Our small town has just
suffered a profound loss: the departure of our treasured UPS
deliveryman.
Like Santa Claus, Tony always brought us
treasures. The regular mail might bring bills or junk, but
Tony’s brown truck always meant a package. Along with
telephone, television and Internet, Tony was our link to the
outside world. But while most such links are technological, Tony
was the link with the human face. He was the smiling
personification of a global economy. That made him someone
important in town, a guy that everybody knew, a shared currency
even more ubiquitous than Paris Hilton.
Though I speak of
him in the past tense, he’s still alive and happy. He took a
promotion, to a shorter route closer to his home. But his departure
comes as a blow around here. He’s been such a part of our
community that it’s hard for us to realize he even has a home
somewhere else.
At about 2,000 residents, our town is
just big enough that you don’t wave at absolutely everybody
who drives past. You want to make sure you recognize them first.
But everybody recognized Tony, and vice versa. A local paper
interviewed him at his departure, and he tried to reassure us:
“I’ll still wave if I see you.”
It’s not just
his face we’ll miss; it’s his knowledge of the
community. With 13 years delivering packages in the same town, he
knew our intimate likes and dislikes. He knew where to deliver
without a signature. He knew who preferred packages at the front
vs. the back door.
He even knew P.O. box numbers. Our
town is so small that the Postal Service doesn’t offer home
delivery — we all go to the post office to get mail out of a
P.O. box. (It’s a great community ritual, but also job
security for Tony: We prefer big packages home-delivered by UPS, so
we don’t have to lug them home from the post office.) Yet
even for packages addressed just to a name and P.O. box, Tony could
consult a delivery-address database in his head. His skills were so
great that I considered suggesting a change to one of the
company’s oft-uttered policies: “UPS does not deliver to post
office boxes — except in Tony’s territory.”
I
even got a sense that Tony knew things about our lives: When I was
getting lots of official-looking documents, that meant I must be
nearing a deadline; when someone else was getting lots of toys, he
or she must have just gotten a raise. My wife and I should have
invited him to our wedding, which was a symbolic ritual only
slightly greater than the first package he delivered to her new
name and address.
And the thing about Tony was that he
was so friendly and accommodating. One day, he was delivering a
package to a friend of mine while I was visiting. When he saw me,
he said, “I’ve got something for you in the truck. Do you
want it now?” He’d deliver other packages to people walking
down the street, or ask if they’d be home in half an hour.
Tony even gave some customers his cell phone number
(though he later admitted regretting it). In the middle of the day
he’d get calls on his cell: “Can you meet me at
such-and-such?”
Sharing community ritual is one of the
benefits of small-town life. We may not have many restaurants to
choose from, but our lives are tightly interwoven. In the city, a
UPS driver might be a dependable presence and even an admirable
character, but if you described him to friends at a Friday night
party, they would recognize only the type. “Yeah, I like my UPS
driver too.” In a small town, it’s: “Oh, Tony! Isn’t he
great!”
I suppose there could be bad UPS drivers too. We
would share those stories as well, and wouldn’t enjoy the
experience. That’s part of why we’re so sad to lose
Tony.
But I’m encouraged about the future. I was
walking down the street last week and saw Tony’s replacement
knocking on a friend’s door. “I think she’s out of
town,” I called out to him.
He asked back, “This is the
woman who has the café, right?” I nodded. “The café was
closed,” he explained, “so I figured she’d want her package
at home.”
John Clayton is a contributor to
Writers on the Range, a service of High Country
News in Paonia, Colorado (hcn.org). He lives and writes
in Red Lodge, Montana.
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