January Bundle Delay

Hello Folks,

With my most sincere apologies, the bundle is very late this month. I stuffed it on Friday, but was just a few minutes too late to make it to the post office, and then drove the bundles there first thing this morning, but of course it is Martin Luther King, Jr. day. So tomorrow I will mail them off to you. Remember that next month is a themed Edgar Allen Poe bundle, and that I need 145 copies now of whatever you print.

We have lost two long time members this month. In your bundle, you will have the last submission from Delores Miller, whose pages I have always enjoyed so much. I have the cut in the photograph, which Ivan says he believes is of Delores from when she wrote something for Dean Ray, or he wrote something about her, but when I asked Delores over email about it a year ago, she didn't write back. That was unusual of her, and I thought something had gone wrong with technology, so I printed it and sent her a paper copy, and again, no response. Very unusual. Maybe she didn't like it? I was going to put it on the envelopes this month as a tribute to her, but this lack of response kept me from doing that. Maybe someone out there knows more than I do? Delores was one of the most steadfast contributors to the bundle, and her writing and her collection of old photographs will be greatly missed. The lingering question: who will inherit her papercutter?

Also Jiyani Lawson has passed away. Jiyani is who signed me up for the AAPA, and he also used to come help stuff the bundle with us sometimes before his health declined. He seemed about 9 feet tall, and one time he showed me a pen he had made himself that was secretly a knife! "I've taken this on so many airplanes," he told me. A retired police officer with I think an endless curiosity, he had a santa-sized bag of crazy stories he could tell. One time, I tried to go visit him in the hospital with some cookies, only to be told they had no record of him ever having been there! It turns out that he had been released that day, and that Jiyani is not his name, but his secret alias! A real mystery man.

I hope their families can find a way to say a good good-bye, and a way to hold on to their stories. 

Hang in there, everyone. Spring (and a vaccine) is on the way. Heather