My friend and I visited his grave yesterday. He has made his plans and arranged for his disposition when he comes to his inevitable end. As we stood in the gentle breezes of the spring morning, we thought very deeply about our mortality. This is where we all end up, regardless of our efforts and accomplishments. No one, after a while, is really remembered. We join the ranks of the billions of out species who have ever lived or died.
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.
Thunder rocks the house, a welcome feeling. A tension has built inside after the dim months of a Midwestern winter. The relief is like the song of the robin. The gods have had mercy on us poor sinners. Spring has arrived. What was skeletal and gray will soon turn green, the kind of green that aches the eyes and soothes the soul.
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The fall that brought me to this point happened on a terrace between two houses. It was a calm and moderate November day. Walking along, piking the mail, my feet suddenly slipped out from under me. I reached back with my right arm to catch myself, heard and felt a rip in my shoulder. Landing almost flat on my back, I regarded the clouds above me for a second. I had no idea what I was in for.
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The last few weeks I’ve been living the life I want to lead in retirement. Every day, I get up before everyone else to write and get the mechanism primed for the day ahead. Then, the phone takes my attention for a while before I go into the bedroom to read and fall asleep for the necessary and irreplaceable nap. After that, the day is mine for more reading, walking the dog, and thinking about the next day’s writing.
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When I hear people griping about the media, I hang my head and sign. The complaint makes no sense, particularly because those most loud about media faults are those who don’t question the capitalist marketplace in which media exist.
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