What Does Your Mailman Know About You? More Than Your Address.
The worst thing about delivering the mail, Stephen Starring Grant says in 'Mailman,' his warm and oddly patriotic new book about being a rural carrier in Virginia for a year during Covid, isn't dogs, although some 5,000 carriers are attacked each year and a few die each decade. To fend them off, postal workers learn to carry multiple cans of Halt! dog spray.In training, they're told to take nothing for granted: 'Spray it till the can goes dry. Get them in the T zone: eyes and nose, eyes and nose.'
The worst thing isn't the seething bees and wasps (also spiders) that lurk in neglected mailboxes. It isn't the awkward and painful stretching required to drive stock vehicles from the passenger seat, which one must do when, as often happens, a rural carrier supplies his or her own car. It isn't how heavily armed people are now, so that there is a 'continuous nonzero chance of someone shooting you.' It isn't rain, nor snow, nor sleet, nor hail nor extreme heat in un-air-conditioned postal trucks. It isn't the 69-pound packages (the U.S.P.S. declines anything over 70). It isn't the high injury rate, especially for rotator cuffs.
The worst thing about delivering mail is the 'casing' that's required before you head out each morning. To case the mail is to painstakingly set everything (envelopes, boxes, magazines, postcards, parcels, you name it) in order, so that you can easily retrieve it while on the road. 'The fact is that every day, each letter carrier effectively builds a library, loads it into a truck and then disperses that library in route order,' Grant writes. Casing takes patience. Many rubber bands are involved. It's a hassle. Doing it poorly can add misery and hours to your day.
Grant found himself grudgingly delivering the mail in middle age (he was 50) because he'd lost his job as a marketing consultant. He had a wife, two teenage daughters and a tiny but worrisome nugget of prostate cancer. He needed the job for health insurance and to ward off the biggest dog, depression. Several years earlier, he'd moved his family from Brooklyn back to his hometown, Blacksburg, Va., in the Blue Ridge Mountains, so that his children would grow up with grass under their feet. Until he was laid off, he still commuted regularly to New York and other major cities.
Delivering the mail was harder on Grant, physically and mentally, than he'd expected, he tells us in 'Mailman.' But he offers insight and cheer about the upsides. He liked being able to check in on lonely people and do good turns. He often felt he delivered something more than just the mail: 'Continuity. Safety. Normalcy. Companionship. Civilization. You know, the stuff that a government is supposed to do for its people.'
He enjoyed the rich pageant of offbeat products that flowed through his truck. 'If you think your carrier doesn't notice when you order a sex toy,' he writes, 'you're wrong.' He liked the days when orders of baby chicks came in, though delivering the heavy bags of chicken feed that followed was a bummer. People gave him cookies; he often got free coffee at Starbucks. He got a lot of steps in, often 15,000 a day.
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