Mailman: My Wild Ride Delivering the Mail in Appalachia and Finally Finding Home

by Stephen Starring Grant

As Joseph Conrad said, it’s a bad world for poor people. So I was desperately looking for a job I didn’t really want to work.

think the distinction between white-collar work and blue-collar work is a false one. Both forms of labor want all of your time and both exact a toll. One form is no more or less noble than the other. The real distinction is between work and service, and I think it’s one of the great dividing lines in American life.

We carry it for you. That is the letter carrier’s work. Since this nation’s birth, we have carried the mail for you—your endowment, yours just for having the good luck to be born American or having the heart to become one. We carry it. And then we head home to our families and brace ourselves. We pray for strength and then get up and do it all again. To the last mile. Every letter, every parcel, every day. Every day a miracle.