Author Mark Munger (Cloquet River Press)

Islam for Dummies  by Professor Malcolm Clark (2003. Wiley. ISBN 978-0-764-55503-9)

Though I’ve been a Christian my whole life, I like many modern men and women, still search and seek for answers. Answers to the questions: “Why are we here?” and “Is this all there is?” and other philosophical/religious queries. So, I’ve not only read the Bible multiple times trying to understand the roots and underpinnings of my own faith, but I’ve read The Book of Moron cover to cover (there’s a review in the Archives section of this blog) and last year, I began to study and read The Koran. With The Book of Mormon, I took up my quest to make it through the text not so much because I wished to understand the faith behind the faces of Mitt Romney, Glen Beck, and Marie Osmond, but more as research for my novel about polygamy, Laman’s River. On the other hand, my study of The Koran is fueled by a desire to understand why religious zealots across the world, but most predominantly in the birthplace of all three major monotheistic branches of faith-the Middle East-deign to blow themselves and innocent men, women, and children to oblivion, all in the name of Allah. I wasn’t finding the answer to my question reading the text of The Koran and so, I thought maybe Professor Clark’s tutorial could assist my research.

Like all “Dummies” texts, this book is very straight forward, well organized, and written at about the high school level, all of which I found refreshing. The one major drawback to my copy of the book (ordered through The Bookstore at Fitger’s) is that much has happened in the world regarding conflicts within and involving the Moslems since 2003, the year my copy was published. My edition of the book ends not long after the United States invaded Afghanistan and Iraq on the heels of 9/11/2000. So there is nothing in the book dealing with the Arab Spring, the rise of ISIS, and the more recent bombings, attacks, and conflicts within and without Islam. Still, Clark’s effort does give the reader a basic primer in the faith, people, culture, and history of Islam. I obtained, by spending my time with this book, a basic understanding of the religion and an appreciation, I think, that we, the West, have underestimated the import of Islam on the world. I am nearly through my reading of The Koran and, having now gained a better framework for reading the text through Professor Clark’s work, I may have to re-read Mohammad’s message to his people to gain a fuller understanding of how it is connected to today’s events.

What I came away with after racing through Islam for Dummies is an appreciation for the variety of branches of this faith along with a comprehension that the conflicts between peoples who adhere to Islam, such as the Iraqis and the Iranians, have much to do with their views of Islam and The Prophet, causing religious disagreement and discord not unlike the debates that rage between Catholics, Evangelicals, and mainstream Protestants in Christianity. The difference may be that, in large part, because the Christian faith is centuries older than Islam, Christianity may have, through the Reformation, heresy trials, and various purges, completed its own period of conflict and unrest and human tragedy whereas Islam remains in that transitional phase, sorting out the message handed down by God through his Messenger. Perhaps, as Catholics and Lutherans have finally put up the sword, so too will Sunni and Shi’a come to a place of peaceful co-existence, and also come to a place of quiet and calm with respect to the non-Moslem world as well. One can only hope.

4 stars out of 5. A bit dated but a valuable resource.

Peace.

Mark

I grew up in Piedmont Heights. My dad was an undersized kid and not particularly athletic, a boy who never participated in organized high school sports. He was book smart and blessed with flawless memory, traits that allowed him to become the first person in his family to earn a college degree. My mom was pretty and petite. Raised by parents who valued books and music and art, Mom wasn’t an athlete in any sense of the word, and even if she had been so inclined, there were no opportunities for her to participate in school sports in the 1940s. Girls took home economics and learned to sew and cook and handle roles of domesticity. Girls did not, in 1946, the year my mom graduated from high school, shoot pucks or grab rebounds or head soccer balls as members of varsity athletic teams.

After graduating from Denfeld in 1945, Dad enlisted in the Army. He wasn’t around when Lloyd Holm took over the reigns of the Denfeld boys’ basketball team in 1946. Holm inherited a talented but undisciplined group of young men. The new coach worked the boys hard, instilling in them the notion that, alone, each of them was gifted, but together they were a force to be reckoned with.

Coach Holm’s vision of what could be culminated in a thrilling 46-44 victory over Crosby-Ironton on the storied hardwood of Williams Arena. My dad, as I said, wasn’t around to witness the one and only time Duluth Denfeld grabbed the brass ring and won the state championship in basketball. But Mom, who graduated from Denfeld a year earlier and remained in town to attend St. Scholastica, convinced Grandpa Jack to drive her and three of her girlfriends to Minneapolis to see the big game. Mom returned to Duluth with an appreciation for what those 10 young players accomplished.

