What could be more enjoyable and entertaining than learning the secret back-room details about a vital business that serves all of us, six days a week?

Fifty-year-old marketing expert Steve Grant lost his corporate job at the beginning of the pandemic. Because he had a family to support, he knew he at least needed a source for health insurance. He applied to work for the United States Postal Service in Blacksburg, his long-time home in the Blue Ridge Mountains of southwestern Virginia. It is the home of Virginia Tech. It is also part of Appalachia. Blacksburg has academic facilities and big and small businesses. Apartment buildings and single-family homes. Dirt roads and mountains and creek crossings. It could be considered to be a cross-section of America.

Thirty-one carrier routes cover the 23,645 delivery addresses. Before Steve can join in and can help out, he has to live through two weeks of intense instruction at the Roanoke Postal Academy. He passes the test, he takes the oath to uphold the Constitution, and he is hired as a substitute carrier. And then the fun REALLY begins. Or rather, the WORK really begins.

Because right away, Steve finds himself covering for Cash, a regular worker who is taking a long-overdue two-week vacation. He runs through the route with Cash once. Then, he's on his own for the next two weeks. Yikes! "Honestly, if all you had to do as a carrier was to deliver the mail, working as a letter carrier would be one of the greatest jobs in the world," Steve says. "But the fact is that every day, each letter carrier effectively builds a library, loads it into a truck, and then disassembles that library in route order." (p. 50) He shares with us exactly what happens behind the post office counter. He itemizes the process. How the truck from Greensboro drops off the incoming mail in the wee hours of the morning. How each carrier sorts the mail for their route by hand in a case full of addressed pigeonholes. How they have to know the differences in handling letters, magazines and parcels. How they load the mail into the little white truck. How the truck works. (Or doesn't.) How and when they can make deliveries in their own personal vehicles. And above all, how the pandemic of 2020 made every task more difficult. Steve constantly has doubts about his ability to keep doing the job. He isn't alone. It requires both mental and physical stamina. A fair number of newbies bail out, under the pressure.

Once we're used to accompanying Steve around the remotest corners of Blacksburg – and once HE gets used to it -- then we get to hear about his most unusual and remarkable deliveries and encounters. Like the day when he was assigned to pick up dozens of boxes of law books from a lawyer father, who was shipping them to his aspiring law student daughter. The day Steve opened a mailbox that was housing a wasp nest. The snowy day when he winched another carrier's truck out of a ditch. Some customers like to greet the mail carrier with a hot cup of coffee. Others might prefer a well-aimed shotgun. Every day is different, and yet, it still has to be consistently the same.

Until we read someone's account like this one, we don't know exactly what goes on in that brick building downtown. We don't know what it's like to drive the little white trucks. We DO take mail delivery for granted. We rarely think of the many people and processes involved ... until something-vital-to-us doesn't arrive on time. Ironically, the week I started reading this book, I noticed that our usual letter carrier must have been on vacation. A variety of substitutes came to our mailboxes instead. Good luck to them, I thought. I hope they're up to the task.

After Steve works for the post office for about a year, he is able to return to the kind of corporate job he is most comfortable with. He considers his letter carrier year as an unexpected gift. And here, he passes this gift on to us.

Mailman is a delightful and enlightening memoir. I highly recommend reading it. I am giving my copy to the people who distribute mail at my workplace. And every time I meet a new carrier walking our city streets, I thank them in person for all that they do. Now I understand how much diligence and devotion it takes to do the job. Thanks, Steve! And thanks, USPS workers!