I have a tendency to interrupt people. Once I think I know how their sentence is going to end, I'm ready to move on. Not surprisingly, this gets me into hot water on a regular basis (even though I usually get the meaning right, it tends to piss people off).
Mostly, I think, I lack enough patience. Sometimes this happens when I get excited and just want things to move along more quickly. Sometimes I do this to redirect a conversation that is starting to stray (from what I think is most interesting or pertinent). Sometimes, as a facilitator, I do it because the speaker has completed their thought and is circling around to say it again, and I break in to bump the needle out of its play/repeat groove.
While I've made some progress over the years in being more mindful about my tendencies—and achieving greater control over my urges—I'm still a work in progress. Over the holidays I got anonymous written feedback from participants at a series of workshops I did in November at NASCO Institute, and perhaps 4% commented about my interrupting as a presenter. So perfection is still some distance off...
What's more, making progress here is more nuanced than merely learning to keep my trap shut. The other day, I achieved new heights (or is it new lows?) in the kind of trouble this can lead to. I was having a one-on-one exchange with a close friend who had already given me feedback about not wanting to be interrupted, when a tricky moment came up that I didn't know how to handle.
We had been working in different buildings and I knew that my friend was expecting a phone call. When the phone rang in my building and it was the anticipated call, I directed the person to try the number in the other building. The caller, however, reported that they'd just done that and no one picked up. Hmm. I was pretty sure my friend was there, but I didn't have anything better to suggest and I agreed to pass along the message that the caller no longer had time for the conversation that day and would prefer to set up a date for another time.
I subsequently went over to the other building and tried to relay the message. I reported that I had handled a call from the expected person, that they had first tried to reach the building we were in, and that no one picked up the phone. I was poised to pass along the message that the caller now preferred to talk the next day, but my friend was eager to explain why they hadn't been able to hear the phone. Now I was at the delicate moment.
While my instinct was to break in with information about the request to reschedule (which was more important, I thought, than details about why the call was missed), I was mindful of my friend's irritation with my tendency to barge in, so I held my tongue. Instead I simply tried to breathe and give my friend all the air space they wanted to tell their story. After a time though, I got in trouble anyway, as my friend could tell what I was doing and accused me angrily of waiting for them to get done talking so that I could respond.
What could I say? They were right! I felt completely trapped. Here I was trying to be responsive to the original feedback, but I wasn't being quiet pleasantly enough. Ai-yi-yi!
No doubt impatience was leaking into my countenance, or was reflected in the way I was holding my body. But I was dismayed to realize that my friend's irritation was probably enhanced by my having not interrupted. (I naively thought I had been making progress on my impatience.) It meant, I guess, that I was aware of the urge to interrupt yet still managed to convey disdain. Where was I to go with this? Must I pretend to be interested in what anyone around me says, whether I am or not? Yikes!
This is a tough one, and I'm still unsure how to do better next time (though I am sure that there will be a next time). Somehow, I have to find a way to be in a state of greater neutrality or acceptance. I need to move beyond my obsession with accuracy and authenticity; I need to embrace listening as a meditation—as a way of building relationship through presence rather than words. It adds depth to the concept of "active listening."
It's a good thing that I typically enjoy personal growth challenges such as this, because I don't seem to be able to conduct my life in such a way that the next opportunity isn't available momentarily.
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
Full Contact Phone Tag
del.icio.usSaturday, January 8, 2011
Solar Gain Saturday
You know it's cold in the house when your cat crawls into your empty suitcase to get warm.
I slept over at Ma'ikwe's house last night, and we were awakened by Kyre clawing her way past the zipper to get into my wife's Samsonite. It was a first for me. Temperatures got down to around 10 degrees (outside) and after a cloudy day Friday, we were happy to see the sun peek in around the insulated curtains once we peeked out from under the covers. It was going to be a solar gain Saturday! While there was no frozen water in the house this morning, that first cup of coffee sure was nice to wrap my hands around.
