{"id":48040,"date":"2025-08-01T17:23:36","date_gmt":"2025-08-01T21:23:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tenfourmagazine.com\/content\/?p=48040"},"modified":"2025-08-01T17:23:37","modified_gmt":"2025-08-01T21:23:37","slug":"delivering-the-mail","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tenfourmagazine.com\/content\/2025\/08\/the-bookworm-sez\/delivering-the-mail\/","title":{"rendered":"Delivering The Mail"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Junk mail, an advertisement, and two bills.\u00a0 It\u2019s quiet in your mailbox today, but who knows what you\u2019ll get next time.\u00a0 A check?\u00a0 A package?\u00a0 A card from Aunt Mary?\u00a0 It\u2019s a surprise every day.\u00a0 And as you\u2019ll learn in the new book \u201cMailman\u201d by Stephen Starring Grant, you have one workforce to thank.\u00a0 After moving his family to Blacksburg, Virginia to raise his kids in his hometown, Stephen Starring Grant landed a job with a challenging commute, no big deal, just a logistics thing.\u00a0 And so it was, at the very beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, that he stood in a nearly empty airport in North Carolina, phone in hand, suddenly laid off from this job.\u00a0 With no income and a dwindling savings account, Grant applied for \u201canything I was even remotely qualified for… and there was never a snowball\u2019s chance of me getting any of them.\u201d\u00a0 Then he learned that the United States Postal Service was hiring.\u00a0 A short wait to be accepted, two weeks of training, and a huge learning curve later, Grant was an official, sworn-in, real-life USPS mail carrier, but it took months for him to feel comfortable.\u00a0 Your mail is sorted before the carrier gets it, he says, and then the carrier sorts it again, by house number into a large contraption called a case.\u00a0 Packages go in a cage.\u00a0 A mail carrier must remember one or multiple routes and there is no cheat-sheet, which can complicate a rural route in mountain country.\u00a0 Furthermore, it\u2019s an acrobatic endeavor: in smaller towns around the country, deliveries are often made from a carrier\u2019s private vehicle, from a passenger seat, with one leg stretched across the cab.\u00a0 So many times, Grant thought about quitting, and then suddenly one day, \u201cI had become a mailman.\u201d\u00a0 We joke.\u00a0 We poke fun at the USPS, complain and switch to bill-paying online.\u00a0 Still, a walk to the box is pure anticipation.\u00a0 It\u2019s a treat to see what\u2019s in that mailbox, and inside \u201cMailman.\u201d\u00a0 And yet, all is not smooth.\u00a0 Though there are many irrelevant asides and chapters that would be more suitable for another kind of book, \u201cMailman\u201d is funny, profane, and fun to read.\u00a0 Author Stephen Starring Grant is quick to admit his total befuddlement with his new job and admits when things get rough he pokes a lot of fun at himself, which lightens every letter of this story.\u00a0 Part of his problem with the job \u2013 and another issue with this book \u2013 is the terminology and trying to remember what\u2019s what, and where.\u00a0 Grant admits that he struggled with that, and readers will, too.\u00a0 Still, most readers will laugh out loud, and they\u2019ll love knowing more about the USPS and its inner workings.\u00a0 If you want an unusual memoir that opens the doors with a behind-the-curtain peek, find \u201cMailman\u201d because it delivers!\u00a0 And right to your front door!!<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Junk mail, an advertisement, and two bills.\u00a0 It\u2019s quiet in your mailbox today, but who knows what you\u2019ll get next time.\u00a0 A check?\u00a0 A package?\u00a0 A card from Aunt Mary?\u00a0 It\u2019s a surprise every day.\u00a0 And as you\u2019ll learn in the new book \u201cMailman\u201d by Stephen Starring Grant, you have one workforce to thank.\u00a0 After<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":35,"featured_media":48042,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[91],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-48040","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-the-bookworm-sez"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tenfourmagazine.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48040","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tenfourmagazine.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tenfourmagazine.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tenfourmagazine.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/35"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tenfourmagazine.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48040"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.tenfourmagazine.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48040\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":48214,"href":"https:\/\/www.tenfourmagazine.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48040\/revisions\/48214"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tenfourmagazine.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/48042"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tenfourmagazine.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48040"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tenfourmagazine.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48040"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tenfourmagazine.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48040"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}