Send it in care of the Birmingham jail

Nobody writes letters these days, save for my wife and her two college roommates, who crank off neatly written, English-major letters to one another from time to time. Even they are sometimes known to e-mail. Pore ole USPS is on hard times, and a story in the Vicad today tells us that the Victoria and Corpus mail-sorting facilities may be combined. The story was interesting, and the best thing was the last three or four grafs, doing their guy-in-the-street thing. The part with the guy in the street read

Slower mail service would be annoying, however, and would affect others, too. Especially those in the prison system.
"Sometimes I'm in jail," [the random subject] said. "And the people in there want to get their mail."

There it is ... my wife, her roommates, and people incarcerated. There is a grubby little town named Tornillo down the lower end of El Paso county. Someone once remarked that the place would have no post office at all were it not for all the mail going out to prisons. Maybe fifteen years ago there was a kid from Tornillo killed in some affray, gangish, I think. He left 19 siblings. Think of that ... his mama lost 5% of her children in one fell swoop. Funky little town, Tornillo.