Ma'ikwe lives at Dancing Rabbit, where all power is off the grid. As hers comes from photovoltaics (others use wind generators instead of—or in addition to—solar panels for their line power, and wood stoves for space heating) it's all about the sunshine. With an array of eight 175-watt panels, she can handle cloudy days better than some. Her system is geared to supply the electric power for three houses, but the second one is not yet occupied and the third hasn't even been started. Thus, she doesn't have to share what her panels crank out this winter. With care, she can go about three cloudy days in a row on battery power (supplemented by the minimal solar gain that trickles in even through complete cloud cover) and still have power enough for reading at night, checking her email, and keeping pace with her 700+ Facebook friends.
The beauty of relying on solar panels is that the need for juice is greatest when the temperatures are lowest, and the temperatures are lowest on clear days—meaning the solar gain is greatest when you need it most. In fact, if she gets two clear days in a row, she's able to "float," which means the panels are producing electricity fast enough that the batteries have been topped off and the extra energy is just being spilled. In those conditions she'll run an electric space heater to augment the BTUs generated by her overworked wood stove (more about that below).
This is fairly amusing in that electric space heaters are generally considered the spawn of the devil among people serious about energy conservation. Electricity is a highly concentrated energy and using it for space heating—a low grade use—is generally considered incredibly wasteful.
With grid electricity it would work like this: in our rural area, power is delivered via the distribution lines of a local power co-op: Tri-County Electric. They, in turn, buy power generated by Northeast Missouri Power, which supplies eight regional co-ops. Northeast Power's nearest generators are a trio of coal-fired plants located in Moberly, 86 miles away. The heat derived from burning the coal is used to drive turbines that generate electricity. The juice is then stepped up to high-voltage and transmitted via high wire lines to Tri-County Electric, stepped down to line voltage near the final user, and then converted to heat through resistance in a floor heater. After all these shenanigans only a fraction of the heat generated by the lumps of coal in Moberly are translated into sensible heat in houses near Rutledge. You can begin to picture why environmentalists want to throw up when asked about electric space heaters.
However, the equation is completely different in Ma'ikwe's case, where the electricity is generated about 25 feet from where it's used; and once her batteries are floating, it's use it or lose it.
All of that said, it's only an occasional luxury that Ma'ikwe can use her space heater to boost her indoor temperatures in short spurts on January days. Her main strategy for space heating is hydronics: radiant heating that comes from circulating hot water through polyethylene PEX tubing buried in her concrete floor. Although the floor slab (with tubing in place) was poured in spring 2009, she has yet to start the building that will house the wood-fired boiler that will generate the hot water for the system. Thus, for the last two winters she's relied solely on her wood stove, which was sized to be the auxiliary heat source—not the primary one—resulting in a lot of chilly mornings.
Maybe what we need to do to get through the winter is figure out how to use the cat as an auxiliary heat source… if we can ever get her out of the suitcase.
Wednesday, January 5, 2011
Powers of Ten
When my kids were young (under 10) they'd frequently sleep with me, and I'd typically read with them before turning out the lights. One of my favorite books for this purpose was Powers of Ten (subtitled, About the Relative Size of Things in the Universe) by Philip & Phylis Morrison, published by Freeman & Co in 1982 (they're the folks who put out Scientific American).
The book considers a spot in a Chicago park alongside Lake Michigan where a couple is lying on the grass, snoozing after a picnic lunch on a summer day, and considers what you'd progressively see if you changed the perspective by a power of 10 in each direction—from the astronomically large: 1025 meters (where there is only the tiniest amount of light discernible amidst the vast emptiness of outer space) to the sub-atomically small: 10-16 meters (where the scale is less than the diameter of a proton, and it's only a guess what it might actually look like). Incredibly enough, some of the perspectives at the extremes are pretty much the same. In between though, there's a lot of shift.
