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Letter carrier Jim Caldwell

A Letter Anyone Can Read

Try to keep up with Jim Caldwell as he strides from house to house in the 2300 block of W. Pleasant St. He knows just the pace it takes to deliver the mail for Route 18 in west Davenport.

Fellow letter carrier and St. Paul member Terry Timmerman once told him, “Look kid, it’s a marathon not a sprint.”

Jim’s steady marathon keeps him looping out on foot from his mail vehicle, covering 587 possible stops over 10 miles of terrain. It’s true what they say. Nothing stops this guy. He blows through two pairs of shoes in a season. August rains soak him to the skin. Summer sun means a lavish slathering of Coppertone SPF 30 on ears and neck. Even his hair gets in on the act, growing visor-like to shade his forehead.

Weather can’t deter this “mailman,” the word Jim actually prefers after 19 years on the job. “I get sweaty around lightening,” he says. “The worst day I can remember, it was the coldest I’ve ever been. 20 below plus a nice stiff north wind. You finger the mail with your mittens on. Those mail trucks don’t get warm.” In the foulest of weather, Jim dons a crown cap insulated with rabbit fur. “The greatest thing about delivering the mail is the cool headgear,” he quips.

Dogs have sent this letter carrier scrambling over fences, leaping back from open screen doors, or skidding across ice.

Jim Caldwell delivers and collects the mail. He probably has never given much thought to how his life connects with a letter the Apostle Paul wrote some 2,000 years ago. Who delivered it, we don’t know. These are Paul’s words, translated into today’s vernacular:

Your very lives are a letter that anyone can read by just looking at you. Christ himself wrote it— not with ink, but with God’s living Spirit; not chiseled into stone, but carved into human lives — and we publish it. (2 Corinthians 3:3)

That makes sense to Jim. Trail along on Pleasant Street with him on his route. He greets a man out for a walk. Judy, a St. Paul member, lives in this house, he says. Across the street lives her father Ernie with the birdhouses dangling from a tree. “He has wrens,” Jim says.

Jim just clicks with people along the way. Some like to kid with him or slip him cookies. This time of year, residents load him up with tomatoes and zucchini. At a rough patch in Jim’s life, one fellow fixed his air conditioner, another gave him a couple of chairs.

Jim’s very life is a letter that anyone can read, just by looking at him in his USPS regulation blue garb.

Barcodes direct much of the daily mail into tubs by route. Then Jim sorts the mail manually. He “puts the mail up” by street address into cases, takes care of the vacation holds, “then I go out to meet and greet. I look forward to seeing my favorite people,” he says. “We’re all in this together.”

One day, in the middle of his bitter divorce, Jim was “walking down High Street crying, thinking about what was coming down. A woman saw me and said, ‘I think what you need are some cookies.’” On he trudged, sugar cookies in hand, the load of his mailbag lightened by the sweetness of human kindness.

In that rocky time, Jim found his way to church. The ninth of 10 children, Jim hadn’t grown up with much more than Christmas and Easter. But brother Paul told him he needed church in his life. “I was on my knees praying,” Jim recalls. “Faith has helped ground me and get me through the week.”

The true joy of Jim’s life is his 14-year-old nephew Justin Wheeler, the son of his widowed sister Judy. Jim has taken Justin under his wing, serving as a stand-in dad of sorts. These two are “cut from the same bolt of cloth.” They roast a mean chicken together, go biking, tackle projects, share books, go to church.

Jim Caldwell knows city streets. He can find Schuetzen Lane off Waverly Road. He can calculate quickly how long it takes to flip open the mailboxes on Pine and Cedar Streets.

But more than that, he knows people. The folks he meets are messages of kindness to him. And for nephew Justin and the woman who waves at the window on Jim’s march along Dover Court, his very life is a letter anyone can read by just looking at him.

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"Yes, this is how God loved the world: He gave his only child; so that all people with faith in him can escape destruction and live a full life, now and forever." ~John 3:16