No doubt these two political factions would vanish as quickly as they had appeared, but in the meantime Lake kept a Green flag in his right pocket and a Red flag in his left pocket, the better to express the correct patriotic fervor. (On a purely aural level, Lake sympathized with the Reds, if only because the Greens polluted the air with a thousand Bender tunes morning, noon, and night. Lake had hardly listened to Bender while the man was alive; he resented having to change his habits now the man was dead.)

Confronted by such dogma, Lake suspected his commitment to his weekly walk to the post office indicated a fatal character flaw, a fatal artistic curiosity. For he knew he would pull the wrong flag from the right pocket before the day was done. And yet, he thought, as he limped down Truff Avenue—even the blood-clot clusters of dog lilies, in their neat sidewalk rows, reminding him of the conflict—how else was he to exercise his left leg? Besides, no vehicle for hire would deliver him through the disputed areas to his objective.

Lake scowled as a youth bejeweled in red buttons and waving a huge red flag ran into the street. In the wake of the flag, Lake could see the distant edges of the post office, suffused with the extraordinary morning light, which came down in sheets of gold.

The secondary tier of Reasons Why I Should Have Stayed at Home concerned, much to Lake’s irritation, the post office itself. He had no sympathy for its archaic architecture and only moderate respect for its function; the quality of a monopolistic private postal service being poor, most of his commissions arrived via courier. He also found distasteful the morbid nature of the building’s history, its stacks of “corpse cases” as he called the postal boxes. These boxes, piled atop each other down the length and breadth of the great hall, climbed all the way to the ceiling. Surely any of the children previously shelved there had, on their ascent to heaven, found themselves trapped by that ugly yellow ceiling and to this day were banging their tiny ectoplasmic heads against it.