by Gregory P. Mac

Created on: May 02, 2008

"Nobody ever notices postmen somehow." I always liked that quote from G.K.Chesterton's "Father Brown" series. In "The Invisible Man", the detective priest solves a murder after multiple witnesses deny seeing anyone enter a home where a murder was committed. They weren't lying. They just weren't considering the mailman as a possibility. Little did I know when I read this story in Junior High School that someday I would experience this invisibility myself.

I was a few years out of college when, struggling to find a job in my chosen field, I took the postal exam and hired in as a mail carrier. After several incidents of nonrecognition by people I had spoken to only hours prior, because then I was wearing "street clothes" instead of a uniform, I realized there was something to this whole invisibility thing. But there was always one group that never failed to notice me on the job - the family dog. It was nearly impossible to deliver mail without inciting a cacophony of howls, whines and barks.

The Post Office supplies each carrier with pepper spray as a defense against aggressive canine encounters. One day, early in my career, I surprised a large German Shepherd, or more accurately, we surprised each other. I whipped out that pepper spray like Marshall Dillon gunning down an outlaw. When the smoke cleared, I had allayed the mighty beast, but due to a slight miscalculation of wind direction, my left eye was aflame with pepper spray. As the dog and I stood only feet apart and vainly tried to rub our eyes, I knew this wasn't the solution for me.

As time went on, I finally got a route of my own. It was a walking route in a middle class neighborhood. I learned to stand my ground to the dogs and to create confusion by shouting commands if they charged. All was well enough that I never bothered to carry spray any more. I had no dog problems, save for one. Ginger lived at the end of a street, my last delivery before I "deadheaded" back to my truck. She wasn't large, maybe ten pounds of fur and snarl, but she did not know surrender. Nearly every warm day, she stood in front of her house, guarding it, and consequently the mailbox, as if it were Fort Knox. Invariably she greeted me with snarls and rapid fire barking.

The accepted procedure in this case would be to bring the mail back and mark it "dog out." The owner would then have to go the the post office to get the mail. But I knew the owner was a the proverbial little old lady, a widow who lived alone. Ginger was her pride and joy. I didn't have the heart to make her go pick up her mail. Besides, I wasn't going to admit defeat to a ten pound ball of fur. So, each day Ginger was out, we would do our own pas de deux, neither taking eyes off the other, circling until I had placed the mail in the box and retreated. Then one day, I decided to try a new tactic. I borrowed a dog biscuit from a fellow carrier. When I tossed it to Ginger, she eyed it suspiciously, as if maybe I was trying to poison her. I couldn't blame her; it had briefly crossed my mind. But, after I walked away, I turned back for a look, and there she was, nibbling cautiously at the treat!

Every day after that, I took Ginger a treat. It didn't happen right away, but it wasn't terribly long before she was greeting me with a full body wag and I was taking time to scratch her belly. We were friends. I've applied this technique to other areas in my life. If someone extends a single finger to me in traffic, I try to react with all five fingers and a smile. I wonder sometimes if we don't each, as individuals and as societies, reach too quickly for our pepper spray when we'd be better served to carry a pocket full of dog biscuits.

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