My dad completed his obligation to Uncle Sam and married my mom. Over the years, as my parents raised a family, they shared the legacy of the ’47 Hunter team with my brother, my sister, and me as an example of what hard work and dedication to task can accomplish.

But to me, the boys who dispatched Crosby-Ironton in that championship game were more than just photographs hanging in the Denfeld gym. Those boys became men who became role models for a wire-rimmed, skinny, unathletic kid who lived on Chambersburg Avenue.

Though better suited for debate or speech, I found myself trying to emulate the ’47 team. I participated in varsity skiing and football, even though my talent for sports was marginal. I pushed myself athletically because Tessier, Nace, and Monson weren’t just names of long-forgotten heroes. Those men were, along with team manager Bob Scott, my friends. They were my hunting and fishing and skiing partners. And they were my mentors: men of integrity who helped guide me through life.

Sadly, all those members of the team have passed on. But on Oct. 8, when the entire 1947 boys’ basketball team was inducted into the Denfeld High School Hall of Fame, my friends were not only present in spirit; their voices could be plainly heard above the din of the audience seated in the storied Denfeld auditorium.

At the induction ceremony, Ken Sunnarborg introduced the members of the ’47 squad who are still alive and who were in attendance: Sunnarborg, Eugene “Pug” Norlander, Howard Tucker, and Keith Stolen.

After brief remarks, Sunnarborg turned the mic over to Norlander, and Norlander had a surprise in store for the family, friends, and alumni in attendance. A woman with no connection to the school discovered a sleeve of 78-rpm records for sale in a far-distant garage. After purchasing the records, the woman realized the discs contained the complete radio broadcast of the 1947 Minnesota State Basketball Championship Game. The woman read the players’ names printed on the album cover, used the internet to find Norlander, contacted him, and sent him the record.

Those at the hall of fame gathering heard the climactic final two minutes of the 1947 championship game — digitized to a quality unknown in the 1940s and complete with announcers, crowd noise, players’ grunts, the squeak of rubber sneakers against wood, the bang of leather on steel, and the swoosh of ball through net — for the first time in 70 years.

“Monson grabs a rebound.”

“Nace passes the ball.”

“Tessier takes the shot.”

As the voice of the radio announcer faded and as the present-day audience rose to its feet and applauded, tears formed. Tears of joy as I considered what it was like for my mom and her girlfriends to be at Williams Arena that night. Tears of sadness for the passing of friends, once young, then old, now gone. Tears of pride for being part of a unique and timeless bond shared by generations of Denfeld graduates.

May today’s Hunters — both young men and young women — carry on the proud legacy of clean play, dedication to community, and mentoring that made the 1947 state basketball championship team worthy of induction into the Denfeld Hall of Fame.

(An edited version of this piece first appeared in the Duluth News Tribune)

Troop 106 Camping in Munger’s Field

OK. Confession time again. I’m borrowing the title of this piece from the book and the old Fred MacMurray movie of the same name. I don’t remember much about either beyond the fact the story involved an adult leader and Boy Scouts. Anyway. On with the story. A few weeks back, I signed up to assist wrangling and guiding seven Scouts and two other adults down the Cloquet River. The route was from my house to the landing off the Bachelor Road: a modest trip, seven miles or so by water, an easy five hour paddle in good weather. There are four DNR tenting campsites (similar to the BWCA sites many of you might be familiar with: clearings in the wilderness complete with a steel fire ring and, somewhere close by, a pit latrine) along the way where paddlers can pitch tents. A perfect route for novice canoeists. Given the water was high, the result of late summer deluges, there was little chance the boys would spill into the dark, black water of the Cloquet.

Friday night. I made apologies as the Scouts and their parents set up camp in my backyard. Seems, as always, I was double booked. I had to make an appearance at a birthday party of a colleague a few miles away. After setting up my tent, and with promises of being back before dark, Rene’ and I drove off. The forecast was problematic: drenching rains were promised. By the time I returned, a storm had briefly doused the campsite and everyone was tucked into their sleeping bags. I released Kena, my black Lab, from her kennel, let her do her business, and then the two of us clambered into my tent.

