Raymond Carver delivers, even when UPS doesn't

I love the point in Raymond Carver's short story "Cathedral" when the blind man explains what little he knows about cathedrals: "I know they took hundreds of workers fifty or a hundred years to build....The men who began their life's work on them, they never lived to see the completion of their work. In that sense, bub, they're no different from the rest of us, right?"

But in this case he's not right, because the "bub" he's addressing devotes his life to--well, nothing much. He hates his job, he avoids his wife, he has no friends, and his chief pastimes are drinking and smoking weed. He's involved in nothing that arouses any sense of passion or purpose, and he appears to be building nothing that will outlive him--which is why it's amazing when, at the end of the story, he and the blind man join forces to "build" a cathedral. It's a small step--a minuscule moment of connection and epiphany--but it's the only point in the story when our nameless narrator seems anything other than irrelevant.

I thought of this guy this morning as I devoted an absurd amount of time trying to connect with someone--anyone--at UPS. I knew before I started that this would be a frustrating quest  resulting only in vague promises to do better next time, but somehow I felt driven to dedicate a chunk of my life to this exercise in futility.

Here's what happened: All day yesterday our area was assaulted by severe weather, with a dire forecast calling for high winds, rain, hail, flooding, and even possible tornadoes. What kind of idiot leaves a small cardboard box with a book in it on the grass next to the driveway in those conditions? Our UPS driver, that's who. 

None of us saw the box when we drove up the driveway yesterday (because that's not a place where a box belongs), but my husband found it early this morning when he walked down the driveway to see whether our bridge was under water. (It wasn't--yet. But the river is still rising and backing up into our creek, so who knows whether I'll be able to get home later?)

The soggy box was crawling with pillbugs but the book was mostly undamaged. Still, when I spend my hard-earned cash on a hardback book of poetry, I don't expect curly, rain-damaged pages or pillbugs, so I resolved to file a complaint with UPS.

We used to have a really great UPS driver who could be relied on to drive the truck all the way up the driveway, leave packages safely on the front porch, and even toss our dog a treat. But he retired. Our current UPS driver (or drivers? Who knows?) sometimes leaves packages on the porch but sometimes leaves them in the drainage ditch next to the mailbox, in a bag tied to our bridge, on the ground next to the garage, or, one time, on a mound of plant matter next to the bridge on a day when snow was falling, covering the package so that we didn't find it for three weeks.

I explained all this to the Customer Service rep I finally connected with at UPS this morning, and he said yes, he could see from his records that we've had problems with packages being delivered to inappropriate places, but he promised to notify the local UPS people and encourage them to behave themselves. He must have made an impact because the local supervisor called and tried to find an excuse for the driver's unwillingness to put the package on the porch: "Do you have any mean dogs that might have scared him? How about low-hanging branches?" If I tell them about the angry dragon living in the garage, will they stop delivering packages there?

I feel for the UPS driver who has to make an unceasing round of deliveries without ever unwrapping the wonders contained within those boxes. Is he building something that will outlast him? He may never know. What I know is that the time I spent on the phone this morning accomplished nothing but made me feel as if I'd taken a stand for doing good work and making it matter. Maybe I'm not building any cathedrals today, but at least I'm trying to leave a mark.