When a neighborhood loves their mail carrier

Why does it feel so novel to be cared for by a stranger?

Top notes:

Hey! Here’s a bonus issue (for everybody! not just paid subscribers!).

This essay isn’t too complicated. It’s about how having a really nice mail carrier rules. It’s also about being grateful for human connection, and there’s really no way to say this without sounding like the corniest human being on the planet, but I’m wildly grateful for all of you, in all the ways you show up here: Readers, Sharers, Subscribers, Barnraisers Cohort Joiners, Commenters, Emailers, Slightly Guilty Deleters, Save For Later-ers, Lurkers, Book Pre-Orderers and Thank You Gift Receivers (a quick update on that front: you all have kept The Right Kind of White on the bookshop.org bestsellers list for multiple weeks, which is bananas). Some of you are long-time friends. Many others I met through this newsletter. The vast majority are folks near and far whose stories I don’t know (yet?). In all cases, if there’s anything I can ever do to show up for you too, please don’t hesitate.

I should make this extremely clear, lest I be accused of stealing valor: Mailman Mike has never actually been my mail carrier. My house is a few blocks off the western border of his route. I’m 100% certain that Mike doesn’t know my name. The fact that I know his doesn’t make me special. Everybody in our neighborhood knows his name. He’s Mailman Mike.

You want to know what it’s like to have Mailman Mike deliver mail in the vicinity of your house? It’s the absolute best. Let’s say you're walking on one end of a long block and Mike is coming up the other end. Do you know what Mike does? He grins ear-to-ear, as if seeing you is the singular highlight of his day. It’s so powerful that (if you’re me), you temporarily forget that Mike doesn’t actually know you. You convince yourself that this is as special of an experience for him as it is for you. And the thing is, it might be, even if he has already flashed that same empire-toppling grin to hundreds of other people that day.

The smile hits first. And then, just as you’re already fully glowing, Mike follows it up with an ebullient, full-armed wave. You immediately wave back. It doesn’t matter whether you’re typically too cool for waving. You wave back hard, like one of those giant inflatable bendy guys outside of used car lots. In an instant, you’re a glorious mess of flailing limbs and temporarily forgotten inhibitions. “Look at us! Me and Mike! Waving to each other! Our special thing!”

And that’s just the treatment you receive if you’re too far away for a conversation. If your paths cross more directly, you get the Platinum Mailman Mike Experience. Mike will pause his route, ask you how you’re doing, and sound like he truly means it. More smiles. Belly laughs. Kind, empathetic eyes. And most of all: no indication that he’s already done this a hundred times today.

That’s all there is to it, really. That’s the Mailman Mike thing. He smiles genuinely, waves genuinely, and converses genuinely. He does this to literally everybody, including nondescript, replacement-level neighborhood oafs like myself Some folks know him much more intimately. Kids get particular attention. But everybody gets to feel as if their relationship to Mike is special, because that’s his whole deal. He competently delivers the mail while doing three things that aren’t technically that hard to do.

If you’re wondering if you’re missing something here, you’re not. Mike Boothe is an extremely friendly mail carrier. I hesitate to say “that’s all” but truly, that’s all. Mike is a living, breathing magic trick, but he’s also, quite literally, just a guy. As far as I know, he has never rescued nursing home residents from a fire, nor lifted a city bus out of a sinkhole. He loves and delights in children, but he doesn’t make them balloon animals or cart around a snow-cone machine or anything like that.

So why then, has an entire neighborhood fallen over itself to celebrate Mike’s retirement? Why are our streets resplendent with homemade tributes— signs and banners around every corner— all for a single mail carrier? Why are there not one but two different public parties this weekend in his honor (with many more private dinners on offer as well)? Why have there been multiple news stories and an official ceremony at City Hall?

Mike, for one, seems genuinely unable to explain it. As he put it in his address to our city’s Common Council, “I’m just a guy at work trying to have a good time every day. I really don’t think I deserve this. We’ve got a lot of good teachers, a lot of good bus drivers, a lot of good crossing guards.” And while that sounds like the kind of perfunctory aw-shucks statement you’re supposed to make when receiving a giant plaque with an intensely calligraphed “PROCLAMATION” across the top, I for one believe him.

Mike’s speech to the council doesn’t end there. It really does sound like he’s trying to make sense of why he’s become such a hyper-local celebrity. He admits that the whole Mailman Mike experience isn’t an accident. Part of it is selfish. If he has to go to work everyday, he might as well do it in a way that fills up rather than drains his energy. I get that. If you give a thousand effusive waves in a day, you get a thousand effusive waves back. The energetic math checks out.

Eventually, though, Mike gets to his go-to explanation. I’ve heard this from him before. He’s shared it when he’s had to sheepishly humor local news interviewers asking him well-meaning but impossible questions (“people seem to love you, what’s up with that?”). He talks about how he’s aware that children are watching him, that they think he’s cool, so he feels that his long-term gift is to model for those kids what “being cool” and being a member of a community is all about.

There’s a theory of change there, a conviction that people who share a space, even in the most superficial of moments, impact one another. How you choose to operate in that shared space doesn’t just make people feel better or worse, it sends a broader message about that community’s identity, about what matters to it, about who matters to it.

To be clear, Mike isn’t just mouthing saccharine chicken-soup-for-the-soul-isms like “one smile can change the world” nor is he pretending that life is not full of pain and disappointment (one thing that has drawn some of Mike’s closest neighborhood friends to him has been his openness to sharing the lower moments in his life). Mike isn’t smiling because he’s naive. He’s realized that he’s an interconnected piece of something bigger than himself, and so he acts accordingly.

