Beware of Cat

by Vincent Wyckoff

  I looked down the street, scanning trees and bushes, wondering what we’d do even if we got lucky and spotted him. Suddenly, the old man let go with a piercing whistle. I jumped back, almost dropping a handful of mail, and the hair on the back of my neck stood up. The tremolo echoed through the neighborhood.

  “That’s what he sounds like,” he said, peering through the leafless trees like a squirrel hunter searching for dinner.

  “Green and yellow, you say?”

  “Yup. He’s small, but real smart. If you see him, just whistle like I showed you. He might come land on your shoulder. But remember, that little guy is mighty clever.”

  “Sure. I’ll keep an eye out.” Setting off again on my rounds, I called back to him, “Good luck, Mr. Harris.”

  I was glad to get away, but I felt bad for the old guy. He wasn’t the type to admit it, but it was obvious that bird meant a lot to him. The least I could do was keep alert, maybe catch a fleeting glimpse of green and yellow, and come back to tell him about it. If the bird hadn’t been missing long, he couldn’t have gotten very far.

  This wasn’t the first time I had searched for a lost bird. A few years earlier a resident on my route had lost a cockatiel. She put a big sign in her front yard and tacked flyers to telephone poles offering a reward to anyone who spotted it. About two weeks later, on a rainy, gloomy day, I saw the bird on the ground between two houses. The poor thing looked exhausted and bedraggled. It wouldn’t last long with all the cats roaming the neighborhood.

  I drove back to the house to tell her where I had seen the bird. She came running, barely believing the cockatiel could still be outside and alive. It was, and after a few days of loving attention, it made a full recovery. The signs came down a day later, and I never heard a word about the reward, but at least the bird had survived its little adventure.

  I looked back at Mr. Harris. In his prime he had been a big fellow, but the years had withered him down to a mere shadow of his youth. He shuffled along slowly with his hands in his pockets, eyes aloft.

  At the corner I crossed the street to work back up the other side. With the old man’s pace, I would get to his house at the far end of the block long before he did. He startled me with another loud whistle as I drew up directly across the street from him. When I looked over, I realized he was too caught up in the search to be aware of my presence.

  I continued looking for the bird. I had the idea that the little creature probably couldn’t fly up into the tallest trees, so I narrowed my search to hedges and bushes. It would be nice to help the old man if I could; besides, I was early and in no hurry.

  I’ve always liked older people. Perhaps it’s because I’m interested in history, so I enjoy listening to their stories. And I always remember something my father told me years ago. We were driving in his car when an old man suddenly turned in front of us without using his turn signal. My father was known for his short temper.

  “Doesn’t that make you angry?” I asked, waiting for him to hit the horn.

  He looked at me calmly and replied, “You have to cut the old folks some slack. We’ll all be old some day, you know, and it can’t be easy.”

  Walking into Mr. Harris’s yard, I saw his wife sweeping off the front steps. We exchanged greetings as I handed her their mail. Pointing back over my shoulder, I said, “I saw your husband down the block. I’m sorry to hear your bird got away.”

  A bittersweet smile spread across her face as she looked down the street at her husband. “We haven’t had that bird for twenty-five years,” she said softly.

  I suppose I should have seen that coming. It certainly explained some of the odd conversations we had had. But I was surprised, and saddened a little as well.

  “It’s been happening like this for the last few years,” she explained. “The first warm day of the year, when the breeze blows just so, often triggers a memory for him of when we had a parakeet, and it did escape for a few hours.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I just stared down the block at the frail old man. With a back bowed under the weight of his years, and hands crammed deep in his pockets, the old eyes still searched the treetops with an earnest intensity.

  “But it’s okay,” she said. “At least he’s getting some exercise.” I turned to meet her friendly smile, and she added, “Isn’t it a splendid day?”

