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New York Times
21-07-2025
- General
- New York Times
What Does Your Mailman Know About You? More Than Your Address.
MAILMAN: My Wild Ride Delivering the Mail in Appalachia and Finally Finding Home, by Stephen Starring Grant 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 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. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Winnipeg Free Press
12-07-2025
- Politics
- Winnipeg Free Press
Special delivery
The postal service has an unofficial motto: 'Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.' 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 Weekly A weekly look at what's happening in Winnipeg's arts and entertainment scene. 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.
