Yours truly has just completed yet another trip around the sun. Thank goodness we no longer put candles on the cake; the blaze would be blinding. Yet, despite the slightly alarming number of years to my credit, I actually really like my birthday. It’s a nice time of year.

As a bona fide grownup, with kids of my own, my birthday celebration tends to be a little more subdued – let’s call it “sophisticated.” When I was little, though, my birthday, while never extravagant, meant two things for sure: mom baking me an imaginative cake, and a pastel-colored envelope sitting beside my plate containing a birthday card from my grandparents.

My grandparents’ card was magic. Always. It wasn’t the card so much, or even the guaranteed $5 tucked inside, it was the potent alchemy of that smooth envelope, stamped and addressed to me by name.

Is there anything so magical as receiving the post, delivered directly to you from far away places?

In later years, the mail brought me many things: correspondence from my grade school pen pal, updates from the best friend I sadly left behind when my family moved away, my acceptance letter to college (and rejections from a few others), funny articles clipped out and sent by cousins, love letters, care packages from sisters, Christmas cards from friends and family.

Sure, sure, the mail also brought electric bills and strange flyers from used car places, but the flotsam and jetsam of everyday life didn’t diminish the thrill of finding an envelope addressed to me. A cute stamp only adds to the thrill.

From Jane Austen’s characters sending missives by the afternoon post, to the Pony Express riding in relay across the vast expanses of our young nation, to the simple letters I wrote on cheap lined paper and dropped in the box on the corner with their magical stamps  attached, the mail guaranteed delivery. Guaranteed connection.

I grew up knowing, or I guess assuming, that a well-appointed, fully functional U.S. Postal Service was a cornerstone of our nation. Of any nation. I mean, if I send a letter to France, or Zimbabwe, given the right postage in the upper right corner, it gets there.

It is the baseline of any functioning society: the mail gets delivered.

Now we watch the testimony on Capital Hill and witness what appears to be a systematic and politically motivated destruction of what has, until now, been a trusted, nonpolitical institution serving everyone equally. It breaks my heart.

I know it’s not perfect, I know there have always been areas for improvement, but really: name any other business that operates at the volume of the USPS, with as many complicating factors (not to mention outside decision-makers ), and still delivers as well. I can’t.

For my entire lifetime, and for generations before, if you had an important document, letter or communique, you put it in the mail. Tax filings, mortgage payments, legal documents – and yes, the sacred absentee vote – are all entrusted to the mail. I mean, “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.” That’s heady stuff.

We as a nation deserve a functioning postal system, not one deliberately made ineffective by the very people entrusted with running it. Democracy demands it, and so should we.

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