In the last few days I crossed a couple of milestones on the odometers of my life and that got me thinking about how I might relate what I do to the powers of ten. One of those was with Facebook and the other was with the Red Cross. While I won't attempt the same range as the Morrisons did, I'm inspired to walk six up and six down from the unity, and see how well I can paint a picture of my life with 13 different snapshots:
106
The FIC is fast approaching one million annual visits to our family of websites. That's an awesome number, and a hopeful sign that people are increasingly eager for information about cooperative alternatives in our fragmented and tumultuous world.
105
FIC became the publisher of Communities magazine in 1972. Since then we’ve cranked out 71 issues (#79-149), breathing life into a dead-in-the-water quarterly. With an average subscriber base of about 1400 over those years, that means we’ve delivered approximately 100,000 copies to subscribers during our tenure. That’s a lot of good reading.
104
This is the number of lakes that Minnesota advertises on its license plate. (While the state DNR claims the actual number of named lakes of 10+ acres is 11,842, why quibble.) While I’ve only canoed a small fraction of that number (mostly in the Superior National Forest, tucked up on the Canadian border), wilderness canoeing in freshwater lakes and streams holds a special place in my heart and I can’t see the number 10,000 without automatically thinking of being in a canoe.
103
As of New Year's Day, Communities magazine reached the 1000 friends plateau on Facebook, the Web's most potent social networking platform. Yeehah! Now if we can only translate about half of those "likes" into "subscribers" we'll be in high cotton. This is also how many days I've been authoring this blog (it's actually 1119, but hey, as an author I get to claim poetic license), and the number of North American communities listed in FIC's most recent edition of Communities Directory, just released in November.102
Yesterday I went into our county seat to support the periodic visit of a mobile Red Cross blood collection team out of Columbia MO. It turned out that I gave my 100th pint, representing donations spanning more than 40 years—and enough aggregate gore to make a vampire drool. This is also a good approximation of the number of cooperative groups that I've worked with as a professional process consultant, where my main task is to stop the bleeding.
101
This year marks a decade since 9/11, and a decided shift in US culture toward fascism and away from civil liberties. Cooperative problem-solving—of the kind that intentional communities are pioneering—is needed now more desperately than ever.
100
This is the number cycles I’ve completed in the Chinese astrological system. There are twelve animal totems (monkey, rooster, dog, pig, rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, and sheep) and five elements (water, wood, fire, metal, and earth). Born in Oct 1949 I am an Earth Ox, and we just came around to that combination again in 2009. It's also the number of communities I've lived in, and the number of times I've been married. Jacqueline Susann notwithstanding, sometimes once is enough.
10-1
In days, this is how long it typically takes me to compose a blog entry (about 2.4 hours). In years, this is the fraction of time I spend annually riding Amtrak (36.5 days) to and from my work in the field.
10-2
In days, this about the time I devote to my diurnal ritual of starting each new calendar entry with a fresh brewed cup of coffee (whitened with half and half): 14 minutes. In years, this is the amount of time I devote to each of FIC's semi-annual organizational meetings: 3.6 days. (The next one will be in Chicago, May 18-20.)
10-3
In years, this is the average amount of time it takes me to compose a thorough report for a client after a weekend of facilitation and consulting (about 8.7 hours). Last year, I did this 13 times.
10-4
In years, this is how long it takes me to scrub the kitchen floor on my hands and knees (52 minutes). This has been my regular cleaning chore at Sandhill for about a decade (we divvy up all non-daily stuff among the members, and this is my task of choice). It's a ritual I accomplish about once a month. This is also about the time I need to make a batch of home-made pasta, starting with a dozen-and-a-half eggs and 12 cups of flour, freshly ground from our own wheat for the occasion.
10-5
In years, this is about how long it takes me to prepare a jar of sorghum for shipment through the mail: five minutes. I've always loved shipping, and it's one of my regular on-farm duties, seeing that all of our web-based orders for food products are safely consigned to the US Postal Service. This is also the amount of time it takes me to play a hand of duplicate bridge (one of my favorite recreational pastimes this past decade) if I'm the declarer. While the ACBL allows 7.5 minutes/hand at tournaments, I always claim early, once all the mystery has been removed from a deal.
