The Mailbox Grandpa Harry Could See

No matter how many Rosh Hashanahs and Yom Kippurs we are given, eventually there comes a year when it is written—and sealed—that it will be our final year in the Book of Life.

No matter how many Rosh Hashanahs and Yom Kippurs we are given, eventually there comes a year when it is written—and…

We never know which year that will be.

We also never know which ordinary moment will become the story that survives us.

In our family, there was always an effort to shield the *kinder*—the children—from whatever difficult things the adults were facing.

But Harlan and I grew up too quickly.

Before long, we were no longer the children being protected from the hard news. We had become the people making decisions about what to say, what not to say, and whom we thought we were protecting.

Mom was fighting cancer.

Her father, our Grandpa Harry Levine—Buddy to us and Herschel to others—was widowed and living alone in his condo in the Village of Ottawa Hills, near Toledo.

While Mom was recovering from her second cancer-related surgery, Harry was seriously injured in an automobile accident.

We did not tell Mom how bad it was.

She was already fighting for her own life. We believed we were protecting her by not telling her that her father was convalescing from a serious crash while she was recovering in another hospital.

That became the family pattern.

We shielded Mom from the news of Harry’s accident.

I drove between the two hospitals, not telling either about the other.

Later, we shielded Harry from the full truth of how ill Zandra had become.

When Uncle Abe died, we tried to shield Mom from that news, too.

We were all protecting someone from something.

We believed that if painful news did not reach a person’s eyes or ears, perhaps the pain itself would not reach their heart.

But life kept happening anyway.

On February 15, 1991, Abe J. Levine died at age 87.

Uncle Abe was my great-uncle, Mom’s uncle, Harry’s big brother, and the patriarch of that generation of the Levine family. Abe and the family were rooted around Toledo and Ottawa Hills. He was the brother of Harry, Betty, Esther, and Jeanette.

Abe was a magnanimous man—large in personality, influence, and position within our family. We could write several Shabbat Shalom stories about Uncle Abe.

And someday we will.

But today’s story is about the mailbox.

After recovering from his serious auto accident, five-foot-tall Grandpa Harry was somehow driving again.

That sentence alone should tell you something about Harry.

He was stubborn.

It was not a quality he tried to hide.

Harry drove a fire-engine-red, four-door 1990 Oldsmobile. From behind the wheel, his hat appeared to sit only slightly above the dashboard. You could see the hat. You had to trust that Grandpa Buddy was somewhere underneath it, operating the vehicle.

Following Uncle Abe’s shiva at the home of Abe’s son Gordon, Harry prepared to leave.

Gordon’s home had a long, winding, meandering driveway.

Considering Harry’s recent accident, a few of us walked outside with him to make sure he reached his car safely—and that his car safely reached the road.

Harry put the big red Oldsmobile into reverse.

He began backing down the driveway.

A relative called out:

“Be careful of the mailbox!”

Harry stopped just long enough to roll down his window.

With the confidence and irritation of a man who did not appreciate receiving driving instructions from younger members of his family, he shouted:

**“I CAN SEE THE MAILBOX!”**

He continued in reverse.

He made the proper turn to the left.

Then he somehow made an improper turn to the right.

And Grandpa Harry backed his Oldsmobile directly over Gordon’s mailbox.

He did not tap it.

He did not brush against it.

He did not merely bend it.

**Harry Levine leveled it.**

The house was filled with family and friends mourning the death of Uncle Abe. Yet there we were, standing in Gordon’s driveway, watching Abe’s stubborn little brother flatten Abe’s son’s mailbox only seconds after loudly announcing that he could see it.

At a moment filled with grief, the Levine family found laughter.

Harlan was not there. He was in New York City, adulting, while I was still in Toledo.

When I later tried to tell him what had happened, I laughed so hard that I could not get the sentences out.

At first, Harlan thought something was terribly wrong.

He knew I was calling after our great-uncle’s death. He expected sadness. He expected details about the funeral or shiva.

Instead, all he could hear was me gasping for air while attempting to explain that Grandpa Buddy had seen the mailbox perfectly—and then driven directly over it.

The harder I tried to tell the story, the harder we laughed.

Mom never heard that story.

Just as we had hidden the seriousness of Harry’s first automobile accident from her—and tried to protect her from the news of Uncle Abe’s death—we never told her that her father had run over Gordon’s mailbox while leaving Abe’s shiva.

That was one more piece of information we decided she did not need to carry.

Zandra Lou Levine Yaffe died on April 25, 1991—only a little more than two months after Uncle Abe.

She was 51 years old.

As Mom’s condition worsened, we faced the opposite decision.

Having protected Mom from news about her father, we now tried to protect her father from the full truth about Mom.

Everyone was shielding someone.

We believed silence could soften the blow. We believed withholding the truth might postpone the pain. We thought love meant deciding which burdens another person was strong enough to carry.

Maybe every family does some version of this.

We hide hard truths because we love one another. We convince ourselves that if someone does not know about the pain, perhaps the pain cannot reach them.

But the pain still arrives.

Maybe the flattened mailbox was Harry’s final signal to his big brother Abe—a stubborn little brother’s salute, delivered in the only way Harry could have delivered it.

Perhaps the Levine family can be understood in that one scene: fiercely independent, completely certain, occasionally misguided, always loving, and somehow able to find laughter in a driveway filled with grief.

All these years later, during this season of judgment, remembrance, and renewal, I find myself watching my own mailbox.

As Zandra would joke every year, I am awaiting a shipment of new paper checks from the bank, updated for the Hebrew year 5787.

Yes, paper checks.

And because one calendar has never been enough for me, I only need enough of them to last until February 6, 2027. That is when the Lunar New Year arrives and the Year of the Horse gives way to the Year of the Goat.

Then, naturally, I will need another update.

The mailbox that Grandpa Harry flattened once carried letters, bills, checks, invitations, and news. Today, much of that arrives through our email inboxes, our telephones, and the endless stream of information placed before our eyes and ears.

And now, decades later, we can send that laughter forward again.

Harlan, you were not there when Grandpa Buddy flattened the mailbox. But once we shared the story, you were there every time we told it afterward.

I think of you every time I tell it now, with the harmony of **“Peace, Love and Equality for All!”**

**Shabbat Shalom & Yom Tov**

**Hal & Peggy Jo**