With few exceptions, every day during my childhood a stranger came onto our street-facing colonial blue porch, built with the house in 1910, whose roof was held up by white, wooden Corinthian columns. The porch was surrounded by white rails which, during the summer months, I spent many hours cleaning and some summers sanding and painting. Depending on the stranger’s size, twelve to fifteen steps brought her from the street to the base of our porch. She, or he (it was usually a man), climbed three eight-foot-wide steps to get onto the twelve-foot-wide porch and approach the front door. To the right and left of the heavy, wooden front door, half of which was glass, were decoratively framed wooden embellishments with intricate glass panels complementing the front door itself. On the right panel of the door was a rectangular hole. Covering that hole was a hinged brass plate that read, “Letters.” This stranger, rain or shine, snow or hail, more religiously than I prayed as a child, lifted the flap and dropped letters into my family’s home. Some of my five siblings enjoyed this ritual more than others. Some of us would shout, “The mail’s here,” and dutifully carry it through the foyer and dining room to the kitchen where my mother was likely to be found cooking for our family of eight.
Imagine the scene with me: The sun was shining. We were off school for a religious holiday, but not a major one. My brother and I were playing in the living room with cardboard box cars. We concocted a plot and set to filming it. The Incredible Hulk would visit and smash our cars up, tossing them off the road. The Incredible Hulk was THE model of choice for our oldest brother who loved WWE and WCW. In the back of the camcorder, the mailman was approaching the house. So I dropped the camera, and we ran to the door. Catching the mailman was better than catching the Easter bunny or the Leprechaun because he is real. My brother got there before me, grabbed the mail, and started running to the kitchen. He opened one of the letters before my mother got there and within a week was dead. It was 2001. Despite this, the mail kept being delivered daily. Never was there a culture-wide consideration that mail delivery, as such, should stop.
This would be one of the most traumatic experiences of my life, if it had happened. As a nation, we did not interpret the anthrax attacks as revelatory of a systemic vulnerability that would require us to eschew mail delivery and replace them with massive mail centers capable of being better guarded. Recently a student of mine from Tanzania told me how shocked he was when he arrived at his aunt’s American house and saw mailboxes which were daily filled by mail carriers. In Tanzania, he said, you have to drive to the DHL package/mail center. It could be hours away. He described the wait in the DHL like the American experience of the DMV. As we discussed this, I realized that behind the mailman and mailwoman, behind the home delivery of mail and packages, lies a whole system of beliefs and assumptions that are not universally shared. Drawing them out in the open for the American public seems not only germane but necessary, because the death of the mailman will be the death of America, since it will be the death of man insofar as he lives as man.
That Americans love convenience is self-evident. While some Americans have P.O. Boxes at their local post office, over 154 million Americans have their mail delivered. The continuance of the USPS, progenitor of privatized delivery offshoots, has never been seriously questioned despite squabbles over inefficiencies and budget problems. Ralph Nader in the foreword to Christopher Shaw’s First Class: The U.S. Postal Service, Democracy, and the Corporate Threat argue that the services USPS provide should “expand.” We are a society that wants the goods brought to us. From the Music Man’s Wells Fargo Wagon to the Amazon truck, the mailman’s coming brings joy, and we are willing to sacrifice other possible ways of living for this convenience. The DHL is, after all, like the DMV, a more social experience, insofar as we are literally waiting with other people with whom we could, in principle, talk and commune even if, in practice, we doomscroll. Even so, what American would actually wish to have to deal with a DMV experience just to get our mail. We may suffer a slow USPS to send mail during the holidays, but to send and retrieve our daily mail would be unbearably inconvenient.
In reality, our love of postal convenience rests on something deeper: mutuality, trust, hospitality, neighborliness, personal responsibility and accountability, grit and perseverance, good will.
When the mailman or mailwoman delivered letters or packages to my childhood home, not once did my parents worry. Even when we were playing outside, they did not fear that the mailman or mailwoman would steal us and sell us into the sex-slave market. Never did they fear that the mail carrier would stab us in the neck. We were not called inside because the mail man was coming. We were not told to be careful of the mailman. While we were not mailed through the USPS, we trusted the mailman deeply. Moreover, we were told to be kind to him, say hello, and be respectful and grateful. We were given the awesome responsibility to welcome this total stranger to the porch with cheer and, even, leave for him an envelope containing cash as a gift during the Christmas and Easter seasons.
