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American management and marketing consultant Stephen Starring Grant's excellent first book chronicles a year of far more varied obstacles to mail delivery: 'This world we've built for ourselves is complex to the point of being paralyzing.'
Laid off by his company in March 2020, months after being diagnosed with prostate cancer, Grant needed work for expenses and for health coverage.
Tim Smith / Brandon Sun files
In a seismic shift from his remote, white-collar career, he became a 'Rural Care Associate' with the United States Postal Service (USPS): a substitute mailman.
From basic training through learning, despising and eventually embracing the job, Grant's year of blue-collar work helped him 'find' his home as he navigated his way around mail routes, grounding his discovery geographically, culturally and psychologically.
Mailman provides many insights into the job of delivering the mail and often soars into truths about society, politics and other human interactions. It is hilarious, touching and often inspirational.
'America is the greatest country in the world, a shining city on a hill,' Grant says. Also, 'America is a steroidal monster… exporting our misery to the world.' Mailman goes about proving, says Grant, that '(b)oth versions of America are true.'
This paradoxical view of the world prompts many of Grant's insights into personal and civic pride and patriotism, showing difficult but necessary ways to improve what needs improving.
Insisting that the USPS does not receive taxpayer subsidy (although its health benefits are federally funded), Grant introduces the complex people who dedicate themselves to delivering the mail, which is both 'dumb and anachronistic' and also 'a vital act of normalcy.'
Promised at least one day a week, substituting ended up being virtually a full-time job. COVID's effect on home deliveries was profound.
A dispute between Amazon and courier UPS meant the post office suddenly had to deliver far more parcels than usual. Grant the consultant came up with an idea for clearing the backlog of packages, but was criticized when he brought it to management. Later, his ideas were instituted; he never expresses resentment that someone may have taken credit for his work.
For many months, Grant hated the difficulties and uncertainty. Sorting mail, delivering from different official and personal vehicles, in uncomfortable and dangerous weather, to unpredictable people around the southern university town of Blacksburg, Va. nearly broke him more than once.
Alicia Kratzer photo
Stephen Starring Grant
In rollicking and outrageous stories about his developing understanding of people and their needs, Grant's insights elevate Mailman to a book of philosophy which is also a page-turner.
The odd feeling of delivering mail to people he knew is clear when he sees a former therapist on a route he is covering. She keeps saying, 'You are not a mailman.' But his joy when he goes out of his way to help a couple renting her Airbnb convinced him:
'I had become a mailman.'
His original incompetence and failures led him to an epiphany: 'Being great hadn't led me to my essential selfhood. Sucking did.'
Still, after an encounter with a seemingly deranged person who insists that '(n)obody ever takes responsibility!' Grant texted his wife, 'HOW HAS THIS BECOME MY LIFE?'
Her gentle but firm insistence that such reactions were hurtful saved him, 'the way that people who love you will always form a rescue party and come looking for you.'
One customer, receiving Grant's 'dream subscription list' of magazines, was delighted for 'all these periodicals to get a second life' and passed them back to him by the grocery bag full.
Grant describes both fellow postal workers and customers of all classes and identities with compassion. Many human problems result from not realizing that, as Grant says, 'the problem is less that the world is malign than that it's complicated.'
In response to political polarization during the 2020 election, delivering the mail proved that, Grant notes, 'when you work with people, when you get to know them as people, it becomes harder to hate them, at least for 99% of folks. We don't have to agree with each other. We have to agree to work and live together.'
Mailman
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Grant's reminiscences look hopefully toward a world not 'sorted into groups where we hold each other at arm's length, naked with uninformed disgust.'
Vaccination and time began opening things up and Grant went back to familiar work with an HR firm. 'But I returned without the sense that it was everything. That it was me.'
Grant finds the dichotomy between white-collar and blue-collar work a distraction: 'One form is no more or less noble than the other…. The real distinction is between work and service… while we all work, few of us serve.'
Grant's truly touching pages of acknowledgments in Mailman show his deep gratitude for his, and others', service.
Bill Rambo is a retired teacher who still loves checking for mail at the Landmark post office.
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