The first thing Don Lorenzetti, a recently retired Truckee postal worker, wanted to know was why. “You’re interviewing me for what?” Behind him, a wooden sign on the mantel read “today is a good day for a good day.”
I had spent enough time in our local post office watching humans somehow trusted with car keys approach the counter as if the person behind it had cut them off in traffic and given them the finger. Missing package. Wrong key. Long line. Lost yellow slips. Name calling. Voices raised. Imagine that. Adults.
I got curious about the people expected to deal with all that. Don, meanwhile, couldn’t understand why anyone would be curious about him.
Don became a postal worker in 1992 by accident. He was 22, recently out of the Navy, going to school and considering federal law enforcement. Someone told him the Truckee Post Office needed temporary Christmas help for 90 days.
He took it. Then they offered another 90. Then rural delivery opened, and it was possible to make it work around his school schedule. Thirty-three years later, he retired.
We like to imagine our lives being built through giant decisions. A purpose. A five-year plan. A beautiful vision board. Sometimes a whole career begins because someone says, “You want to work Christmas?”
As a rural carrier, he was largely responsible for his own day. Get there early. Sort the mail. Understand the volume.
He managed the same Tahoe Donner route from roughly 1997 until his retirement this past May. He had opportunities to switch, but “I got so comfortable in my route,” Don said, as if that explained everything.
Nearly everything around that route changed. Postmasters came and went. Truckee grew from four rural routes to 13. Letters became emails. Parcels became the job. Amazon took over. Presidents changed. The metal boxes, somehow, mostly did not. Neither did Don.
Turns out, what’s inside those metal boxes tells on us.
A postal carrier knows who got a speeding ticket. Who might be overdrawn. Who is sick. Who turned the family home into a rental. Back in the day, Don knew who subscribed to Playboy and Penthouse — an extraordinary amount of personal information to entrust to a man driving a government vehicle.
He watched babies become college graduates by way of envelopes. Other people’s lives became a kind of clock.
Maybe seeing that much of other people’s lives strips away illusion. The wealthy and the struggling. Republican and Democrat. Young and old. The person who seemed to have everything together and the person who clearly did not. Don said he eventually realized everyone worries about the same things. Family. Money. Health. Life.
“We’re all human. We’re all the same,” he said. “We’re all here on this planet trying to do the best we can.”
Of course, there was considerably less benevolence when it snowed.
Truckee winters required Don to deliver mail in LLVs, Long Life Vehicles, a generous name for rear-wheel-drive metal boxes born in the 1980s with approximately the winter capability of an abandoned plastic patio chair. Somehow, Don drove one for 33 years without an accident, earning him a Million Mile jacket.
His winter nemesis was Northwoods Boulevard, especially when visitors came to Tahoe during major storms without chains and stopped halfway up the road, shocked to discover that mountain weather can be challenging.
Momentum was everything in an LLV. If Don had to stop behind someone spinning their tires, he might have to back down the hill and take another run at it. “We all need the tourists but sometimes we don’t want them.” A diplomatic statement from a man who admitted his mail truck would definitely accuse him of swearing.
His wife, Kelly, remembers snowstorms differently. While she and their son secretly hoped for a snow day, Don woke thinking about road conditions, the route, and whether he could get to work. She described him during some of those years as a “ball of stress.”
Retirement has apparently restored his love of snow through the healing power of somebody else having to drive in it. But retirement also surprised him. In the final two or three years, Don couldn’t wait to leave. Then leaving became real. He expected relief. He didn’t expect grief. The last month brought tears, sometimes right there on the route. This is notable because Don describes his emotional range of his younger years as approximately zero. Kelly says he has softened over the last few years. Don agrees.
At one point I asked what the job had given him that he never expected. He started with the low hanging fruit. Pension. Health care. Stability. Then he stopped downplaying it. “It gave me, I guess, our life, right? I mean, this house, my wife, my son, everything I have that’s in my life is what it’s given me.”
Ta-da! Not heroism. Not sacrifice. Not even service, really. A life.
Thirty-three years of getting up and going somewhere. Coming home early enough to pick up his son. Watching a town change. Cursing inside an LLV. Carrying packages. Accepting cookies. Watching children grow up and familiar faces grow older.
Said son is now a police officer in Reno. Kelly spent her career teaching. Don carried mail. Service, apparently, has a way of repeating itself in this family.
Near the end of our conversation, I asked Don what his route would say about him if it could talk.
He admitted it might call him grumpy. Then he went searching for another word. Something meaning a person who takes care of something entrusted to him. He thought it started with a c. Eventually, he settled for steward.
“A good steward to the route.”
Maybe the word he wanted was custodian.
Maybe it doesn’t matter. He’d already spent the afternoon explaining it.
When I asked what one final letter from him to Tahoe Donner would say, without blinking he said, “Thank you.” Immediately his eyes filled.
He signed up for Christmas help. Thirty-three years later, Don finally got to keep the rest of his day. A good day.
Not bad for a 90-day job.
~ Ennis Kamcili has changed careers, cities, styles, and opinions and still thinks a bio is asking too much. IG @ennis
