I hate working for the postal service. I said I was a risk-taker in the interview to sound like some sort of deliriously happy wage slave, which got me the job but also the most outlandish assignments. Now they had me delivering a letter to some spooky guy way up in the mountains by way of rivers and streams.

 

Deep in the forest, I hopped off the rowboat and cringed as it creaked. I gave 50 dollars to the old man with rose-colored cheeks and grey eyebrows that drooped over his round spectacles, asking him to wait for me while I forayed into the dark castle carved in the mountain cave. He responded with an enthusiastic nod while rubbing his rotund belly. I hadn’t journeyed more than a few steps when he started rowing away.

 

“Hey! You can’t leave me out here!”

 

“I’m a businessman, son. Besides, that castle is downright creepy,” he murmured and chuckled like Santa Claus, adding “Adversity builds character! Keep fighting, boy!”

 

What crummy luck. I resolved to bear a grudge against the elderly forever, even daring to hate myself as I grew old. Anyway, I tiptoed past the jagged walls of the cave and said hello to two rectangular men with slick cuts and feet rooted into the ground. They told me to get lost until I showed them the letter. Then they slowly dragged the doors open across the carpet and I walked through a hallway slowly collapsing in on itself; the wood twisted and shrank. Placid heads of moose and deer hung by the entrance, but as I progressed, the heads along the walls started furrowing their brows and snarling at one another. They kept that Halloween spirit going on year round, and I respected that.

 

Reaching the end of the haunted hallway, I burst out into a sterile waiting room. I promptly picked up a gossip magazine and sat in a slightly overstuffed cushioned chair. Across from me I observed a man with green skin, eyes on the sides of his head, and fish fins betwixt his claws. Nearby I saw a woman sleeping and snoring upright in her pajamas, emitting the ghosts of Victorian children from her nose as she slumbered. To my right an octopus sat glued low to her chair, glancing at me like a shy puppy while her arms drooped at her sides as if she were unsure of what to do with them. Two thirds of these monsters were not wearing any clothes—Nice! I should ask the boss to send me to more nudist colonies.

 

So there I am, lounging around with nothing to do and not a care in the world, and I’m thinking, what the heck? I pull out the old envelope and pop that bad boy open, only to find a grainy photograph of a crying teenager and a note reading, “WE HAVE YOUR DAUGHTER. DEMANDING RANSOM OF FIVE MILLION DOLLARS. -J.” Woah! I realized I might be in a dangerous situation.

 

“The postal worker will be seen now.” The intercom whispered as the winds and wolves howled in the distance. I walked through a door labeled “Warning: Death” and found myself in the rather charming little office of an old man who collected such culinary oddities as newt eyes, frog toes, and bat wools ranged along the walls in glass jars. He swiveled around in his chair and glared. His little legs slid off his velvet seat and he waddled over to look at me.

 

Locking his eyes in an 80 degree angle towards mine, he said, “If you’re going to bring me the horrible news I think you will, I’ll send you back to the post office in a rental car that keeps making strange banging noises and that you will be overcharged for.”

 

“I dunno cars,” I said a little too loudly, “but here’s something funny.” I dropped the creepy photo and bloodied note onto the ground in front of old grumpy, who scrambled to pick them up. He looked over them as lonely tears rolled down his wrinkled face, which grew ever more wrinkly as it began to shrink in on itself with each choked sob. “Okay,” I said.

 

He looked back up at me, cracking his frail neck joints in the process and shooting me a wry smile.

 

“Sonny, you got guts talking to a brooding villain like me that way. Why don’t I show you around?” What followed was pure splendor. He sold machines that made gumballs out of the tears of Victorian children unearthed in archeological digs. The villain let loose hordes of alligators into the sewers, and then broadcasted the grisly chaos on TLC. He built pricey bouncy houses for birthday parties and deflated them once the kids were inside. I walked beside not only an agent of laughter and joy but an upstanding businessman.

 

“I met my old lady bagging groceries at Walmart. She was a Walmart greeter. We ran off into the countryside, away from our drab corporate jobs, and launched business ventures,” he said with a whimsical lightness and a cock of the eyebrow.

 

How could I ever thank him for the lessons he dropped on me that day? After a firm handshake, I set off into the world with a newfound perspective on cranky old geezers—in all their victories and failures, and all their glory and shame.