Excrutiatingly Bad Neighborhood Mailbox Jokes Enter Fifth Year

Image by author

A few weeks ago, I started my fifth year as neighborhood mailbox jokester. This meant I lugged out my thin-tipped magic markers, the square papers I cut for this gig, and the — count them — four Bad Dad Joke books given to me for my birthday/Christmas by my fans (enablers?)

My first thought when facing the beginning of this fifth year matched the first thought I had when I started the fourth and third years. I went straight to the beginning of Covid and sat my memory down in that crazy time.

Covid was the reason I began placing weekly jokes on the mailboxes near my house, where the school bus stop is located. It was for the kids who live across from me. I did it to produce positivity when there was little, connection when it was hard to come by, and fun when it wasn’t the first — or twentieth — thing on people’s minds at the time.

This year, I found it hard to piece together the timeline of when Covid hit exactly and when I started to put the jokes on the mailboxes. I knew I placed them there once the kids returned to school after the shut-down because our driveway art class — another of my positivity inventions during Covid — had ended. I wanted to keep my connection with these kids going. I didn’t want it to dissolve. Plus, just because school resumed, it didn’t mean the world was all rosy and cheerful again. People were still dropping like flies, and we were still living in worry over what was going to happen to us — personally, as a community, as a species.

This year, I went down a CDC website rabbit hole into the Covid timeline. Wow, did that bring back memories, and I realized what the fifth year of neighborhood mailbox jokester actually means. It is the annual marker of the trauma we all went through — together.

As isolated as we all were, there was also a common vibe that drifted through our days back then. We were connected digitally — email, text, video, social media — or in person outdoors with masks, and we knew that we all shared living daily with a common fear and life disrupter.

We worried about our health or the health of loved ones, financial matters, and future goals. Would our older parent who battled cancer die in a flash if exposed to the virus? Would we lose our jobs? Would we graduate from college? Would our young child learn anything that year in school? Would our kids be able to weather the anxiety? We were linked.

Each year, when I place the first of the school year’s bad jokes on the mailboxes at the end of August, I remember that link and those concerns we collectively struggled to make sense of.

Cycling through another year of this joke project is about being silly, having fun, and hoping my now older neighbors don’t think it too childish for their tastes. Of course, how could it be childish if a sixty-year-old lady thinks it’s the most fabulous thing to happen to Thursday in like ever? Don’t answer that.

Also, placing these jokes down at the bus stop is another beat in my weekly routine that indicates quite loudly that a week has passed and time is flying. Having the start of the school year pass by me is even louder. Scouring the Bad Dad Joke books is an exercise in scavenging for rare gems. The title doesn’t have the word “bad” in it for nothing. Personally, I’d have used “insufferable”.

There are benefits to doing this each year. I figure I’m generating a smile here and there. I’m giving a couple of kids a “plus” start to the day rather than a “minus”. I’m investing in a weekly ritual which adds structure to purpose. I’m continuing to learn how to live life on my terms instead of worrying about how I look to others. The newspaper article would read: 60-Year-Old Bad Jokester Lives Life Footloose, Fancy Free.

But this year, it’s a little different. Instead of focusing on the fact that I’ve hit another anniversary of fun, connecting with neighbors, and honoring my sense of commitment, I’m attracted to something else. I’m thinking back on what it was like when I posted that first mailbox joke. It wasn’t fun. It felt like human connection had been placed in a vacuum. A sense of commitment to life felt like a luxury. Life was a spinning unknown.

We did what we could, and sometimes heroically so. Think of the medical community. Remember the yard signs that popped up everywhere, thanking them, honoring their dedication during such a collapse of normalcy? And, speaking of collapse, remember the teachers and their crazy mission to try to educate kids who either loved learning online or who couldn’t possibly?

There was the sector of labor that had only one option for work: in person. There were the elderly who needed social connection but couldn’t get it because they were also among the most vulnerable. There were all manner of life situations that kept people extra vulnerable to the virus, to financial downfall, to anxiety-driven futility. Fun and jokes were, well, a joke of an idea.

Until they weren’t. Until we realized we could weather this challenge better with collective survival, and this meant compassion, empathy, and humor.

I know there was also contention during that time, but underneath the social division here in the US, on a person-to-person level, there was still a lot of care and concern.

Five years in, a sense of history now asks me why I started this weekly joke. I look back to its inception and remember with awe how easily we, as a huge community, came together to stand up to a threat not against our values or sense of what should be right and wrong, but against our human bodies — our most fundamental truth. That canceled out the other stuff. It went straight to the core. It hit compassion on the dot. Bingo.

I hope this mailbox joke still hits something good on the dot. I hope the mail lady likes it, and my neighbors chuckle. I hope I come to respect bad dad jokes one day. I probably won’t. But I’ll have fun trying.

---

Hope you're well, friends.