The mailman and mailwoman expect hospitality, and rightly so. This is why they expect the dog to be contained since a loose dog whose job is to protect the family from strangers would be correct in identifying the mail carrier as a stranger. The dog is right, but the mailman is more so. A civilization that depends on convenience of home-delivery is a civilization built on welcoming the stranger and giving deference to them.
The family expects the mail carrier to be kind in return for their hospitality. To the child playing outside their home, the mailman or woman is, with the grocery store clerk, one of the primary models of storge, that universal love we owe to our fellow citizens, to members of our shared place. Their way of relating to me as a child, their gentle hello, their recognition of my existence, demonstrated something important: adults and children belong in the same space with mutual goodwill.
This mutual goodwill is what keeps the mail carrier persevering and fulfilling the USPS’s informal motto: “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.” Their perseverance arises from the recognition that they are responsible to deliver packages and envelopes whose contents are a mystery. Their mere delivery of the goods is the good that is their noble calling. They are, as it were, mediators par excellence. They do not merely mediate the goods or information but mediate that humans are mediators of a good life.
I now live and farm in the middle of rural Maryland. I have six kids. In addition to the mailwoman who daily brings us mail and packages, we also have Amazon, UPS, FedEx, and other delivery services delivering things needed for farming or living (like diapers from Costco.com!). Home deliveries imply vulnerability for both parties in a way that driving to the DHL never could. The DHL is more capable of being protected than the Amazonian woman delivering her package. In Tanzania, where a recent election dispute has brought about the death of over a thousand people, it’s very possible that a home delivery would end in rape, murder, and theft. Bodies could be fed to dogs or pigs or buried. I have several guns, and the FedEx truck is full of valuable stuff. Despite the mutual vulnerability, that we don’t have daily violations of delivery drivers and their trucks and/or of the families to whom they are delivering is indicative of something far greater than mere legal structures. It is indicative of the kind of interpersonal attention necessary for any right moral action. These men and women and children are men and women and children and as such demand I attend to them as such and neither as rivals nor as objects. This attention is actually convenient in its etymological roots: a coming-together-with-one-another. It is only by coming together with the other that civilizations exist and remain. Marriage, the primordial convenience whose mutual hospitality welcomes the other, orients outward to the convenience of the family which gives rise to a greater convenience of other families-in-communion.
The USPS is the only institution trusted to deliver baby chicks from hatcheries to farms in the United States of America. This summer saw one disastrous event where twelve thousand chicks were neglected, and many died before the local SPCA tried to get the survivors adopted by nearby homes. They never made it to the farms waiting for them.
Neighborliness and trust still go a long way though. This summer while driving to get chicken feed over an hour away, I received a text message from the central USPS hub 30 minutes from our farm that our chicks were in and needed to be picked up before 4pm. It was 3:30. I could not get there. My wife could not get there. The chicks were normally delivered to our local branch of the USPS so that we could pick them up 5 minutes away. The concerned USPS worker did not want these chicks to die overnight. Fair enough. I told them neither I nor my wife could get there and that the chicks would be fine since they were just hatched that morning. We would pick them up at our local branch tomorrow. The mail carrier said that she lives north of our farm in Pennsylvania and could drop them off on her evening commute. Now, truth be told, I did wonder if this was a scam and if this person was for real. I wondered if this person would rape my wife and kill my children. I then realized, these are ridiculous thoughts. I texted my wife that the mail carrier would bring the chicks. A middleaged, animal-loving woman delivered 160 baby chicks to my wife. All was well.
This woman, in going out of her way, demonstrated the very nature of what the mail carrier does every day. Their job is to make the “out of the way” in their way. The interior reality of the mailman and mailwoman is thus the necessary interior of all men and women: a bringing together in mutual goodwill and trust that bears fruit for our common good. We are responsible for such. Our re-sponse–our pledge in return–presupposes encountering the other as the gift that he or she is to themselves, God, and the world as a whole. The American mailman and mailwoman manifest all this. Not only are they the canary in the coal mine of a society–if they die, we all die–with every step they take they renew America “from the inside by the ancient rule of neighborliness, by love of precious things, and by the wish to be at home.”
Image via Wikimedia.
