< 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
In my experience, the work of overcoming racism and its sordid history has many aspects, and can be pursued in many ways. Some are loud and disruptive. Others are calmly persuasive. Different strokes for different folks. Here I want to pay tribute to a current worker, a friend of mine, and fellow Quaker, Ron Osborne. … Continue reading Ongoing: The Everyday Work of Facing a Racist History
If I believed I was a prophet, I’d say that after three years of agony, a breakthrough in SAYMA’s logjam/paralysis is in sight. It will soon be a month since the summer representative meeting of Southern Appalachian Yearly Meeting & Association, or SAYMA. Held by Zoom on July 20, its major business item was the … Continue reading SAYMA: The Gravy Train Is Lurching toward a Stop