There are a few more layers worth acknowledging here. The first is that Mike is Black and many (though not all) of the neighbors who are most effusive in their love for him are White.¹ I have no doubt that, for at least some of us White neighbors, Mike has served as the much coveted and tokenized “Black friend,” particularly in a city as haunted by segregation as ours. But it does feel a bit insulting to Mike Boothe’s clear intentionality to chalk up the entirety of Mailman Mike Fever to White liberalism’s desire for tacit acceptance by Blackness. Let’s be clear: while there are always other layers at play, Mike is loved deeply because Mike is deliberate and thoughtful about showing love.

The layer that feels even more instructive, though, is the fact that Mike Boothe isn’t just an amiable neighborhood character. He is a federal government employee, arguably the most visible government employee in a densely populated chunk of the city. And that matters. Ours is a country whose government employees often fall into two categories. There are those (police in particular) whose jobs are implicitly or explicitly antagonistic to communities, particularly communities of color. And then there are so many others, professions that are, at their root, about community care (mail carriers, teachers, librarians, sanitation workers, social security staffers, etc.), but who have suffered through forty-plus years of a Reagan-initiated project to both slash their budgets and to impugn their competency (“starve the beast,” “the most terrifying words in the English language are “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” and all that attendant nonsense).

This, too, informs Mailman Mike’s calculus. In one of those myriad “no seriously, what’s your deal?” interviews, Mike talks about how he knows he has to subvert stereotypes about the USPS. He says something to the effect of “we all know what people mean when they say ‘going postal.’” And he’s right. The campaign to invalidate public service has been far reaching and insidious. Sometimes smiles aren’t just smiles, they’re counter-points.

Mike isn’t the only civil servant in our community doing tireless, empathetic work on a day-to-day basis. Our neighborhood is full of teachers, paraprofessionals, county parks employees and road crew members. They too see their work as an act of care. But in a country where the best-resourced government employees carry guns and badges, it’s notable that a neighborhood’s single greatest point of pride is that we have the kindest mail carrier. That’s a radical break from the broken social contract that we are too often offered. It is a reminder that this is how it should be. We should be a country that makes it easier for public servants to envelop our communities in love and care. And their work (and how it makes us feel) should be what makes us proudest to be from a place.

There’s an argument to be made that the effusiveness with which our neighborhood loves Mailman Mike says more about us than it does about him. And while I don’t want to take anything away from Mike— truly, his ability to change the trajectory of other people’s days is just magical— there’s a lot of truth there. I mean, there is a real “thirsty desert travelers sprinting to the oasis” vibe in how deeply an entire neighborhood craves Mike’s waves and smiles. We are starved for connection. We are too used to relationships as means to an end, commerce as a substitute for community, and the constant exhaustion that comes from running a rugged individualist race against each other. And by “we,” I don’t mean just me and my neighbors. I mean all of us. It shouldn’t be notable that a mail carrier is kind, because our days should be full of both giving and receiving compassion and delight. But that isn’t the world we live in yet. So yes, let’s celebrate the Mikes of the world. Let’s erect a million signs and host a thousand block parties.

The simple (and incorrect) lesson to take from Mailman Mike’s retirement would be that we should all just smile more at strangers (even writing that sentence as a counter-example no doubt spurred a thousand patriarchy-weary “noooooooos” from women reading this piece). But it’s not just about the grins.

Mike didn’t just make a decision to smile and wave for eight hours a day. He made a decision to treat everybody he encountered as the miracles that they truly are. He made a decision to remember that, if he were bound in a web with other human beings, then there is both a gift and responsibility to that interconnection.

At some point in his last twenty years on the job, Mike asked himself how he could make other people know that he was grateful to share space with them, and when he had his personal answer, that’s what he did. Day in and day out. And that does deserve a whole neighborhood’s worth of signs. But it shouldn’t be special. There is a version of the Mailman Mike treatment available to all of us. And whatever that means for us, I hope we give it a try. After all, if there’s one thing I’ve learned from my neighbors this week, it’s the intensity with which we crave each other’s shared intentionality, delight, and recognition of what an incomprehensibly profound gift it is to be here together.

End notes:

This is normally where I share a song of the week, but I already did that on Monday, so instead I want to use this space to note that, for me at least, it isn’t just Mike. I love the entire U.S. Postal Service so much. I love my actual carriers (they too are kind and competent, even if they haven’t had their routes as long as Mike), I love the super fun grandmas who work at my local post office, and I love that, for a very small amount of money, I can put a letter in a blue box in Milwaukee and a few days later it can arrive in Alaska. Most of all, though, I’m proud to be the kid brother to a truly exceptional carrier in Bowling Green, OH,. My brother Eric has a similar relationship to the folks on his route as Mike does to my neighborhood. He’s also a member of the mighty APWU Local 170 out of Toledo, one of the most legendary postal unions in the country.

That’s just to say, the USPS rules, as do so many public employees. Let a thousand block parties bloom!

You know what? That does call for another song of the week! Let’s do my favorite song celebrating both public employees, the art of putting stamps on letters, and Boston’s finest brutalist architecture. The floor is yours, Modern Lovers. We DO have to rocka rocka rocka nonstop tonight… at the Government Center.

As always, the Song of the Week playlist, is on both Apple Music and Spotify.

1. The way I explain the demographics of my neighborhood is that White Milwaukeeans describe it as “diverse” and Black and Brown Milwaukeeans describe it as “White” and neither is fully wrong.