  Office Hours

  When Danny decides to grace us with a song, the entire station stops to listen. Not because he’s a great singer, which he isn’t, but because it’s just so startling to hear a middle-aged man suddenly break out in song on the workroom floor. He ignores our groans and catcalls. If he starts in a key that’s too high, he stops, holds his hands up, and shouts, “Wait! Wait! Let me start over.” Then, amid jeers and laughter, Danny begins again. Soon he’s ripping headlong through “New York, New York,” “Back in the ussr,” or “All Shook Up.” He may not be Frank, or Paul, or Elvis, but he knows all the words to all the verses, and he isn’t afraid to belt them out.

  Adding to the fun is our unspoken anticipation. We peek down Danny’s way to see if he’s about to let loose. He doesn’t take requests, and if we ask him to sing he refuses, but when he finally gets going, we yell out guesses as to the original artist and when the song was recorded. We grimace when Danny strains to reach the high notes and laugh out loud at his hip-swaying, finger-snapping style.

  DANNY’S A CAPELLA RENDITIONS are a welcome diversion on Saturday mornings after a long week of work. The only days that all letter carriers have off together are Sundays and holidays, so our Saturdays are like everyone else’s Fridays, and they tend to be a little more festive. If someone wants to treat the station to rolls or cake for a birthday or anniversary, they do it on Saturday. With all the miles we walk each day, letter carriers are not timid about early morning calories.

  A few years ago I worked with Carla, a letter carrier who owned a lakeshore cabin a couple hours north of Minneapolis. During summer months she often wanted to spend weekends with her family at the lake, but her rotating schedule gave her a Saturday off only once every six weeks. So she devised her own little escape plan. After sending her husband and two children ahead to the cabin on Friday night, she came to work on Saturday morning with a large bag of fast-food breakfast burgers. She opened the bag and then set about sorting mail. Because we start our workday so early, people often skip breakfast for an extra snooze on the alarm. It didn’t take long for curious letter carriers to investigate the mouth-watering aromas.

  “What’s in the bag, Carla? Have any extras?”

  “Take a block off me and you can have one.”

  By nine o’clock she had given away most of her route, and by noon she was on the beach at the cabin with her family. Of course, the supervisors sanctioned none of this, but it was easy for fifteen or twenty letter carriers to absorb an extra block each, especially when the price was so right.

  ONE SUMMER, word got around our post office that a young woman living nearby liked to sunbathe topless in her yard. Like most other people, she had weekends off, so Saturday was a big tanning day for her. To get the best angle on the sun’s rays, she lay out in her side yard, almost in the path of her letter carrier. Not too many Saturdays went by before our supervisor addressed us on the PA system. “Listen up, everyone. We just received a complaint call. Last Saturday nine postal jeeps were spotted driving past a certain nearby house. That was nine jeeps before 12:00 noon.” He couldn’t help laughing along with the rest of us. “Just knock it off,” he concluded.

  IT’S A CHALLENGING JOB, with physical demands and the ever-present knowledge that all that mail has to be delivered every day regardless of the weather. A certain determined individualism is necessary for survival. People not physically up to the task don’t last very long. Several years ago, during a short stretch of time, five new letter carriers began working in our station. Before their ninety-day
probations were completed, two had been let go for not moving fast enough on the street and the other three had quit. I once saw a new substitute carrier standing in the middle of the workroom floor at the end of a long day, his face flushed red from exertion. He leaned forward to ease the ache in his back, his jacket open and his head and shoulders slouched in defeat. “I don’t know how you folks do this for thirty years,” he lamented. “I’ve been here thirty days, and I’m done.” He walked out the door, and we never saw him again.

  I work with a fellow who has two brothers delivering mail, and another’s father is a retired carrier. The mother of yet another co-worker runs sorting machines downtown. There are many more. In a way, I’ve felt like an outsider my entire career because, as far as I know, no one else in my family has ever worked for the United States Postal Service.

