Light Bulb Quest
When I was a little boy I was mesmerized by a toy I call the Floating Ball. You can still find it for sale online. It’s such an elementary concept: as you blow gently into the tube you keep the ball aloft, levitating as if by magic. Obviously you cannot exhale indefinitely, but if you […]
My wife Bethany and I have been together for a long time. Today is our twenty-ninth Valentine’s Day as a couple. Twenty-nine years. That’s long past the candy-and-flowers stage. Past even the Valentine cards stage. Ours was never a storybook romance. We married young and started a family early. A child with special needs. Job […]
‘No offense, Martin,’ one of my dearest friends, Dave, was telling me. I’d just started as a UPS driver, and as luck would have it, I caught him at home one day when I showed up with a delivery to his address. I decided to take a ten-minute break to catch him up on my […]
This week’s issue of the New Yorker magazine includes a long-form article titled, ‘UPS and the Package Wars.’ Its subtitle is a lot more provocative: ‘The company offers old-fashioned middle-class jobs and is enjoying record profits. So why is a strike looming?’ And the text of the web link is the clever, pithy phrase, ‘Can […]
It’s 2023! Like a lot of people on January 1st, today I find myself reflecting on the year that has just passed and considering the year that lies ahead. I’m a big fan of observing milestones. Crossing a finish line is a big deal for me – always an accomplishment worth celebrating. But as a […]
Thanksgiving two years ago I shared my thoughts about what I was thankful for as a new package car driver for United Parcel Service. Then last year I observed Thanksgiving with a reflection on how the supply chain is really a global chain of human (inter)activity bringing our purchases all the way to our front […]
Happy November! I see the day after Halloween as the first day of the holiday season. Time to start enjoying Christmas music again! Recently I gave five simple reasons why I love being a UPS driver. Since then I’ve thought of a few others, including this one: I make people happy, all day, every day. […]
In the U.S. over my lifetime, Labor Day has served chiefly as a three-day weekend bracketing the ending of summer break from the beginning of the school year. I myself never gave much thought to the holiday until I started researching its origins. All across the country, all throughout the industrial era, the history of […]
For the past several months the eyes of the world have been on Ukraine. In a modern David-versus-Goliath scenario, Russia’s military has met tougher-than-expected resistance from scrappy Ukrainian forces – the entire Ukrainian population, really. Outmanned and outgunned, Ukrainians have nevertheless shown themselves fierce defenders of their homeland against the invading aggressors. What was supposed […]
A while back I shared about some of the things I’d had to let go of, amidst the professional and personal losses of the past few years. In some very real ways my life is harder now than it had been before. But I didn’t share out of any sense of bitterness, disappointment, frustration, or […]