Of Parks and Post Offices

ONCE UPON A TIME, there was a family named Kennedy. They hung around Massachusetts, attended colleges like Harvard and spent their summers in Hyannis. Occasionally, they ran for Senate or House seats, and even for President.

All the while, they played football: on the beaches of Cape Cod, in Soldiers Field for the Harvard varsity, even on the White House Lawn.

"Bawbby, get the bawl from the, uh, cah and throw me a, uh, paaass," is often echoed in memory of Kennedy touch football clashes.

"Well, uh, alright there, uh, Jaaack."

In light of these memories, it is particularly disturbing to see the Kennedy name attached to the monstrosity at the corner of Soldiers Field Road and JFK street. Kennedy Park--it is still hard to utter--was once a vacant lot utilized by Harvard students from River to Quad for touch football games and other irreverent delinquencies. Some of the Kennedys may even have honed their paaass-caaatching talents there in their undergraduate days.

Now, the space is occupied by an ugly, iron-fence-enclosed garden with little resemblance to a park. A road down the middle of it prevents the playing of anything resembling touch football. Future plans call for flowerbeds and the planting of trees. Hardly a gridiron.

Harvard, the city, the state and the Kennedys should all be ashamed. Harvard students and Kennedy afficionados alike can only be disappointed at the end of a Massachusetts--if not an American--tradition.

AN EQUALLY disappointing waste of resources are the new stamp-vending machines the post office has installed at the Harvard Square location.

Anyone who has ever tried to get stamps anywhere except at the post office knows that drugstore vending machines usually charge about 50 percent more than the cost of the stamps. And when you use them, you usually pay something like 66 cents for a 22-cent stamp and two nine-cent stamps. God only knows what you are supposed to do with the nine-cent stamps. They don't even buy a postcard these days.

At the post office, however, you can get three 22-cent stamps for the same 66 cents. You can even get a book of 20 for $4.40 or a sheet of 100 for--you guessed it--$22.00. But you have to wait in line behind 15,000 people, each waiting to mail a box of lemon twists to their grandchildren in Tacoma, Washington.

Selling stamps doesn't really require human interaction between buyer and seller. So presumably to save consumers long waits in line for short business transactions, the post office installed stamp-vending machines which sell the books of 20 stamps for the same $4.40 as you pay if you stand in line.

But the machine only accepts change--exact change at that. No fives, no ones and no change machines for five dollar bills. Quite often, the dollar bill changer is broken too, meaning that to use the machines, you must be carrying around 17 quarters, a dime and a nickel.

Failure to bring the precise allotment of coinage leaves you two choices. You can stand in line and pay for your stamps at the desk, or you can stand in line and get change for the stamp machine. Either way, you still must endure the 14,999 people in front of you waiting to send their resumes to Salomon Brothers.

A machine that accepted five dollar bills and returned a book of stamps and 60 cents change probably made too much sense to the U.S. Postal Service. Besides, making any dealing with the postal service more convenient would ruin an American tradition.

Cabbages and Kings appears periodically to talk about things positive and not so positive in the Utopia we call home.