The Postman 

It’s about the service

 It happened about a year ago.  We live on a suburban street that ends where a cross street is occasionally busy with traffic taking a short cut.  It was busy that morning as was the small children’s playground on the other side of the cross street.

A cry startled me.  A shriek, really, and I saw a tiny little girl run into the busy street pursued awkwardly by a frantic woman overburdened with child.  Fright crept up inside me.  

There was the sound of squealing tires and small white truck trimmed in blue and red lurched to a stop in the middle of the intersection.  A uniformed man hopped out of the right side of the truck, hands raised to stop the traffic.  He scooped up the little girl and hugged her.  She was laughing.  He was saying her name.  The man, I knew him, handed over the child to her distraught mother, hopped back in his truck and continued on his rounds.  Folks waved their thanks.  A few motorists gently honked and smiled.

I’ve thought about that day often since then.  Ray, he was our postman, did more than deliver the mail.  He was an essential and welcome member of our community, although he lived somewhere else.  That day, like every other day, Ray drove up and down my street stopping at each street-side mail box, stuffing in mail, taking out the occasional stamped first-class letter.

Each stop the same until further up the street he stopped and got out of his truck.  It was the home of, well, I’ll call her the widow Bailey.  I didn’t know her.  No one on the street seemed to.  She’d been there forever.  But Ray knew her, and I knew she would be waiting for him on her screen porch out of sight, waiting in her wheelchair.  I knew Ray wouldn’t just hand over a stack of mostly useless mail — flyers asking you to buy something and flyers asking you to give money to something so someone else could buy something.  No, Ray would chat with the widow Bailey for at least five minutes, the only human contact she would likely have that day.  Then he’d carry the stamped letter she wrote to someone every day and be sure to get it into that afternoon’s outgoing mail.

I thought that day, and often since, that Ray and countless men and women like him give meaning to the word “service” in the U.S. Postal Service.  Ray served, gave something of himself to his work.  It wasn’t just a job to Ray.

But something has changed.  I read in the papers that the Post Office is being reorganized.  An efficiency effort.  I saw something of that just yesterday.  I had to send an important legal/financial packet off to the East.  Had to go in one day, overnight mail.  Had done it many times before.  At the big central post office where I took my packet, resplendent with gaudy stamps — thirty-five dollars’ worth — I noticed a big sign, which I studied while I waited socially-distant in line.  In large letters the sign read “5:00 PM.”  Under that it said mail posted after 5 pm would not go out until the next day.

That caused me to remember a day only a few months before when I started to drop a letter in the big blue box in front of the post office.  It was about quarter past five.  A shout stopped me and a young woman in a postal uniform, carrying one of those slope-sided post office boxes full of mail, cheerily told me: “Wait, give it to me.  I’ll make sure it gets into today’s mail.”

The stories in the papers lead me to believe someone thinks there should be in the postal service less of the kind of behavior of that woman, and of Ray.  Inefficient, likely.  Indeed, inside the line moved more quickly than I expected.  There was no side-chatter.  Despite the muffling of the masks and the clear plastic barriers, my transaction went quickly, smoothly, albeit in an unexpected direction.  My one-day, overnight guaranteed mailing might only take one day, but the guarantee was for two days.  Still thirty-five dollars.

On the way home, I thought about the small rural post office I had used often when we lived in Vermont.  The postmistress — that’s what we called Martha, the woman who ran the post office — seemed very efficient to me.  The mail came and went with nary a slip, even when the snow was deep or the roads muddy.  Of course, I went to the post office in person, as did many others.  Every morning about 10 a half-dozen of us would gather in front of the post office counter and chat with Martha while other employees were stuffing our boxes.

I usually tarried a bit after the others left just to talk with Martha.  She was smart, attractive and, as I learned gradually over the months, a very hard-working mother of two inter-racial boys whose Black father had difficulty finding good-paying work in lily-white Vermont.

From Martha I learned that the Postal Service paid reasonably well, sufficient to support her family.  Later I read the USPS is the largest government agency, providing a leg up for hundreds of thousands of folks who would otherwise be struggling to find work of any sort.  A “gateway to the middle class,” the article said.

Back home this morning I saw how the efficiency effort was working out.  I slipped out a few minutes before 10 to talk with Ray and get my mail in person.  But he was already far up the street, near the widow’s house.  I watched, but Ray didn’t get out of his truck, just stuffed her mail in her box and moved on swiftly.

No one would chat with the widow Bailey that morning, nor pick up her daily letter.  Too inefficient, surely.