Snap Supplements ad: Normal For Who?

Peg read my lab sheet in the clinic parking lot with the engine running. Every line said normal. She looked up and said, "Normal for who?" I said, for a man my age. She said, "That's what I'm asking." I'm Hal. I've carried the mail on Route 6 for twenty-four years. Route 6 is eighty-seven miles of blacktop and gravel with six hundred and forty boxes on it. I drive it in a Jeep that smells like every dog in the county. My wife Peg runs the counter at the feed store. We have two grown sons, Danny and Tyler, who live far enough off that we say "we should visit" a lot. I'm fifty-eight. My father drove a milk truck and retired at sixty. I could tell you what he did with the next eleven years, but you've probably guessed. He sat down. The man who trained me my first month was Gus Mercer. He gave me one rule that isn't in the manual. "The box is where the mail goes," he said. "The door is where the carrier goes." He meant that if somebody can't easily come get a package, you walk it to them. Mrs. Henderson on Pike Road is eighty-four. Her door is two hundred feet up a hill from the road, and it's the back door, because the front hasn't opened since 1994. Every package she got for twenty-four years came to that back door. Sleet, August, and a dog with opinions about me. I never thought of it as something I did. It was just how you did the job. I can tell you the exact week I stopped walking it. The first week of March a box came for the Hendersons. A medium one, nothing heavy. I pulled up at the bottom of the hill, looked up at the house, and put it by the mailbox instead. Then I kept my eyes on the road the whole way down. I told myself the hill looked icy. I'd been running out of something for two years by then, and that hill was the first place I couldn't hide it. Most nights by seven-thirty I was asleep in my recliner with supper going cold on the tray. I was up before six and sorting by seven-thirty, and by two in the afternoon I was working on will alone. Peg would wake me to go to bed, and I'd tell her I was thinking. I used to pull a double on Christmas week because somebody had to. Now I couldn't finish a Tuesday. I went to the doctor three times in four years, because Peg made me. It went the same way every time. He was a good doctor, not a hurry-up one. He'd look at the screen, ask how I was sleeping, and say, "You're fine, Hal." After the third visit Peg took the lab sheet out of my hand in the clinic lot and read it with the engine running. Everything on it said normal. "Normal for who?" she said. I told her, for a man my age. "Yes," she said. "That's the part I'm asking about." We drove home without the radio. Nothing on that sheet was wrong, and nobody had written down that I couldn't stay awake past dinner. So I tried things. I walked the dog two miles every night for six weeks, on top of the route. I came out of it more tired than I went in. I cut caffeine to one cup, which made me a worse mailman and a worse husband. I bought a once-a-day multivitamin for men over fifty at the drugstore. Twelve ninety-nine, big as a coffee can. I took it three months and couldn't point to one thing it did. Peg made Sundays nap days. I napped through three of them and felt nothing about it. Then there's Earl Pruitt. He's eighty-one, and he's at his mailbox by eleven every day, rain or shine, because the mail is the best thing that happens to him. In March I handed him a seed catalog and he looked me over. "Hal," he said, "you're walking like me." He said it gently, the way you'd tell a man his tire was low. Then he told me that when he was my age a doctor told him he was fine too, and he believed it for twenty years. "I got to where I'd leave my own mail in the box till Marlene came out for it," he said. "Don't do that." I drove the rest of the route with my hands at ten and two. Peg did the work. I want that on the record, because I spent two months making her do it. I called it snake oil at the dinner table. I said it to the dog. I told her supplements were for men with too much money and not enough shame. She didn't argue. "I'm not asking you to buy anything," she said. "I'm asking you to read one label." Then she told me something about her job I'd never thought about: everything they sell at the feed store has a tag, and the tag has to say what's in the bag and how much. Farmers read those tags like scripture, because every one of them has been burned. Her rule is that anything that won't tell you what's in it, by name, doesn't get your money. She meant to hold me to it. She wanted to know where it was made, who tested it, and what was in it. She said she'd drop the whole thing if I didn't like the answers. What finally made sense of it for me was Pike Road. There's a culvert under it, a big corrugated pipe where the creek goes through. The county looks at it every spring. They peek in, they see water running, and they write down that it's fine. What they don't see is the silt. It gathers a quarter inch at a time and the water keeps running. Every spring it passes, right up until the March the creek can't get through and backs over the road. Nobody