10-6
In years, this is the outside edge of effective facilitation. In an average two-hour meeting there are perhaps two or three opportunities to make a major difference in the conversation—the difference between sliding into the abyss of acrimony & diffusion, or inspiring the participants to their higher capacity as compassionate human beings. At the most, you have about 30 seconds to recognize those opportunities and come up with an effective choice about what action to take that will authentically and accurately hold all the players. If you miss those moments, it can be a long, hard slog back up the hill.
Sunday, January 2, 2011
Wringing in the New
Yesterday was 1/1/11. It's hard to look at that and not think of fresh starts. (I guess you could look at that and think of stuttering, but that hardly seems the stuff of inspiration.)
Of course, toward the end of the year we'll get a chance to experience rampant 1s again, on this year's anniversary of Veteran's Day: 11/11/11. However, it seems more auspicious to reflect on beginnings now, when ringing in a new year, tearing the cellophane off a spanking new calendar, and celebrating the incrementally longer days since the Earth made its ponderous turn past winter solstice. November seems more suited for exhalation than exaltation, so let's not wait.
Like many others, for most of my life I've periodically pondered the Question, "What do I want to do when I grow up?" Even as the years have steadily mounded up and I'd already established a satisfying career as a community builder, there has always remained a residual wanderlust, to consider the roads not taken. As full as my life has been (and I'm not complaining) it's been pleasurable to pause now and then to look out the window and ask, "What if… " following in my mind's eye those blue highways leading away from my marked path in enticing directions.
By degrees, I've come to accept that I will probably never be a cabinetmaker, a US Senator, or a contestant on Iron Chef. I may never see the geysers of Iceland, Ayers Rock in Australia, or the Inca engineering miracle of Machu Picchu. I don 't know if I'll ever get to canoe the Thelon River in the Northwest Territories again. Gradually, I've come to accept that I'm probably as grown up as I'll ever be. At 61 years old, The Question has morphed into: "What do I want to do with the rest of my life?"
I want to write more
For a long time I was hung up on the conundrum: When have I learned enough (and become articulate enough) that I have something to write about? Or perhaps more to the point, when have I digested enough of life that my collective attempts to share my observations are a worthy addition to the blogosphere? How can I tell when my contributions are worth their weight in electrons?
While I'm still unsure of the answer, the die is now cast and I'm willing to take my chances as a writer. Three years into my career as a blogger, I am no longer afraid I'll run out of things to write about, and am pleasantly surprised to discover that something interesting to reflect upon happens as a nearly daily occurrence. (Why didn't I notice this amazing fact earlier!) Now, even as I'm striving to enhance my ability to be current in the moment, there's also a small part of my consciousness that's regularly devoted to observing the moment (in contrast with experiencing it), tracking potential topics to write about. These days I talk less and reflect more, and I like this shift.
I want to teach more
As a social change agent, I regularly ask myself, "In what ways can I most effectively contribute to creating a better world?" After years of steadily developing a career as a group process consultant, it occurred to me that I'd reach a lot more people if I could teach others to do what I do. Thus, eight years ago I began an experiment to see if I could teach the kind of dynamic facilitation that I could practice. I needed to know if my approach was a circus act (watch the amazing man extract golden nuggets from the apparent dross and snarl of anarchistic chaos!) or something that could reliably be passed along to others. That is, was I a freak or an inspiration?
After completing four rounds of my two-year facilitation training, I now know that my skills can be learned (I really didn't want to be a freak anyway) and teaching group process has become my greatest passion as a consultant. While I still need to keep my hand in as a practitioner (it's both my greatest recruitment tool for attracting students and keeps me on my toes), I want to teach as much as possible. I feel incredibly blessed to have so much to offer while I still have the energy and constitution to deliver it.