“Judge Munger?”

A male voice woke me up from a fitful sleep. I grabbed my cell phone. 4:05am. Kena remained curled against my hip, seemingly unconcerned by the intrusion.

“Yes?”

“Trooper Smith. State Patrol. I have a search warrant for a blood draw.”

Crap.

I’d forgotten that I was “on call” for the weekend; which, in judicial parlance means I needed to be available to sign legal documents for law enforcement. My eyes focused. I unzipped the tent to a downbeat of wicked rain. “Yes. I’m here.”

The Trooper handed me an application and warrant. I studied the documents by headlamp. The officer swore to the contents of the documents. I signed them. Then, he was on his way. Kena put her head down and returned to snoring.

In the morning, a light rain, interspersed with infrequent squalls, stalled over the river. As the sky lightened from black to gray, boys and dads struggled out of their bags. I started a fire. Older Scouts filled pans with water for oatmeal. Orange drink was mixed. Bags of apples and oranges emerged from the food bins. Breakfast bars were opened. By ten, the mist and rain diminished enough to dry out the tents. We broke camp, loaded the canoes, and slid them down the muddy bank into the current. I wore hiking sandals to steady the canoes as boys and dads took up their seats. The mist returned, at times pummeling us with more significant rain. The sun remained absent. The wind whipped up. Paddling became more of an effort. The group ducked into Hunter Lake, an ox bow off the main channel, taking time to investigate an old Scout camp, a beautiful piece of property, Camp Bunkowske. “Wonder why this isn’t used anymore?” was a question that boys and dads asked more than once as we explored. I knew the history of the place and shared what I knew. And then, we were back in our canoes, headed downstream. Rich changed positions with a young Scout, becoming the stern man in his son’s canoe. My new partner took the bow seat in my 18′ Grumman square stern and promptly launched into a dissertation on just about every topic under the sun. My new partner’s chatter never stopped. I tried to maintain patience, which, as anyone who knows me will attest, is a fragile component of my persona. Despite the multitudinous questions and answers launched between bow and stern, we got on just fine.

Hunter Lake.

Troop 106 pushed on. The younger Scouts interjected frequently, “Are we there yet?” “Just around the next bend,” I’d reply as rain dripped off my waterproof bush hat. My lie briefly quelled the questioning but only for the time it took another Scout to draw his breath and bring the query ’round. Shortly after noon, we landed at Twin Pines campsite, our destination and lodging place for the evening.

Paddling the Cloquet.

Twin Pines.

After staking down my tent and unrolling my sleeping pad and bag, I threw on my life jacket and took a stab at tossing a dew worm and spinner into the tannin stained water of the Cloquet. I had one hit but landed no fish. After a hot lunch, with the rain gone but the sun remaining stubborn, I claimed my mummy bag and took a short nap. My neck was giving me grief and it seemed that even the cushion of a PermaRest wasn’t enough to let me slumber. But tired from the short paddle and the exertion making camp, I was soon asleep. In the late afternoon, we explored the ridge behind the campsite, following a four wheeler track for a mile or so through residual legacy white and red pines. After a dinner of brats, hot dogs, mac and cheese, and s’mores, we sat around the campfire as night descended. As the sky darkened, a pair of otters chirped and splashed nearby, oblivious to human visitors. A deer (we never did see whether it was a buck or a doe) swam from one side of the watercourse to the other. A train rumbled across a bridge downstream. The locomotive’s lonesome whistle reminded us that, though we were surrounded by forest, we weren’t far from civilization. A Barred Owl hooted. Bats swooped in and out of the trees. As night fell, the sky opened up and we tried to guess constellations.

Morning fog, Twin Pines.

In the morning, after  a breakfast of steaming coffee, hot chocolate, oatmeal, breakfast bars, and fresh fruit, we policed the campsite. “Leave no trace” means exactly that. Rich and his son found a tree frog in their tent. I’d heard the amphibian calling earlier in the morning when I got up to do my business. I placed the frog away from the hubbub of breaking camp.

A short paddle brought us to Bowman (Side) Lake, another ox bow, where the troop rested and considered the warming morning. I tossed worm and spinner with no success. My canoeing partner grew reflectively silent. We paddled past the Beaver River’s concourse with the Cloquet and an osprey nest built atop power poles. We made the Bachelor Road landing ahead of schedule, unloaded our canoes, and waited for transportation back to Munger’s Farm.

