The 40-year class reunion of the Archbishop O’Hara High School intimidated me. The decades have been good to me in many ways, but I felt I was somehow inferior to my classmates. I have done many things, achieved much. But I am, in the end, a mailman. All those roads with their twists and turns, and I have little to account for a life of what some call adventure.
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.
I was dreaming of a basement bedroom and the dim light dribbled through the window at the top of the wall. Trying to get up the steps, I felt that something was tugging my shirt, pulling me to the carpet. My grasp on the rail kept me from falling. Though wanting to get up those steps, I resigned myself to the reality of being stuck in the room underground.
Leave a CommentSitting in the lobby making time with the customers is a great time. For a while. Then, the day gets long, which makes for a very long week. One thing I can say about carrying the mails is that the days goes quickly. I always feel a little angst before clocking in. But then I swipe my card and, bing, the day starts and is almost over.
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I’m struck with the passage of time. As I’ve written before, I think that the cruelest trick biology has played on us humans is that when we are young, time passes so slowly. We get a little wisdom and experience and time flies.
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When Sadie came to us, now ten years ago, we didn’t know what we were in for. A bundle of endless energy, she was already almost full grown. We estimated when we picked her up on Beardsley Road, after she’s been abandoned by some inhumane human being, that she was about a year old. She was a pretty dog, some kind of pit-bull mongrel, white and black.
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