The second week of June a life-changing event took place. After four months at home due to a workplace injury, I returned to carrying mail.
One CommentAuthor: Patrick Dobson
Dr. Patrick Dobson is a work in progress until his termination. In the meantime, He is a writer, scholar, postman, and college professor living in Kansas City, MO.
The University of Nebraska Press published his travel memoirs, Canoeing the Great Plains: A Missouri River Summer in 2015 and Seldom Seen: A Journey into the Great Plains in 2009. Canoeing the Great Plains won the 2016 High Plains Book Award in Creative Nonfiction and the Thorpe Menn Literary Excellence Award. His essays and poems have been published in New Letters, daCunha, Kansas City Star, Garo, Wood Coin, and JONAHmagazine, and others.
Dobson earned a doctorate in American History and Literature at the University of Missouri-Kansas City in 2013. He has edited books, taught journalism, and been a union ironworker. He now teaches American History, Modern Latin American History, and Western Civilization at Johnson County Community College in Overland Park, KS.
He looks forward to hearing from you soon.
It’s been a long time since I sat down to write something besides an E-mail. Things have been busy and, on many levels, chaotic lately. Personal problems—relationships, work—have presented themselves. Often perplexed on how to proceed, I consulted with friends and family and increased my attendance at AA meetings. This bore great fruits. What surprised me throughout all this was my ability to meet these challenges as a mature, adult human being.
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The last two months have been one of the most painful of my life. Most of the time, I run around bumping into things. I take the day as it comes, waking in the morning with scarcely a thought to what the afternoon may hold for me.
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On March 25, 2011, I tried to hang myself in the basement. My actions at the time seemed reasonable and rational. The thought process did not strike me then or now as insane or out of the ordinary. I can’t think of anything else that would have stopped me. The idea of calling a suicide prevention hotline was the farthest thing from my mind. I wouldn’t have responded if someone had dialed the phone and handed it to me. My mind was made up.
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When his house caught fire, he was asleep, dreaming of his kids and the wife he’s losing in a divorce. It was only the call of his roommate’s overnight guest that roused him. He had just enough time to grab his pants and tumble down the stairs. The air had transformed from life-sustaining into a viscous mixture of paper-and-plastic miasma, the acrid smoke burning his lungs.
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