  The family connection seems to foster loyalty to the job. The uniform might play a small part in it, but more significant are the stories handed down by family members: tales of freak storms, crazy dogs, and the countless miles walked in a career. These carriers with a family history in the post office are the ones who keep telephone books handy to seek out correct addresses for misaddressed envelopes. They’re the ones who, after work and on their own time, bring stamps out to their elderly patrons or mail packages for them at the holidays.

  On our station wall is a black-and-white photograph of the letter carriers, clerks, and supervisors working out of our station half a century ago. In the back row is a smirking young man with wavy black hair at the beginning of his career. When I met Bob at the beginning of my own career, he was still smirking, but his hair had turned gray; he was a soon-to-be retired grandfather. More than thirty years older than I, he could still whip me on the tennis courts. He had the physical stamina and competitive spirit that is needed to wrestle a walking route under control every day, year after year.

  The job of delivering mail hasn’t changed much from the time of Bob’s career to mine, but a couple of facts can be extrapolated from that old photograph. For one thing, there were more carriers in the station then, which means there were more routes, which in turn suggests that the routes were shorter than they are today.

  The gray steel shelving in the photo is still in use today, and it’s identical to the shelving found in post offices across the country. I could transfer to Florida or Alaska, and I would be right at home in the workroom. These massive steel shelves are known as “cases.” Each unit has five tiers of pigeonholes, with one slot for each address; three units per route are arranged in a U-shape, allowing the carrier to stand in the center and have access to all the slots. “Casing mail” is the term we use for sorting into these shelves.

  Most of today’s mail is transported by air. All the commercial airlines carry mail, even on Sundays. That’s the reason that we handle nearly twice as much mail on Mondays. Throw in a Monday holiday, and Tuesday mornings greet us with three days’ worth of mail.

  Carriers arrive for work even earlier than usual the day after a holiday. Dispatches of mail have been arriving at the station since the middle of the night. Many times, one or two dispatches will have arrived during the holiday. Mail handlers and clerks disperse the mail to the routes. The familiar white usps tubs filled with “flats”—magazines and catalogs—as well as plastic trays of letters are stacked hip-high around the cases.

  We dig into it, and a silence borne of concentration and anxiety settles over the workroom floor. The Postal Service has established minimum standards for casing mail, but working four or even five times standard on heavy days can feel like a losing battle. Packages pile up, and mail is stacked everywhere. The dock doors bang open and groans erupt: more incoming mail.

  Carriers rock from foot to foot while shoving mail into cases. Hunched shoulders and wired-tight postures reflect the tension. A morning radio talk show drones in the background, while some carriers isolate themselves in their own headphones. Occasionally, a stack of tubs tumbles over, spilling flats across the floor. The nearest carriers turn to look to make sure the avalanche hit no one, and then quickly resume the task of casing. Everyone is aware of the morning ticking away. In our station, we have an unwritten rule that no one should mention the time out loud, as that only intensifies the anxiety. And all this mail still has to be delivered today.

  Eventually, the first carriers begin leaving for the street, and an earnest panic sets in on those still casing. There’s the fear of not being able to get the job done, of having to call in to the supervisor to send help out to finish the route. Worst of all is the possibility of having to find addresses in the dark. At some point in their careers, all letter carriers have had the experience of stumbling around in the dark trying to read addresses by streetlight, especially during the early winter evenings.

  If this sounds like a nightmare, it is. Our morning routine is the backdrop for many carriers’ bad dreams. After hearing my descriptions of these early morning trials, my wife began having sympathetic nightmares for me. She has the details down, too. In her dream, which varies little from the ones my friends at work have described, she tries frantically to put letters in the case, but she can’t fit them in the slot. She discards letters and grabs new ones, while carriers around her leave for the street. Eventually, she’s the only one left, and she still hasn’t put a single letter in the case. In another version she pulls up to a corner with a jeep full of mail. Opening the back door, she finds trays of mail stacked to the roof. She doesn’t know where to begin, and it’s getting dark out. (In letter-carrier nightmares, it’s always getting dark out.) Frantically running up to houses, she finds that none of the addresses match those on the mail. She finally wakes herself up with her fitful tossing and turning.

