The mailman's life

If you think your letter carrier isn't keeping a list of who's naughty and nice, you are not living in reality.

Stephen Starring Grant, Mailman

The person who delivers our mail each day is one of those people most of us just take for granted. We just expect our mail to be placed in our box each day at about the same time. We give little thought to everything that goes into getting our mail to us.

And so reading Stephen Starring Grant's Mailman (2025) might be a good idea for all of us.

Laid off from his corporate job at the age of 50 in the middle of Covid, and with a family depending on him, Grant took a job delivering the mail in the Appalachian Mountains of Virginia. He delivered the mail for a year, and his experiences are eye-opening.

Grant underwent the post office training expected of all new hires, yet even after weeks on the job he felt incompetent and ready to quit. Sorting the mail correctly, dealing with all those packages (especially during the Christmas season), delivering the mail to the right place at the right time and, yes, dealing with all those dogs that seem to hate mail carriers was a daily struggle for him.

Yet he struck with it and, he now believes, became a better man for it. He talks about the paper cuts, the other injuries common to mail carriers, the importance of rubber bands, the difficult deliveries to ridiculous places and everything else that becomes a part of a mail carrier's life.

He says at one point that his "greatest accomplishment was not quitting." And yet eventually he did quit when he got another, better-paying job in the corporate world. But at least he gave us this book about what the post office looks like from the inside.