Patriots of Yorktown

Note eyebrows

I'm sorry I couldn't make it to the high school reunion--you all seemed to have such a good time catching up. Some of you have been kind enough to email me and ask what I've been up to for the past 45 years. So let's see. As many of you may recall, I wanted to be a writer. I was young, and didn't realize that isn't a thing. Also, you're supposed to write what you know, and I didn't know anything. And the things I was starting to learn were not things I wanted to write about as long as my mother was alive. So it took me a little time to find my calling.

I went off to college intending to be a psychology major, only I'd figured out psychology was pretty much bullshit by the time Mom and Dad dropped me off at the campus. So I threw myself into the liberal arts, until I took my first science class and realized my mistake. In four years I'd ricocheted into a biology degree and then scored an exceptionally low-paying job in my field by wearing a low-cut dress to the interview. I spent two years torturing about a billion white mice in ways you don't want to know about for chump change and then I moved across the country just for the hell of it and eked out rent and beer money doing Art. Which means I was like any other kid coming to Portland, Oregon today, except that back then we could afford rent.

By this time I discovered that a surprising number of my college classmates, who by all appearances were carefree hippies like myself with majors such as Comparative Religious Holograms and Medieval Basketry, had quietly gone off to get law degrees and were pulling down six figures and didn't have furniture made out of cinderblocks and planks. This troubled me for a while until I satisfied myself they were miserable, and by then I was taking my first steps toward my dream job. I became a drunken mailman for fifteen years. After that I was merely a moderately lit-up mailman for another sixteen years. And all of it was in service to the great plan, and culminated in the job I'd been meaning to have my whole life: retired mailman who enjoys a good beer or two.

That pretty much covers the picture. There was probably other stuff in there, but I don't remember it. For instance, I don't know precisely when my eyebrows went away. I'm as curious about that as anyone.

But that's just hair under the bridge. Now I'm old enough to have perspective instead of eyebrows. There's no shortcut to perspective: it takes time. Perspective is what allows you to be happy maintaining a weight that horrified you when you first approached it from the other direction. Thanks! You all look great too.

And with perspective and seasoning, I get to be a writer after all, so it all worked out. Plus I never had to be a whore about it. I'm the pure kind of writer. The unpaid kind.

Yes, that means I'm free.

Beaming

I've figured out a fun way to irritate the bejeesus out of my mailman. I like John a lot, and he does a fine job, but I'm in a unique position to really pull his chain. I'm a recently retired letter carrier, quite obviously satisfied with my new status, and as such, I represent simultaneously everything John wants to be, and everything he isn't now. He's got two years to go until he's eligible to retire himself, and he can practically taste it. So whenever I see him, I listen sympathetically, head tilted, as he ticks off his complaints: the ice, the overtime, the big fat catalogs, the eensy-beensy political mailings that nobody wants, the Advo fliers that shed coupons with every gust of wind. I nod, brow furrowed, until he winds down; I belt my bathrobe a little tighter, peer up at the sky, and then I say: "Huh. Is this Tuesday?"

So last Monday I caught myself before I put out a letter to go, remembering it was Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and we weren't going to get a visit from John. Dave pointed out that being retired really takes a lot of the glory out of having a holiday. And just then, following some grand celestial script, our doorbell rings. There on our porch are three little girls, and what they have to say is: "um." They take turns saying "um" and twirl a little and scuff their feet and finally one of them launches off the verbal diving board and explains that, um, they were collecting food for the Oregon Food Bank. There were two motherly types out on the sidewalk with kiddie trailers packed with grocery bags, and another group of small children heading up the steps to my neighbor's house. I invited the girls in while I scoured the pantry for canned goods and wrote out a check. When they left, I overheard them reporting to Mom about the tuna and the check and a whole lot about our neat cat, who had trotted out to entertain while I scrounged.

That's what these children were doing on their holiday, a cold but brilliantly sunny day. The sun had to have been written into the screenplay along with the girls, as a metaphor for hope.

When I was about their age, I was very impressed by a Good Friday service at our church, because the sky had gotten extremely dark and menacing and at the most critical portion of the reading of the scriptures, there was a tremendous crack of thunder. In the self-centered manner of some six-year-olds and other religious people, I intuited the hand of God in this, imagining that it was thundering all over the planet on the anniversary of Our Saviour's death. I believed this in the face of all evidence to the contrary, not that I looked for any.

But Monday, on the eve of the inauguration of a new president, I found myself squinting into the rare winter sun, as my new young friends continued down the street, and imagining that it was sunny all over the world.