Original anecdotes, commentary, rumination, and occasional pontification.
JUNE 4, 2026 – (Cont.) Ever since high school I’d been a fan of Camus, which rendered me curious about Algeria, which is why I was drawn to the acclaimed documentary La Bataille d’Alger (The Battle of Algiers) when it was showing at Bowdoin our sophomore year. The film was about the Arab urban guerrilla …
JUNE 3, 2026 – (Cont.) Toward the end of our senior year at Bowdoin, I engaged in some nonsense of my own, albeit in league with Jeff Oppenheim, on whom by that stage I’d exerted a corruptive influence, though by no means irredeemably so. Jeff continued to act as an older, wiser brother exercising superior …
JUNE 2, 2026 – (Cont.) In anticipation of the 50th reunion, I’d said to a non-Bowdoin friend, “I don’t want to engage in a lot of ‘remember the time our freshman year when [we engaged in some puerile prank that we thought was so clever—guffaw, guffaw]?’ I’d much rather stick to (high-minded) talk about people’s …
JUNE 1, 2026 – (Cont.) I remember the time about a decade after I’d left the venerable St. Paul firm of Briggs & Morgan for greener pastures over in Minneapolis, when I had occasion to attend a business meeting in the same old First National Bank Building where Briggs still occupied five floors of the …
MAY 31, 2026 – (Cont.) At Logan maybe it was the hard plastic bins dropping down into the pick-up slots below the conveyor belt; OR . . . perhaps it was the young TSA man barking sharp directives with such volume they sounded like reprimands before I’d done anything wrong; OR . . . another …
MAY 30, 2026 – Blogger’s note: I’m on assignment. Stay close . . . and in tune.
MAY 29, 2026 – The intensity of today’s reunion activities revealed that yesterday’s engagements were in the wading end of the pool. Today we all swam in much deeper waters, starting with chatting up a storm over breakfast and in the case of seven of us, turning off the lights on the last conversations of …
MAY 28, 2026 – Today we climbed out of bed early to make the day-long trek from Minnesota to Maine (via Massachusetts) for my 50th college class reunion. To be truthful, four years ago when I first started hearing about plans for this occasion, my thoughts were focused on the pending stem cell transplant I …
MAY 27, 2026 – It is in our nature, I guess, that when the Northwind blows, forcing us to pull our collars up and walk with folded arms to trap more body heat, we complain about the cold. Yet, when the tables are turned and the Southwind sends its hot and humid breath across the …
MAY 26, 2026 – I don’t know what I did to wind up in a family full of grammarians, but that’s what happened to me. One of my most searing memories as a teenager away at school was receiving from a certain family member, a Xeroxed (back when such was a word) version of one …
MAY 25, 2026 – This morning after breakfast and Java, I sat at the log dining table at the Red Cabin, pecking away at correspondence on my laptop. Facing the lake exactly 75 feet from the windows, I periodically looked up to check on the scenery. A splendid breeze frolicked across the two-mile fetch from …
MAY 24, 2026 – My parents, bless their souls, were philhellenes and to a lesser extent, Romanophiles—lesser because as I remember my dad explaining when I was quite young, for the most part, the Ancient Romans were “copycats,” the Ancient Greeks having been the source of so much that later evolved in the hands and …
MAY 23, 2026 – I remember asking my mother one evening when I was young, “Would you rather be great or famous?” Without answering it, Mother turned the question around. “What would you rather be?” “Great,” I said. Of course mother had to ask why. “Because . . . Anything can make a person famous if …
MAY 22, 2026 – Yesterday, I attended a quarterly board meeting of a non-profit organization, with which I’ve been involved for some years, the World Press Institute. Its 65-year (thus far) mission is to promote free and open journalism around the world. The founding concept was an annual fellowship program anchored here in the U.S. …
MAY 21, 2026 – To those of us who’ve been on the anti-Trump train since he’s been in the public eye, his multiple disorders have never been a mystery or a surprise. As we’ve seen for 11 years, with Trump, what you see is exactly what you get, which is appalling. For me personally, this …
MAY 20, 2026 – I didn’t forget. Early this morning when I first saw today’s date, I immediately thought of Dad. If he hadn’t died 16 years ago earlier this month, he would’ve turned 104 today. My three sisters, independently of one another and of me, were also thinking about Dad today. Later this morning …
MAY 19, 2026 – Today at high noon I joined two other lawyers with whom I’d teamed up in a contested real estate matter for the past two years. What had started out as the prospective sale of farmland turned into a full-blown lawsuit, including a protracted appeal, followed ultimately, by a closing on a …
MAY 18, 2026 – . . . North Korea! Or more precisely, Kim Jung-un. Or more accurately, the loser is . . . the United States and nuclear non-proliferation. Now that the Republicans have settled on a ratio existendi ex post facto for the war against Iran—namely, keeping nuclear weapons out of the hands of …
MAY 17, 2026 – “Seventeenth of May.” Though I’m of Swedish heritage, I have no problem celebrating Syttende Mai—”Seventeenth of May”—in honor of the Norwegians’ Constitution Day (1814), which marked the country’s independence from Denmark. After all, though my wife’s paternal grandmother was Swedish, as was mine, her paternal grandfather was Norwegian, just as my …
MAY 16, 2026 – A year ago, I worked myself to exhaustion planting Norway pine and white spruce seedlings, mostly in the tree garden of Björnholm. As is the case this spring, the ground then was so dry, a walk through the woods mimicked the Kellogg’s Rice Krispies jingle—snap, crackle, pop. After planting the seedlings, …
MAY 15, 2026 – Departing the big city at 9:30 this morning, I enjoyed a beautiful spring drive to the Red Cabin. Once there, After unloading the car and wolfing down lunch, I spent a good chunk of the afternoon hosing off the screens, letting them dry in the zephyr off the lake, then hauling …
MAY 14, 2026 – The other night I stayed up way past my usual bedtime to watch to completion the Netflix movie, Nuremberg, based on Jack El-Hai’s book, The Nazi and the Psychiatrist: Hermann Görning, Dr. Douglas M. Kelley, and a Fatal Meeting of Minds at the End of WW II. The movie stars Russell …
MAY 13, 2026 – Yesterday evening my wife and I joined a third of the population of the Twin Cities, it seemed, inside a middle school gymnasium for . . . an orchestra concert. The performers were fourth-through-sixth grade string players from each of the district’s half-dozen elementary schools. Included among the fourth-grade violinists was …
MAY 12, 2026 – Today I inadvertently observed the Dear Leader’s press conference, so-called, before his departure for “Chi-EENa.” One more blather session such as that one and the country will need therapy along with remediation. In my jaundiced view, what was readily apparent in Trump’s interactions with reporters was how remarkably out of touch …
MAY 11, 2026 – If Elon and his Tech Bros have their Apple wallets set on cruising to arid, dusty, rocky, lifeless Mars and pitching their tents there, I say, “Go right ahead . . . make my day” . . . er, “nine months there, nine months back, plus the time it takes to …