The group, minus two.

End of the line, the DWP bridge in the distance.

Mark Twain. Will Rogers. Garrison Keillor. Each generation seems blessed with a humorist who, instead of standing off in the distance and pointing out the incongruities in American life, stands shoulder to shoulder with ordinary men and women. Our homegrown satirists have descended into the muck and mire of race and politics and religion to identify the best and the worst of America. Using words as sharp as a surgeon’s scalpel, our beloved social commentators have made us understand how far we, as a nation, have come and how far we have yet to go. Now the best of them, a man who combined music and poetry and narrative to reflect on our national pulse, is hanging it up.

I was just a kid behind the wheel of a battered Chevy Chevette negotiating I-494 from my apartment in Bloomington to downtown St. Paul on my way to my first “real” job as a process-server; going to law school at night. On those early morning drives, I’d tune into Minnesota Public Radio (MPR) and listen to The Morning Show, a program featuring musical guests scheduled to be on A Prairie Home Companion (PHC), Keillor’s iconic Saturday evening radio variety show. Charlie McGuire, Leo Kottke, Prudence Johnson, Bill Staines and a plethora of other musicians enlivened my morning drives. Hailing from late seventies Duluth—the rebirth of the Arrowhead’s arts and culture and music scene still decades in the future—The Morning Show’s cavalcade of music was a revelation. In addition, faux advertisements and commentary and puns and jokes intertwined with the music. It all added up to an auditory experience unlike anything I’d ever encountered. I was hooked. My love of all things Keillor became engrained in my Northern Minnesota soul. Once I married my sweetheart and Rene’ joined me in the Cities, we made frequent trips back to Duluth. During our drives home, we tuned into MPR and listened to PHC.

Decades passed. Rene’ and I are still together. We’ve raised four sons and we’re now grandparents. Our boys grew up listening to PHC on family vacations. Our boys have also seen Mr. Keillor at the Fitzgerald Theater and at the Minnesota State Fair Grandstand. They‘ve grown up listening to The News from Lake Wobegon. They’ve been raised on Garrison’s wicked political satire. Assessing Mr. Keillor’s impact on my family and the countless other American families who tuned into his broadcasts is difficult. One doesn’t want to exaggerate. That would be, well, so un-Norwegian, so un-Lake Wobegonian. And yet, it’s markedly true: Garrison Keillor’s renditions of Americana have been like no other. Is the show’s draw its not-so-subtle nostalgia, a desire for a simpler time, a more innocent world? Or is it simply the great music that draws us in? Or a mixture of the two?

It’s Friday night. Labor Day weekend. I’m sitting next to my wife beneath the soaring steel canopy of the Minnesota State Fair Grandstand. Over the course of three hours, a seventy-four year old man who’s endured health scares, multiple marriages, and occasionally disappointing book sales (as all fiction authors and English majors must!) stands in a pristinely white suit (perhaps unconsciously claiming the stage persona of Samuel Clemens?), and leads the house band and guest musicians through gospel, opera, choral arrangements, folk, rock, and swing. With help from the omnipresent radio acting company, current presidential candidates make appearances as voices for GPS devices and a skittish private eye meets The Donald. We laugh. We sing. We applaud. The hour grows late. The host, cast, and musicians take a final bow. The old man at the center of it all says he’ll be back next year. Fireworks explode above the emptying stage and illuminate the night sky. We rise from hard seats and head towards the parking lot.

Very soon folk musician Chris Thiel, a member of Nickel Creek and the Punch Brothers, will begin hosting a very different sort of Prairie Home Companion. There will be no news from Lake Wobegon. Guy Noir will no longer sleuth the airways. Longtime sponsors The Ketchup Advisory Board and Powdermilk Biscuits will pull their advertisements. But rural America’s voice won’t be absent from our culture. Mr. Keillor will continue to narrate The Writer’s Almanac; a podcast I listen to for inspiration every morning before I write. He’ll pen novels set in the little town that time forgot. He’ll craft essays for The New Yorker and national newspapers where he’ll challenge us to aspire to be better than we are. And maybe, just maybe, on Labor Day weekend, 2017, the tall, gangly man in the white linen suit will climb down from the grandstand stage, microphone in hand, and sing “America the Beautiful” with ten thousand fellow Minnesotans.

