Every day as I walk my route in this wonderful weather, I consider each day a reprieve from what I know is coming. The ice and snow are just over the horizon. We’ve been lucky—I’ve been lucky as a mailman—to have a warm December.
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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.
Aging is an interesting exercise. Everyone does it, whether they die a children or as elderly people. I’ve heard that we were born dying, that the whole trajectory of a person’s life leads to the grave, that life has but one end, that none of us gets out of here alive. These are all true. But rarely do people speak of dying as a process of living. We don’t get to die unless we get to live.
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A woman thirty-six years ago changed the direction of my life and helped make me who I am. I dreamed about her again last night and woke upset and fatigued.
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The thoughts come like jabs with a sharp instrument. Walking along, delivering mail, I’ll suddenly wince with a memory of a word ill-placed that embarrasses me now, only 30 or 40 years after the fact. There’ll be an untruth that I’ve kept secret to me for decades. I’ll remember a friend long gone and feel a deep pang of loss.
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The task that faced me was overwhelming. How was I going to deal with almost two years of material that trickled through the front door and wound up on every horizontal surface in the living room, dining room, and kitchen? Little things, big things, well-intentioned projects littered our lives since we both began our new work lives in December 2019. They were all there for the world and for us to see. For us, the sight of them meant nagging feelings of things undone.
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