MAILMAN

A marketing whiz, waylaid by the pandemic, becomes a rural mailman in this winning memoir.

“I am behind schedule and this route is almost sixty miles long,” writes Grant early in his memoir. That route snakes out from Blacksburg, Virginia, one of the most technologically sophisticated cities in the nation; by its end, on unmaintained roads past sad trailer parks and weathered farmhouses, it’s a different world. Indeed, one of his first customers takes delivery of a sword paid for with his second pandemic check, a replica of “the blade that smote Sauron.” Another stop on his route leaves coffee in the mailbox for him in the freezing Appalachian winter, while Grant slugs down Gatorade in the boiling summer and advises cutting it in half with water, “because it’s actually too salty right out of the bottle.” That’s not the only bit of wisdom Grant dispenses: “If you think your letter carrier isn’t keeping a list of who’s naughty and nice, you are not living in reality.” Grant also observes the reality that few delivery people last long in the job: where the average on-the-job annual injury rate is 2.8 for every 100 employees, it’s 7 for postal workers, thanks to dogs, bees, weather, and off-kilter people. But, Grant adds, there are pleasures to the job, too, from seeing beautiful countryside to doing a public service: “When I carried the mail I was never just me, but something much larger.” Along the way, Grant muses about rural poverty, fractious politics, violence, drug abuse, and other issues, but he peppers his prose with funny aperçus: “It’s always the small dogs that start shit….When the universe arrives at its heat death, there will be nothing left but unread issues of the Economist….Our delivery vehicles were like democracy, the worst of all possible vehicles, except for the alternatives.”

A charming book that’s guaranteed to make you think differently about the USPS.