Letters from The Sun Magazine

The Sun is a magazine that I recommend highly. It is put out by a small staff and takes no advertising – which is tough. I don’t read everything in it because the contents are also tough. This magazine has a unique tone, a big heart, and isn’t pandering to the lowest parts of us. My favorite part is the Letters section. Readers are given themes in advance. Editor and founder Sy Safransky gives many pages to them, and through this a subscriber feels more a part of the magazine. Follow the link in the Links section. Take a look at the magazine online, and consider subscribing.

Thanks to Merrin Whitten for the subscription, as always.

I work for a Fortune 500 company. Before I came here, I spent fifteen years in a monastic community as a Catholic priest. The skills I learned in the monastery are readily transferable to my nine-to-five job adminstering employee-survey programs.

Three disturbing trends have surfaced in these surveys: nobody trusts anyone; employees don’t believe in senior management; and workers are too stressed-out to care. When I was a monk, we referred to problems with trust, belief, and caring as crises of faith, hope, and charity. I’ve come to believe that corporate America’s problem is not just managerial but also spiritual.

– Name Withheld, New Jersey

My twenties were the hardest years of my life. I had thrived in college, but then I moved back into my parents’ house, in a subdivision of identical townhouses with no trees. My job, as an editorial assistant for a textbook publisher, paid well, but I was given little to do. My bright yellow cubicle had a bulletin board I was expected to decorate with cartoons or pictures of family and friends. I never put anything up.

Every Saturday I saw a plychiatrist who would sit and gaze at me until I spoke. He prescribed small blue pills, which I took at the water fountain around the corner from my cubicle, after making sure no one was looking.

My mother loved the publishing company job and talked about it incessantly. If I tried to tell her how I felt about it, she wouldn’t listen, but would just go on and on about how lucky I was to work for such a wonderful company, with a beautiful cafeteria where I could choose between hot and cold lunches. She drove me to work every day, filling the car with her words while I smoked in the passenger seat. I tried to tell her how uncomfortable I was in my job, in my skin, but she couldn’t get past that cafeteria.

I worked with a group of overachieving, high-energy young career women. During breaks they would assemble in the cubicle across from mine to drink coffee and chat. I bought new dresses with matching shoes to try to fit in. Every day I made a mental note to join their conversation, but I never did. Instead I went out to lunch with a co-worker who drank. I’d down two Manhattans with her, enough to get me through the afternoon.

Finally, to get away from home, I moved to Boston with one of my sisters. We lived at the YWCA and ate dinner at Howard Johnson’s. I’d order soup and two Manhattans. My sister only pretended to be job-hunting and spent her days at the Boston Common. We both disapproved of each other.

When I had a job interview at another publishing company, I asked the interviewer only one question: Would I have to be in a cubicle?

Then I saw an ad for a proofreader at a printing plant, and I went for an interview. The place was dirty and noisy, with clanking machines and a tiny proofreader’s office with draftin tables and green lamps – and no cubicles. Perfect.

– Name Withheld,, Illinois

Aunt Bernice was huge - about 350 pounds - and was paralyzed on one side of her body. The family never talked about the accident that had caused her paralysis. She also had a speech impairment. The only words of hers that I could understand were "Gimme a kissh." She terrified me.

My family went to Aunt Bernice and Uncle Erwin's house once a year for a barbecue. Aunt Bernice was always wedged into the same chair in a corner of her living room; I never saw her any place else in my whole life. Uncle Erwin was the nicest man I knew. I thought it was selfless and noble of him to stay with and take care of Aunt Bernice all those years. I felt compassion for her, but I also resented her for being a burden.

Aunt Bernice died at the age of seventy. By then, Uncle Erwin had been married to her for almost fifty years. He amuses us at family gatherings twice a year now. Listening to his stories, I've discovered a few surprising facts. For one thing, though I'd always assumed Aunt Bernice's accident happened while they were together, it actually occurred two years before they met. So he married her when she was already an invalid. Even more unexpected, though, was the revelation that, while Uncle Erwin was faithful all those years, Aunt Bernice was not."

– Name Withheld,, California