Going postal

I went by the post office at the U.S. Federal Courthouse on Monday. I love that old building. It was built in 1908 and renamed 99 years later after one of my favorite people, the late Judge Gus Bootle.

Yes, I love the courthouse, with the old-fashioned post office tucked inside. Even though my post office box is located at the main post office on College Hill, I usually head over to Mulberry Street when I need to mail something.

I go there not only because it’s only a block from my office but because it looks and feels like a post office, complete with high ceilings and marble floors.

Of course, Monday was also the day the new postal rates went into effect. So now it costs more to send a letter. I don’t know which is getting more ridiculous: stamps or gas?

It now costs 41 cents to mail a letter, up from 29 cents. When this courthouse building was built 99 years ago, it costs 2 cents to mail a letter. So you could send 20 letters for what it costs to mail one today.

But I didn’t go to the post office to wax nostalgic. I went to mail one of my books, “Once Upon a Whoopee” – the story of the 1973-74 Macon Whoopees hockey team – to a rabid minor-league hockey fan in Toronto, Ontario.

He had contacted me last week after finding the book on the Internet.

Before Monday, that book would have shipped anywhere in the U.S. for $1.84. I know because I’ve mail books all the time. I usually send them out third class or “media” rate.

I was prepared to pay more for this, though. After all, it was going to Canada.
It costs me a whopping $4.63. What was puzzling is when the postal employee asked me if I would be sending it by boat or plane.

Boat or plane?

Now I didn’t have to think too much about this one.

A commercial plane can make it from Atlanta to Toronto in two hours, and 32 minutes.

But boat? From landlocked Macon?

That was a puzzling choice. I could visualize the book sailing down the Ocmulgee to the Altamaha to the Atlantic Ocean and the port of Savannah. Then up the Eastern Seaboard to the Gulf of St. Lawrence, taking a sharp 90-degree turn to the west, down the St. Lawrence River and into Lake Ontario.

"It will take two weeks to sent it by boat,’’ said the postal employee.

“Put an extra stamp on it,’’ I said. “This one is going to have to fly!”