Since the USPS did not require a Secret Clearance from the Department of Defense, it was one of the few places that an immigrant draftsman could work in the Washington DC Area. One Friday night three of us went to New York City to attend a Hindu Wedding. I drove... We stayed at an apartment building in the Bronx. The entire multi-story building was filled with Hindus from around the world. They had a temple in the backyard. There was a lot of "Sacred" food to be eaten and supposedly we would be insulting our hosts and the Gods if we refused to eat it. The Groom was coated in a yellow colored spice (Saffron). He had a bad allergic reaction to it... I ended up eating much more than I wanted to. On the night before the Wedding we went to a Hindu Disco and danced. Some of the people my friend was related to lived on one apartment building and some lived in a different one. We had to walk the women from one building to another because the neighborhood was dangerous and they feared getting abducted... So whenever a woman wanted to go to the other building, we escorted her... At the wedding an old woman played the drums... My friend was from Guyana, South America... a former British Colony. His ancestors were imported slaves from India.
The third person in our adventure to NYC was a black American man. His mother lived in NYC and she was the owner of a Rastafarian Bar. We did not get to visit because the air conditioner in the bar was broken. Too bad... It would have been an interesting place to visit. Another draftsman at the USPS was a man my age from Vietnam. He said that when he was a child he watched the American Bombs exploding and he thought they were pretty. I'm not making this up.
Read more of my autobiography at: http://gvan42.blogspot.com/2018/03/growing-up-in-los-gatos-california-in.html
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