  When casing mail, we encounter a steady stream of undeliverable letters. These consist of misaddressed envelopes and mail to be forwarded or put on vacation hold. It might be mail with a good address but an unknown name, or a letter to someone who moved years ago. There are a number of specific reasons why a piece of mail may be undeliverable, but the stack of letters, bundled together, is known as “skulch.” The regular carrier on the route is responsible for sorting through this stack every day, directing the individual pieces to the proper channels for processing.

  Skulch is a term that is unique to the post office. You won’t find it in the dictionary, but ask any letter carrier about skulch and you’ll get a response. I’ve wondered about the word for years; where did it come from, and who coined it? Bob, the retired letter carrier, once told me the term was in common use fifty years ago, and had been around for decades before that. It may be a funny sounding word, but skulch is a term we use every day in the post office, and it describes an important facet of a letter carrier’s job. Ask your carrier about skulch sometime. The fact that you even know the word will probably get a grin out of him, unless he’s just returned from vacation, in which case he probably has several bundles of it back at the station demanding his attention.

  Most post offices have one-way mirrors. These aren’t for spying on customers. Around the perimeter of the workroom is a hidden walkway, or crawlspace. Every ten or twelve feet, a one-way piece of glass is situated to give the observer, often a postal inspector, an unobstructed view of letter carriers working at their cases. To my knowledge, these spy ports are seldom used, although I have no way of knowing that. They’re intended for a time when a station receives complaints regarding stolen mail, or pilfered letters like birthday cards, that may contain cash. An inspector can watch a suspected carrier casing mail to see if anything goes into a pocket.

  I’ve heard of letter carriers getting fired for stealing, and these one-way mirrors probably play a role in proving guilt. But I’ve never worked with a letter carrier who exhibited anything less than complete respect for the mail. Besides, our jobs, benefits, and pensions are too important to risk. That’s why a dollar bill lying on the workroom floor will still be there days later. No one wa
nts to be seen putting cash in his or her pocket. You never know who may be watching.

  The number of college-educated letter carriers I work with is amazing. Steve has a degree in English literature, while Tim was an economics major and earned a master’s degree in philosophy. Jeff taught elementary school his first year out of college. After realizing that teaching wasn’t the career for him, he followed his father into the letter-carrying profession.

  “I had no intention of staying here for thirty years,” Jeff confided one morning as we cased mail, our easy rhythm of throwing letters providing Jeff a platform for storytelling. “I’d grown up listening to my dad’s horror stories about the job. He grumbled all the time about working Saturdays, and he hated getting up so early. Hell, I hate it, too,” he added with a self-mocking shake of the head. “My dad came home every night stiff and sore from trudging through the snow. I should have known better. Besides, I really didn’t want to work with my dad, or hang around with his old work buddies. I was still young, I had a college education, and I thought I should be doing more.”

  I waited for him to continue, and when he didn’t, I had to prod him. “But here you are. What made you decide to stay?”

  “I don’t think I ever consciously made that decision,” Jeff said. “It was meant to be a temporary stopover, a way to make an income until I figured out what I wanted to do. There were college loans to pay. I needed a job.”

  That made sense. I know many carriers who started out planning to stay only a couple of years. Before long, they got enough seniority to bid on their own route and developed a comfortable routine. Life itself has a way of making some of these decisions for us. There’s marriage, and children. Soon you can’t afford to try something different, or you simply lose your nerve.

  “I had a good friend back in those days,” he continued. “We’d been roommates in college. We talked about my dilemma for hours on end. He helped me realize that I wasn’t really wasting my college education. A good education is never wasted, because it becomes a part of who you are. But even more important, I came to understand that blue-collar work could be as satisfying as any job. It’s what you bring to it, and the effort you put out, that’s important.”