Things change and, as families drive across this great land, their car radios tuned to MPR, or as dairy farmers listen in as they muck out their barns, or as older folks settle into recliners listening in as they wait out winter, it’s unlikely that Chris Thiel will make folks forget Garrison Keillor. But as the old man himself might say, “Give the kid a chance. You might like what you hear.”

I know I will.

Peace.

Mark

(c) 2016

(An edited version of this essay appeared in the Duluth News Tribune on 09/11/2016)

Hackensack, MN Art and Book Fair 2016

Before we left home, the shit literally hit the fan. Rene’ and I were due to leave the house early on Friday morning. I had plans to load the car, tuck away the dogs (our son Matt had agreed to feed, water, and exercise our Lab and Dachshund), and hear the hum of rubber on asphalt before 8:00am. Didn’t happen that way. Here’s why.

First, I woke up sicker than a dog. Headache. Upset stomach. Body aching all over and unable to decide whether it should puke or let loose from the other end.

“Maybe we should stay home,” my wife of 38 years thoughtfully suggested.

“Can’t do it,” I replied, dragging my way out of bed and towards the shower. “Gotta set up early tomorrow. Besides, we’re supposed to be at Halvorsons’ tonight for dinner.”

Bob and Dode Halvorson are friends from law school. Bob was a year behind me at William Mitchell, someone I played intramural softball and football with and shared cheap beer in the Irish bars of St. Paul. Dodie is his wife. They invited us to meet up with three other couples with ties to the Dorsey Law Firm, the place I spent two of my four years working my way through night law school. The Floms, good friends from Moorhead, and the Liesches and the Buckvolds, who hail from the Twin Cities, were to meet up and spend some time together at the Halvorson cottage on Fish Hook Lake near Park Rapids. The other folks have gathered annually since our days together at Dorsey. We were late invitees, the result of another of the couples we spent considerable time with, Mark and Debbie Ginder, passing away in the past year. I didn’t want to miss the chance to reconnect with people who helped define me as a person and a lawyer, whose support was essential to completing four years of night school while juggling a full time job, marriage, fatherhood, and working as a caretaker at a Wilder Foundation high rise.

The warmth of the shower did little to curb my aches and pains. I dressed, ate some half-toasted wheat bread slathered with peanut butter, woke Jack (our 18 year old son), let the dogs out to do their business, packed a suitcase with clothing for two days and nights away from home, and started lugging boxes of books out to Rene’s Nissan Rogue.

“Damn kids,” I muttered as I passed Jack on his way upstairs to get a towel.

“What?”

“Not you. Matt’s boys. Daycare bug. It got me…”

“Oh.”

Rene’ repeated that I should get back into bed and call off the trip.

I need to get out and get Boomtown moving, I thought, highlighting that the Northwoods Art and Book Festival, a neat little gathering in a tiny tourist hamlet a half hour south of Park Rapids, has always been a great place to sell my books. Plus we need to make our commitment to the Halvorsons and the others. Who knows. We miss this invite and, well, we just might not get invited again.

“No, I need to do this.”

“Fine.”

“Can you drive?” I asked as I watched Jack drive away in his blue Matrix.

Then, I heard water running in the basement. I tumbled down the stairs towards Jack’s bathroom. What I found wasn’t pretty.

The lower level of our home has a bathroom that sits slightly up slope from our septic system. Whenever the baffle in the solids tank is clogged (usually with toilet paper), the sewage and gray water reverses course. The noise coming from the basement bath? It was the toilet overflowing with foul water and bits of toilet paper. But that wasn’t all. The tub was half-filled with the same disgusting mess. The words that came out of my mouth, uttered like the wail of a father over a fallen child, can’t be printed here in a family-friendly blog.

I’ll spare you the details. But I did learn something new. We’ve been in our house for 16 years. By the time the septic guy arrived, I’d managed to get the sewage flowing again. The alarm in the house was blaring but the poop water was diminishing.

“Here’s another thing,” the kid said, pulling on a white handle fitted between the solid and the liquid tanks in our front yard. “Your filter’s clogged.”

“Didn’t even know there was a filter between the tanks,” I said, my head pounding, my legs shaking from the bug.

“Well, now you do. Needs to be cleaned at least once a year.”

