Brownies for René

René is our mailman. I don’t like the mail, but I like René, even though he mostly brings bills and junk. I’ve almost switched all the bills to electronic. Less luck with the junk.

When we travel, I have to have the mail held, or, if we’re going away for more than thirty days, forwarded to incurious friends. Sometimes substitute carriers leave it in the mailbox anyway, where it sits until we return, announcing our absence. I tried to stop all mail once, but the post office wouldn’t let me.

René is sympathetic. He says the post office is a mess. He seems cheerfully abashed to be working at a place where his personal standards aren’t matched by those of his employer.

I’ve waved and nodded to many mail carriers over the years, from many homes in many states, but René is the first one I’ve known by name. He’s also the first one I know for sure loves brownies.

When our sons went off to college, Meg began sending them brownies now and then. “Brownie Love,” she called it. A small, flat-rate mailing box is just the right size. Sometimes they were still warm when she put them in the mailbox.

It wasn’t too long before I’d see René (whose name I didn’t know then) on his rounds and he’d say those brownies smelled so good he couldn’t guarantee they’d make it to the boys. After that, with the boxes she mailed Meg often left a little plastic bag with a brownie or two, tied with a ribbon. “Protection brownies,” you might call them.

As the years went on, René met our dog and our sons when they were home from school, and when I walked in the neighborhood I would see him on his route and make a joke about him being disloyal, taking care of other customers.

Then, last Fall, I didn’t see him for a few months. I thought maybe he’d retired. I mentioned missing him to our new mailman, and he said René was on a medical leave. When René came back, he said he’d been away “kicking cancer’s butt.”

Since then he has gotten thinner and a little slower, and he misses a week now and then, but he keeps coming; and Meg keeps making brownies. Our boys have been out of college for a while now, but as long as René comes to our porch with the mail, a living symbol of the strength and optimism in tough times that is the best of us, they’ll keep getting brownies in the mail.

Now is the Time

Today is the day we celebrate the life and vision of Martin Luther King. When my youngest sons were growing up, we played his speeches on this day every year. Listening to them through a child’s ears, I literally shivered with pleasure and pride. Barack Obama was president. 

Dr. King urged us to march. “Now is not the time for the tranquilizing drug of gradualism,” he said.

I don’t think Dr. King would be as shocked as I am that a racist is president, and that racial hatred is openly abroad in the land. He grew up in the Jim Crow south. He faced down George Wallace. He watched Klansmen ride out of Stone Mountain in Atlanta in white robes and hoods on their way to light the burning crosses of racial terror. He was willing to sit in jail in Birmingham.

Most of us are not selfish. We are willing to share what we have with others in need. The greatest thing we Americans have to share is our freedom. Our instinct, or at least our moral aspiration, is to lift our lamp beside the golden door.

But Trump has made us afraid, or some of us anyway. He has appealed to the basest side of us, the side of which we should be ashamed, and of which, in private, we are ashamed. But in a mob…well, we all know what mobs are capable of, whether Southern lynch mobs or Nazi brownshirts.

Now is the time to stand up to the Trump mob.

If we do not, will we suffer? Will we, as they say, get what we deserve? 

No, most of us who read and write these kinds of thoughts won’t. But millions of our fellow citizens, our fellow residents, our fellow human beings from all over the world, will. And when they are brought low and we are walled off in our elite white utopia, what will we be?

What is any man or woman who hears the suffering of others and turns away?