I want to hand off my work well
Over the years I've accumulated a lot of responsibilities. Now, while I'm still high functioning, I need to be more deliberate about planning for my replacement. In addition to finding candidates with the appropriate qualifications (the right mix of skill, availability, and motivation), I need to manifest the income stream sufficient to compensate people at rates more reasonable than the pittance I can operate on as a member of an income-sharing community with no debt.
I've already largely succeeded in getting myself out of being essential to operations at my home community, Sandhill Farm. Now I have to accomplish the same thing as the main administrator for Fellowship for Intentional Community. In the process field, my students will continue my work, adapting it as appropriate. Or, if my body of work ultimately proves to be less potent than that of others, then it will fade away and that's as it should be.
Mind you, this is not about stopping working, or even easing my foot off the gas; it's about not being essential, which is really just an ego trap.
I want to travel more
I'm already on the road 60% of the time, yet the vast majority of that travel is work related. This past summer I took two weeks off with Ma'ikwe to enjoy Drummond Island in the northwest corner of Lake Huron, with a cook's tour of upper and lower Michigan thrown in for good measure. It was a wonderful time and I'd like to travel for pleasure more—preferably with my wife. While this will probably have to await the manifestation of greater financial abundance, it's always a good idea to state the intention.
I want to love more
Who do you know who truly loves as if they've never been hurt? As fearless as I try to be as a professional facilitator and community builder, I'm more cautious in intimacy, where I identify more easily as damaged goods.
One the most precious aspects of my partnership with Ma'ikwe is her constancy in inviting me to intimacy without pretending that my feet are made of anything other than clay. The miracle of her love is that she sees me as stubborn and arrogant as well as tender and compassionate… and loves me anyway. While I don't understand such love, I'm in awe of it and am inexorably drawn toward it. I want to spend a goodly portion of the next few decades gamboling in the meadows of our love, exploring, laughing, and breathing deeply.
Life is Not a Dress Rehearsal
I identify with this bumper sticker, which neatly encapsulates my view on reality. I'm not saving the champaign until all the bubbles go flat, and I'm not banking on there being another time around. I intend to wring as much out of this life as I can.
Today, I think, is a terrific day to begin.
Thursday, December 30, 2010
Paint by the Numbers Facilitation
After 23 years as a group process consultant I'm getting ready (slowly) to write a book about facilitating cooperative groups. It's a big topic—and doesn't get any smaller by virtue of my going deliberately. In fact, one of the trickiest parts is knowing when to ease off of doing in order to write about doing. It's a little crazy-making.
One the themes I stress as a trainer is that a good facilitator needs to be able to work both with content and with energy. I call this "riding two horses," and it's no small feat. The skill to do one well is completely unrelated to doing the other well, and it's not unusual to encounter students who are fairly accomplished equestrians with one horse, yet total greenhorns on the other.
One of my motivations to author a book about facilitation is that most of the existing literature on this subject is slanted toward the content horse—how to manage the conversation effectively and efficiently. I'm convinced though that you also need the second horse, to be able to read the the subtle undercurrents and handle volatility (pretending that upset doesn't occur, or making a rule against its expression, simply doesn't work).
My attitude about this is rooted in 36 years of community living, where there's a clearer understanding that relationships are primary to quality of life, and that you haven't solved a problem if there isn't a high level of buy-in from the individuals in the group. While I think this is essentially true for all cooperative groups, it's more apparent in intentional communities, where discord and disgruntlement have more immediate deleterious consequences.
One of the spurs (riding the equine metaphor for all it's worth) for my writing about facilitation is that most authors offer up a recipe for good meetings with an "if A, then B" approach—suggesting that if you could get good enough at it (that is, learn all the rules), then you would always know what to do. If you could only get a large enough set of colored pencils, then you would always have the one you wanted for filling in the dragon's eye.
Some authors focus principally on expanding one's tool kit (the person who has mastered the most techniques wins). See Holman & Devane's The Change Handbook for an example of this approach, offering up their sense of the best of whole systems practices.