I slept the entire four hour drive to the Super 8 in Park Rapids. By the time we arrived, though I wasn’t fit as a fiddle, my headache had ebbed and my guts had calmed to the point where we could register at the motel and head out to the Halvorsons’ for dinner. Despite the anxiety of the shit storm and the resulting cleanup (I did as much as I could but knew that a more concentrated, more thorough scrubbing of the bathroom, tub, and sump room awaited) the dinner of salad and steak, prepared by Bob and Rita Buckvold and their daughter, was wonderful. The company? With old friends, the stories get retold, the love is rekindled, and the years seem to melt away.

Sunset on Fish Hook Lake, Park Rapids.

Saturday morning. Rene’ made arrangements with Joe and Marcia Liesch to get a ride from the motel out to the Halvorson place on Fish Hook Lake. She was fast asleep when I pulled away from the Super 8 in her Rogue, headed south on the backroads for Hackensack. I’d gulped down a cup of motel coffee, eaten a hardboiled egg and some yogurt, but still felt the affects of the bug as I meandered towards the art festival. By the time I pulled up to the Hackensack Community Center where my rented table was waiting for me, the illness had run its course.

You might be asking why, given I was nearly at death’s door (OK, that’s a huge exaggeration but damn it, I did feel like crap!), would I drag my sick body and my long-suffering wife all the way across

Another view of Fish Hook Lake.

Minnesota to sit in a hard metal chair behind a rented folding table selling books to strangers? Well, the simple answer is, of all the events I’ve done over the years, the Northwoods Art and Book event is on that I can always count on.

“Oh, I just loved _____ (fill in the blank). Do you have anything new?” is a common comment and question from readers. 20 or more authors set up shop in the UCC Church across the street from the community center. I choose to pay a little higher fee to be isolated from my brother and sister authors. Why? Less competition, pure and simple. If I’m one of only a few, rather than one of many, trying to foist my words on strangers, odds are, I’ll sell better. This year was no exception.

Art and Book Fesatival, 2016.

The rewarding thing about these events is that time and time again, kind folks who’ve purchased a book in the past stop by and buy another Munger read. In the 16 years I have been selling words to strangers, I’ve only heard a handful of negative comments. I accept them, as I accept praise, reminding myself of Hemingway’s admonition that, if you revel in the glory of the critics, you must accept their condemnation as well. Boomtown, my as-yet-to-be-launched murder mystery/legal thriller sold well. At the close of the festival, I said my goodbyes, packed up my boxes, and hit the road. Within an hour, I was back at the Halvorson cottage, a Bent Paddle Black in hand, floating on the calm waters of the prairie lake. The Floms joined us and, as we sat down for dinner with friends, joined by the Halvorson’s daughter Zoe and her boyfriend, the old stories flowed. I’m sure the twenty-something child who grew up with most of these folks had heard every tale from our law school days. And yet, she pretended to listen…

Sunday morning. We were back on the road, headed south. The last leg of our trip took us to Target Field to watch a Twins game with my friends, Judge John DeSanto, and former Chief Public Defender, Fred Friedman. We set up this event months ago. Originally our wives were to join us. A week ago, Fred stopped in at my office to reveal that Mrs. Friedman and Mrs. DeSanto would not be attending. I kept this bit of news to myself, disclosing it only as we drew closer to the Twin Cities. My wife wasn’t particularly pleased to learn the other ladies had bowed out. But she’s a good sport and after letting off a bit of steam, she quieted down and accepted that she was the only girl in the group.

It was a great day for a ballgame. I was hoping that the resurgent Twins would make a showing. When Dozier hit a bomb to left to tie the game, I thought, Damn, this is gonna be fun. But by the time we shuffled out of the ballpark later that afternoon, the Twinks had been on the receiving end of a 11-4 shellacking. The bumbling hometown favorites had nearly as many hits (6) as they had errors (4). But again, sitting with two mentors who I admire a great deal, trading stories, talking law and baseball and families, well, it really didn’t matter what the score was.

After a pit stop in Forest Lake at Famous Dave’s, we roared onto the freeway and were home slightly after eight Sunday night. It had been a grueling, tiring, exhausting yet delightful weekend. I wasn’t even pissed off or upset when I grabbed my scrub bucket, cleaning supplies, paper towels, and made my way into the basement bathroom to begin the process of scouring.

Peace.

Mark

Target Field

Three old guys at the game.

The only girl at the game…