way to the suburbs. I routinely see mailbox-strewn streets in our town. But, I don’t believe it’s the work of rowdy teenagers. I believe it’s the work of the suburban Mafia – members of housing associations who are using muscle to enforce their rules.
When we lived in Massachusetts, people left each other alone for the most part. If you wanted to paint your house an ugly color or put a 1976 Ford up on blocks as a lawn ornament, you were free to do so. When we moved to Ohio, all that changed. The plat in which we bought a house had a long list of “Housing Association Rules.” Now there was someone telling us what we could and couldn’t park in our driveway and under what circumstances we could erect a fence in our back yard.
An Offer You Can’t Refuse
If you get a knock on the door from a guy named Luca who says he’s the president of the homeowners association and suggests the paint color on your shutters isn’t an approved hue, you may be in for trouble — or at least your mailbox may be. Luca gots ways of making you retink the color of your shuddas. Ways that go “plat” in the night.
Personally, I don’t care much for housing association rules. I’m a free-thinking, radical, non-conformist, independent-minded kind of guy. In fact, I also routinely break other suburban traditions. I don’t wash my car every Saturday. I don’t own an SUV. My lawn isn’t finely manicured and I often mix up my trash and recycling. Sometimes I even use a garbage can that doesn’t match the neighbors’ cans.
I’m not afraid of any housing association rules. But, perhaps I should be. I just heard my mailbox explode.
(To subscribe to Tim’s column or read more of his work, visit his Web site at homepages.udayton.edu/~bete.)