Others have a favorite technique that they view as a golden compass, always pointing you in the right direction. Or perhaps I should say a golden hammer, where every group challenge appears as a nail. Rosenberg's Nonviolent Communication comes across this way, where the key is learning how to speak as a giraffe instead of as a jackal. The sociocracy craze is founded on the notion that the right organizational structure will see you to the promised land. The Institute for Cultural Affair's Technology of Participation offers an up-tempo formulaic approach to problem solving.
While I definitely think it's worthwhile learning patterns, and I believe that many of the above approaches have merit, meetings are not like pantyhose, where one size fits all. [Ma'ikwe just proofread this and informed me that even pantyhose does not come all in one size fits all—who knew? Probably I should confine my metaphors to lingering on topics about which I have more knowledge, and stretch less to offer metaphors about confining lingerie.] In my view, there is no single approach that always works or is always best in any situation. While you want to learn principles, you need to stay fluid about their application.
I see facilitation more as an art form than a craft, and this is a crucial distinction. While I'm all in favor of facilitators doing their homework and coming to a meeting prepared, they also have to be light on their toes and willing to alter the plan to follow the energy, adapting to what presents in the moment. This does not mean that facilitation is all about contact improv, yet it does mean that you will be too brittle if you're adamant about following a script.
For my money the facilitator's mantra is: What does the group most need right now? It could be a summary; it could be a graphic laying out where you are in the conversation; it could be a pause in the action to give attention to someone in tears; it could be a potty break. It's way more than just deciding whose turn it is to speak next. While the baseline skill is accurately hearing what people are saying, a great facilitator needs to also hear what's not being said, and the deeper meaning that underlies what's happening on the surface. A top-notch facilitator needs to be able to look around the curve, see what's coming, and decide whether to keep the herd moving in that direction or pick another path.
In short, facilitators need to be able to develop their horse sense and come to meetings with a fully stocked saddle bag; they need to know when to trust their instinct and when to haul out a technique. In the end, it's all about what works—by which I mean what moves the group productively and authentically through the agenda and builds relationships in the process.
While it's no doubt an easier pedagogy to teach brush strokes and how to mix pigments, I don't think that's really good enough. Sometimes, to get the full beauty of the moment, you have to color outside the lines. And that's the kind of facilitation I teach.
Monday, December 27, 2010
Vegas Convergence
Yesterday was a long day. It started when the alarm went off at 4 am and didn't end until Ma'ikwe and I crawled back into the same bed at 1:30 am (technically today).
In between we dropped off a friend at the Quincy train station (to catch the 6:12 am to Chicago), delivered a quart of honey to the doorstep of a sleeping customer in Hannibal, and continued on down to De Soto (less than an hour south of St Louis) to spend the day with my son and his family (Ceilee, Tosca, and their daughter Taviyn), who were visiting Tosca's family over the Christmas weekend.
I'd last seen them in October and figured this would probably be as close as I'd get to them until April at the earliest. So it was worth 9+ hours in the car to visit for 11+ hours.
My next visit will almost certainly be in Las Vegas, which is where Ceilee has been living the past four years, and where Jo, my daughter, will be living in a few days. Even as I type this Jo is caravaning to Vegas with her partner (Peter) and her mother (my ex-partner, Elke). Jo & Peter just closed out two years in Toledo yesterday, and life in Vegas glitz belt should offer considerable contrast with life in the Midwestern rust belt.
It's a bit weird that both my kids will start 2011 living in Vegas, which I don't consider to be an affirmation or natural extension of the agrarian homesteading values in which they were raised. Yet there's also a logic to it. Tosca was originally drawn to be in town for sommelier training; Ceilee likes it for the mild climate, the free-wheeling business environment, and proximity to natural recreational areas. Peter's career is in television (electronic promotions), and Jo has a budding career in food service. Vegas makes sense for all of those reasons.
Even though it's 1600 miles west, Vegas is a relatively inexpensive place to get to, and whenever I have work on the West Coast I'll get a chance to stop by (either coming or going) and see both of my kids in one go. If I'm successful in launching a two-year facilitation training program in northern California this year, that will translate into eight chances to see my kids over a 24-month period. Pretty sweet.