ever failed that culvert. It was fine every year until it wasn't. Then I thought about what clears it. Not one pass with a shovel. The pipe, the ditches feeding it, the creek bed above it. You keep the whole thing moving or you're back out there in March. I looked at that lab sheet again. A quarter inch of silt a year, and every line on the sheet saying the water's running. Normal for who, Peg had asked. Normal for a culvert, maybe. I'm a mailman, so take that for what it is. After that I looked up what moves in a man the way water moves in a creek. Blood flow. Somewhere past fifty it slows a little every year for a good many men, and nobody checks it while it's still running. I asked Peg to show me what she'd found. It was after midnight. She had the laptop open on the kitchen table and she'd been at it a while. She turned it around. "Big Boy Bundle," she said. "I know. Read the label." Three bottles, a Prostate Health, a Nitric Oxide Booster and a Testo Booster, ninety capsules each. It comes to nine capsules a day, three from each bottle, all at breakfast. She read me the Testo label out loud like a feed tag, every ingredient named with its milligrams, and the other two bottles held up under the same reading. She said that passed. She'd found out where it's made. Here. She'd found out who tests it. Somebody that isn't Snap, every batch. That was her other two questions. I went straight to the one-star reviews, because that's what you do with feed. The worst of them said it did nothing for them. That's what the ninety days is for, Peg said. You find out whether you're one of those men without it costing you a dime. I told her I'd take it until the bottle ran out so she'd quit looking at me. She said fine. I took them at ten to six the next morning at the counter with my coffee, all three bottles together. Peg made me tell the doctor first, and I did. For ten days there was nothing to report. On day twelve Peg came home from the store at a quarter past eight at night and I was still sitting at the kitchen table. I hadn't gone near the recliner. She stood in the doorway a second and didn't say a word. Then she went and put the kettle on. In the third week I pulled up at the bottom of the hill on Pike Road with a box for the Hendersons. A medium one again. I looked up at the back door. The box is where the mail goes. The door is where the carrier goes. I turned off the Jeep and walked it up. Mrs. Henderson opened the door before I knocked, with her glasses pushed up in her hair. "Hal," she said, "I thought they'd made you stop." She'd seen the packages at the curb since March and figured the post office told me to quit walking them up. She hadn't said anything because she didn't want to get me in trouble. I told her nobody had told me anything. She took the box with both hands. "Well, I'm glad," she said. I walked down the hill with her dog, who's had opinions about me for ten years, trotting along behind me to the gate. I sat in the Jeep a minute with the engine off. That Sunday Danny called, which he does about once a month. We talked for twenty minutes before he stopped. "Dad, you sound different. What are you doing?" I said I was walking the route again. There was a pause on the line. "You sound like you did when I was in high school," he said. He called Tyler after we hung up. Tyler called me an hour later to ask the same thing in his own words. Peg listened to both calls from the next room and pretended she wasn't. Around week five I was at Earl's box at eleven with his catalog. He took it and looked at me a long time, the way he had in March. "You're walking different," he said. I said I'd been trying. "No," he said. "You're walking different." That was all he said. His hand shook a little taking the catalog. I'd been looking at that hand for two years and hadn't once thought about what he'd been told. In week six we went back to the clinic for a check I'd scheduled on my own. Same lot, same engine running, same sheet. Everything on it still said normal. Peg read it, folded it, and put it in her purse. "Normal for Hal," she said, and she grinned. I hadn't seen her do that since the boys left. I couldn't tell you what's different on that sheet, because nothing is. I can tell you where I was standing when she said it. I was standing up straight. If you're the one at your job who carries it to the back door, whatever your back door is, you already know the day it stops. Mine was in March. My father sat down at sixty. I'm fifty-eight and I walked a box up a hill. Good people in short visits told us we were fine, and I can't fault them for it. And don't wait the way Earl did. He told me that himself, and he's the one who'd know. The link is the page Peg read me at midnight. Ninety days, and one email to Snap gets all of it back, with the bottles still yours. I didn't believe a word of it for two months. P.S. Mrs. Henderson leaves a glass of tea on the back rail on delivery days now. Nobody told her to. P.P.S. Subscribed, it comes to $59.46 a month. One order is $79.95. Shipping's free. Individual results vary. P.P.P.S. I said snake oil for two months, to Peg and to a dog.