There’s not much left on my personal bucket list. That’s especially true when the dreamiest, yet most implausible items (e. g., hitting a homer against baseball’s Evil Empire in Yankee Stadium) are subtracted. But one hope, after so many decades, still dances tantalizingly on my horizon: living to see a king of England named after … Continue reading For My King Chuck Hopes, “The Crown” Is A Royal Pain
One of the advantages of age is finding old jokes one has forgotten about, so they’re new again. Like these Quaker gems that just turned up: The Clerk had just worked through an extended monthly business meeting, where unified decisions were hard to come by. After a long silent pause, she glanced down at the … Continue reading Transitional Quaker humor: Some New Queries
< one > Chekhov: “Any idiot can face a crisis; it is this day-to-day living that wears you out.” Sometime around the late 1980s, I started having two recurring nightmares: One, I’m maybe at home, or out somewhere, when the sky darkens and a dull roar starts up. It’s a tornado, bearing down on right … Continue reading Karmic Collision IV: Like a (Kidney) Stone
Post Office work is more than drudgery. It’s honest, productive work, an integral part of what keeps our society going. I kept reminding myself of that. But I often wondered: do many children in the United States daydream about growing up and getting a job as a mail handler? I doubt it. Maybe a few … Continue reading Karmic Collision III: Living My Double Life
[Note: This is the second part of a Dog Days series on how early civil rights work and later years in the Postal Service came together for me. The first installment is here.] <one> For a mail handler, the mail stream is much more like a moving body of water. A lot of it came … Continue reading Karmic Collision-II: Lab Rats and the Road Not Taken