Original anecdotes, commentary, rumination, and occasional pontification.
JUNE 10, 2023 – Some of the people who visited Mother were as oddly brilliant as she was but with a severity altogether absent from Mother’s personality. Christabelle Chase, for example. Christabelle lived on the other side of town and was the wealthy widow of a newspaperman who’d once been in the running for governor. …
JUNE 9, 2023 – (Cont.) Two weekends later, Mother informed me that she had sold the canoe. I was astounded. Mother never got rid of anything. She didn’t buy that much, and she never, ever got rid of anything except newspapers, organic garbage, and some of the junk mail. Why on earth had she wanted …
JUNE 8, 2023 – (Cont.) Down by the permanent steps that led to where the dock was supposed to be installed, I turned over Mother’s light, 13-foot aluminum canoe. It had been lying upside down there for over a year. It was tied to a tree, and the rope was doubled up so many times, …
JUNE 7, 2023 – (Cont.) Mother’s virtuosity with the slide rule also made me think that I should cut her some slack. For a second, it occurred to me that her wackiness, which could embarrass me so much in public, might be related to her brilliance. A person acquainted with that brilliance but oblivious to …
JUNE 6, 2023 – (Cont.) On rainy, boring, summer days when I was a kid and after exhausting other entertainment options, I’d rummage through the drawers of the tall secretary in the living room to see if there was anything I’d missed on previous expeditions. There were the rubber stamps, the magnifying glass, the cute …
JUNE 5, 2023 – One of my earliest memories of Mother was the day when Mrs. Donaldson and another woman stopped in. I was too young to assemble all the pieces of the puzzle that arose from the commotion and very lively conversation, as they sat in our living room, bathed in sunlight, and sipped …
JUNE 4, 2023 – When you’re a kid, it’s the random, passing experience of little apparent consequence that can leave a lasting impression about a person. One such experience with Mother occurred for me on a warm, sunny, summer afternoon before I was school age. With her small-boned arms, Mother turned hard on the wheel …
JUNE 3, 2023 – When I was young, Dad called Mother “Rabbit,” a term of endearment expressed often in the kitchen while she was cooking supper and he was checking on her progress and wrapping his long arms around her in a warm embrace. But most of the time, he called her “Boots.” I was …
JUNE 2, 2023 – If I weren’t the storyteller, I wouldn’t believe this story. So far, no one who has heard it believes it, except Cliff, who has survived the most critical parts of it, and my sisters, because I’ve told them everything and they themselves have lived enough of the story to know I’m …
JUNE 1, 2023 – We humans are expert at treating life as one big experiment. We often talk about our country that way, as in, the “Great American Experiment,” which, if any aspect of our lives is an experiment, our construct of a nation-state certainly is. In a scientific context, experiments originate from hypotheses, but …
MAY 31, 2023 – Late yesterday evening I stepped outside to check on the stars and saw that a few were out, beaming their light down from deep space. I did my usual—picked one I knew wasn’t a planet, called it “Twinkle, Twinkle” and made my wish. At the close of this little ritual of …
MAY 30, 2023 – (Cont.) Second: the plight of women. This is one of history’s great challenges. With some notable exceptions, women have shouldered burdens and abuse disproportionate to their 50% representation of humanity. (In the case of extremist Ukrainian atrocities against the Poles of Volhynia, women and children were a sizable majority of the …
MAY 30, 2023 – One evening recently I stumbled upon a Polish film entitled Wołyń (pronounced, VO-win), which is a region of Central-Eastern Europe fraught with history and bloodshed in a four-way tug-of-war among Poles, Jews, Ukrainians, Russians and Germans. Notice that I said “four-way” but named five “tribes.” That’s because historically, the Jewish population …
MAY 28, 2023 – On this Memorial Day, I’m moved to express a somewhat contrarian view. I have nothing against the occasion; just the manner in which we observe it. Quick! What’s the first thing most Americans think of when they hear, “Memorial Day”? Exactly: “weekend.” And what do we most closely associate with “Memorial …
MAY 27, 2023 – Recently, while I was hiking the hills of “Little Switzerland,” a golfer in his late 20s called out a greeting to me as he strode from his cart to the tee. An extrovert, he prompted me to respond similarly. I reciprocated and added a passing observation about the late-day improvement in …
MAY 26, 2023 – After paying my dues all morning and into the afternoon, I took a break to take our seven-year-old granddaughter to nearby Como Park, St. Paul’s version of Central Park. She had the day off from school—something about a teachers’ workshop—so her mom had taken her to work at a shop near …
MAY 25, 2023 – (Cont.) Aluminum docks are fine—if you’re installing or removing them: they’re light and easily assembled and disassembled. But I despair over the visual pollution they cause along the shoreline. On more crowded portions of the 16-mile shore around Grindstone Lake, the dominant features are white-painted aluminum docks and huge aluminum boat …
MAY 24, 2023 – (Cont.) Carl and Grandpa eventually grew too old to play any role in “dock-in” day—and thus, too old for the Old Crow that would follow the arduous annual ritual. The dock itself grew old too, of course, and had to be replaced. Dad was now lord of the manor—and harbor master, …
MAY 23, 2023 – (Cont.) What made the cradle so dangerous were the hand cranks. Made of cast iron, they were connected to other cast iron fittings in such a way that by squeezing a mechanism on the crank handle, you could lock the crank in place or release it so you could turn the …
MAY 22, 2023 – (Cont.) What amazed me as much as Carl’s steel driving skill was his ability to line things up so that the holes in the sides of the dock frames lined up perfectly with the holes in the pipe brackets. After Carl had driven the pipes down into the lake bed and …
MAY 21, 2023 – Way back in time, “dock-in” day was an annual ritual in the lake and cabin country of northern Minnesota and Wisconsin. Every family with a rustic, lacustrian getaway had its unique formula, but invariably the affair involved the dock itself—bracketed pipes and wooden dock sections heavier than sin; a steel boat …
MAY 20, 2023 – Today a sister called me to catch up. At some juncture she said, “I’m sure you remembered, but today is Dad’s birthday.” “Yeah,” I said, adding that he would’ve been 101. “Maybe it’s a good thing he didn’t live that long,” she said, light-heartedly. I agreed. Rarely are sight, taste, hearing, …
MAY 19, 2023 – When it comes to art and poetry, I know what I like and what I don’t like, and I really like the poetry of Don Brunnquell. This evening we attended a reading by Don, aided by several others, from a newly published collection of his poems, A World Together / Family …
MAY 18, 2023 – In the early days of my legal career, I dreaded “CLE” (Continuing Legal Education) seminars. Al Gore had yet to invent the internet, so “webinars” didn’t yet exist either. Even “casual Fridays” were a thing of the future. You had to attend all sessions in person and wear your usual uniform—a …
MAY 17, 2023 – Apart from chronic environmental issues bearing down on the entire planet, the most acute potential crisis facing the world right now is the effect of Congressional failure to raise (or better yet, abolish) the artificial cap on U.S. Government debt. This is one of the dumbest of all wholly avoidable, self-inflicted …