I was pretty small for a long time growing up and always had trouble reaching, and then seeing in, the mailbox.

I would have to reach my hand inside and feel around, determining whether there was anything in there only after touching the warm paper envelopes instead of the hot, wavy metal. Things like that always frustrated me. I couldn't get myself glasses of water because the cabinets and faucets were so far away. Then suddenly I discovered I could reach them. It would seem to happen in one day. I couldn't do something, then I could.

So it happened that I was roller-skating up and down my winding driveway when I stopped at the bottom and looked over, discovering that my head was at the exact same height as the mailbox. And even more remarkably, it seemed to me that my head was the exact same size as the mailbox.

I will pause here to remark on the stupidity of children. Children aren't curious. They aren't ignorant, either. They're just stupid. They do stupid things, and when they aren't caught, they do them again to see if they were as stupid as they seemed the first time.

With my head inside the mailbox, I noticed that I could hear myself breathing exceptionally loudly. And if I then spoke, my voice reverberated back at me like an echo. A very loud, very tinny echo. And in fact I had discovered – having inserted my huge melon-shaped noggin in the mailbox - that my head was, just as I had observed, a perfect fit.

What I hadn't noticed was that once inserted, all I had to do was twist my neck slightly and my head could get stuck inside the mailbox. Further, I had elected to attempt this experiment while wearing roller-skates, which did an amazing job of eliminating traction on the inclined driveway. What, then, could be a better test of human endurance than for me to start screaming inside the mailbox?

The answer is, of course, nothing.