By Anne Semmes
For those devotees of Greenwich postal clerk Caesar Carde located in his downtown Greenwich Post Office on Amogerone Crossway, Carde’s days are numbered. June 30 is his retirement day after nearly 37 years. That day will be a tough one for Carde as well. He’s going to miss, “Dealing with the customers, building a relationship, having conversations with them, and often giving them some life advice,” he shares. And being a generational window clerk, at age 64 and a half, he’ll miss that pleasure of, “growing young with the young customers.”
Customer service was definitely Carde’s calling. Getting out of the Army, having served two tours in Korea with intense traveling – “I was in nuclear weapons, and we had no idea where we were because of the nature of the classification – Carde wanted to return to school to continue his education. But with a growing family, he took that job posted by the Post Office thinking it was temporary. And then, “I started to enjoy it,” he tells.
Carde has customer stories that would fill a book. There’s that one on Christmas Eve when he was posted at the Glenville Post office decades ago. “All the employees had left for the day because this was expected to be a very slow day.” About to close the doors and turn on the alarm, the phone rang. “It was someone mumbling, and I couldn’t understand him.” About to hang up, he hears “a lady saying please don’t hang up. This is not a prank call! We are visiting in Greenwich…My husband dropped his teeth inside the Pemberwick mailbox!”
Carde to the rescue. The limousine arrives. “This big, big guy gets out of the limousine asking me to take them to the mailbox…Sure enough his dentures are there. He puts them on.” Returning Carde to his office the big guy “pulls out some money and I say I don’t want it.” Carde suggests instead, “Wherever you’re going look for somebody that may need it more than I do. So, this guy gives me the biggest bear hug – I stopped breathing for about 10 seconds. He let me go and gave me a kiss on the cheek but with saliva as his dentures weren’t on properly. So, there’s saliva all over me as they’re waving goodbye.”
He follows up with another holiday story. “I see this young lady waiting in line, and I don’t recognize her. It was noticeable she wanted to deal with me. She goes, you remember me. I said no, I’m sorry.” She tells Carde her father Victor was one of his customers, and yes he does recall her and her twin sister visiting when they were little kids. But there was something Carde did that impacted her life she tells and would he “please step over the counter” so she could talk to him. Carde “didn’t know what to expect.”
She began, “One day around Christmas time, my dad told you he heard me telling my twin sister that Santa Claus was not real. So, you and Daddy made up a story and Daddy took me by myself to the post office. Then you took me in the back of the post office, and you told me Santa Claus was real, that I had to believe otherwise I won’t get any gifts.” “Caesar,” she said, “I believed that story until I was in college. Every Christmas I thought about you. And I said if I ever saw you I would slap you!”
“So, she took her gentle, nice, soft hand and gently tap me on my cheek. Then she says you’ve already been slapped so let me give you a big hug because of the slapping.”
But it’s his last story that really rocks. “A customer walks in – I’ve seen him before, but I’ve never had a conversation with him. He always struck me as very cheerful. But Carde finds out differently. “I said that’s a shame you feel that way – you ought to find some way of getting over it and try to feel good.” “Why should I feel good,” was the response. So, Carde gets an idea, retrieves a paper bag from the post office, and takes his non-cheerful customer aside and promptly puts the paper bag over his head. “I would never do that again,” says Carde, “But I took the liberty and I said to him turn around a couple of times. Now leave the bag on and walk out the door – see if you could do it.” His groping customer then took off the paper bag and Carde told him, “The one thing you should be grateful for is your sight – and he said thank you and walked away which I thought was a little disappointing. A few days later his wife walked in with a smile and said, “Caesar, you beat my husband up without touching him.”
So, what is Carde looking forward to in his retirement? Well, there’s that fifth grandchild on the way, maybe some volunteer time, “perhaps be more active in church.” And certainly, working out the logistics of a 90-day trip with his wife and a couple backpacks next January, through South America. “So, we fly from JFK to Santiago, Chile,” and then it’s off to Argentina, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia and Ecuador. “We want to spend two or three weeks in each country and then back to the United States.”
So, what will he miss most in his retirement?
“The daily contact,” he says, “I have customers that just walk in if they happen to be in the area just to say hi. This is very meaningful to me, when you can manage at a personal level. It may not be a personal relationship where you get to hang out with those people, but you know, it’s nice to be acknowledged. It doesn’t even feel like work, it’s more like going somewhere that I belong – it’s almost like going to church.”