This coming Friday evening I'll be sedately ringing in the New Year over at Dancing Rabbit, (where there's a 50-50 chance I'll still be up at midnight). My kids, meanwhile, will be smack in the middle of Sin City where every kind of excess known to humanity is close at hand. While the juxtaposition is startling, I reckon we'll all be having a good time, with each doing what he or she wants to be doing. At the end of the day (or year), I reckon that's as good as it gets
Friday, December 24, 2010
Neither Snow, nor Rain, nor Heat…
Back in 1995, we painted Sandhill's mailbox green. If you pulled down the door, on the inside would be a message painted in yellow: "Hi Charlie." That salutation was for Charlie Houghton, our regular mail carrier for almost 22 years—from Jan 14, 1989 until yesterday, when he gave himself an early Christmas present and retired. We'll miss him.
In this season of exaltation and exhalation, it seems an auspicious time to reflect on the many years of good service we've enjoyed from our local Post Office.
While it's something of an urban distortion that change in the hinterlands comes slowly, the pattern holds true to stereotype when it comes to Rutledge mail carriers. I've lived here since 1974 and in all that time we've only had two regular mail carriers: Charlie and the guy before him, Hillis McCabe, whose time in the saddle went back far enough that a regular portion of his delivery route literally required him to spend time in the saddle. The roads were so poor when Hillis broke in that whenever it rained he'd have to deliver nine miles on horseback, slogging through the mud. (I don't know if it was uphill both ways, but I'm sure there wasn't any "swift completion of his appointed rounds" on wet days.)
Charlie was an easy-going mail carrier, happy to take a moment to discuss the weather (what were the chances of rain overnight?) or the whether (he'd take your package whether you had the right postage or not; if you underpaid he'd front the difference and bill you the next day—try getting that kind of service in the city).
Charlie knew where the vicious dogs were (and knew that ours were all bark). If there was a bad dog, he'd simply stay in his truck. What with the FIC's national headquarters located at Sandhill and my community's need to ship sorghum hither and yon, it's a common occurrence for our packages to exceed the capacity of our mailbox. If it was a nice day, we leave the extras on a skid next to the mailbox. In inclement weather, we'll stash the surplus on the front porch and leave a note in the box. Without complaint, Charlie would pull up to the steps, walk up to the porch, and gather the packages. In the country, you see, the Post Office doesn't just deliver, it also collects.
Our happy association with the Post Office goes further than our relationship with our mail carrier. Of the four postmasters we've had during my community's tenure in the outskirts of Rutledge, we grew quite close to the one we had the longest: Mary Walker, who served from 1990 to 2007. She came along right as the FIC was developing its role as a publisher, and together we plumbed the depths of the DMM (domestic mail manual) to learn about the arcane features of bound printed matter, periodical rates, and bulk mailing (we were the first locals to blow the dust off some of the sections of the DMM, and FIC was assigned Bulk Permit #1 when we started dabbling in direct mail campaigns).
In the early days of publishing Communities magazine, I'd go into the back room of the Post Office once a quarter to count and weigh all the bags with Mary's help. On Tuesdays she'd drive the two miles to Sandhill to take her one-hour lunch break with us, and we got to know her pretty well. In the depths of winter, it became a tradition to attend the Walker's Super Bowl Party, where the entertainment was equal parts of: a) watching the high-priced efforts of Madison Ave's latest attempts at clever TV ads; and b) listening to Mary's husband, Roger, who'd regale us with stories from his career as the road manager for Buckwheat Zydeco. Some of us even watched the football game.
If closure decisions are based on volume of mail, the FIC is doing its part to help keep the Rutledge Post Office open, averaging around 100 pieces of mail outgoing each week. We're crossing our fingers that it will be enough, and our small town of 100 will not lose one of its favorite spots for socializing. If you're ever out our way, stop by and visit a spell. Hillis still lives in Rutledge, and you can ask himself yourself about all those miles of mud.
