A couple of years ago I rushed to the post office to mail some copies of my book to about 15 people around the state. I wanted to get them mailed before five o’clock and was frustrated to see that my nearby post office was closed early. They were resurfacing the parking lot.
I hurried five miles over to the next nearest post office, and they were open. Better still, there were no lines. Perfect.
I took my box of books up to the clerk and he began preparing the labels for each individual mailing. He asked, out of idle curiosity, what kinds of books I was mailing. I said, “History – light history, or popular history, about Texas.”
He asked, “You like historical photographs?” I said, “Yes, I do. Love them.”
He said, “We have an old photo album with pictures of over 100 years ago in it. It’s been here for eight years in our dead letter files. We don’t know who it belongs to. Would you like to see it?”
I said, “Sure, I’d love to take a look.”
He brought it out and I quickly leafed through it and saw that they were indeed photos from probably 1900 or 1910, something like that. No doubt photos of Texas. I said, “I have an idea. If you’ll let me take this, I know Jac Darsnek at Traces of Texas on Facebook. He specializes in black and white photos of historical Texas. I bet he can post a few and maybe figure out who this album belongs to.”
He said, “Please do. We’ll never find the owners here.”
So I took it home and the next morning at breakfast I took it out to peruse it over coffee.
The first photo I saw had a man in a suit standing in front of a model-T Ford. Reminded me of the Bonnie and Clyde era.
The photos had dates like “1910” and “1920” of well-dressed people in front of large white homes. One such home had the word “Denton” beneath it. Some photos were of ranch country with barns in the background.
I saw a toddler boy descending house steps, in overalls. The photo was labeled “GB.” I told my wife that we had a GB in my family – an uncle, actually. I said it was quite common back then to call boys and men by their initials.
I kept turning the pages of this album of old black and white photos mounted on now-ancient black construction paper and tied together with a skinny string. Halfway through I saw a woman, about 30, who I immediately recognized as my grandmother.
I realized, to my shock, that these were photos of my family – but a lesser known branch of my family tree – at least to me.
But the greater shock was how this had come to be in my hands. How had the universe delivered this to me in this incredibly random way? I had never seen this collection of photos before.
As I racked my foggy brain for an answer, I remembered many years before, but ever so vaguely, my mother sending me a Christmas package to that very post office. I used that branch more frequently then. She had sent me a package and asked me to forward the one within it to my Great-Aunt Mable, who was then in a nursing home in Austin. I remembered forwarding it right then at the post office, without knowing what was in it.
How it happened to get returned to the post office, I don’t know. I suppose there was no return address on it or it got damaged in shipment. By then, both Mable and my mom had passed. No one could solve the mystery.
Yet I marveled at the sequence of events that made it possible for this album to come back to me. I had to be in a rush to mail books that day.
The nearest post office had to be shut down at that moment. I had to choose to go to the other post office. I had to run into a clerk who was curious about what kind of writing I did. He had to care enough to say, “You know what? There is something here you might be interested in.” And then I had to be curious enough to want to see it. And then he had to trust me to take it with the intention of finding its owner.
All that had to align to get that album back to my family. But for some, it is not a miracle. Some say there are no coincidences – only destiny, only fate.
