Mark Goes Shopping for a Dress

Mall of America

Mall of America

The news was expected. Our second son, Dylan, and his long time significant other, Shelly Helgeson, got engaged over the Christmas break. The normally recalcitrant and emotionally reserved young man “popped the question” to his lady on Christmas Eve and presented her a rock the size of a small potato. She, of course said yes. But, as anyone who has gone through the process of modern marrying knows, the engagement is just the “tip of the iceberg”, so to speak. The next decision for the fated couple is: When? Well, the date was quickly set: September 20, 2014. Less than ten months away. Then, of course, come the really, really difficult decisions: Vegas or big wedding? Religious or civil ceremony? Big party or small gathering? The kids have settled all those issues, including where to hold the reception. The actual location of the ceremony (religious, which makes all the assorted parents smile) is still in the wind, though not for lack of trying. Seems the person in charge of such things at Sacred Heart in Duluth is no longer in her position. We’re all waiting to hear back as to whether the date selected by the kids is still available. If not, a change will need to be made. But of course, for the two mom’s involved in the process, more so for the mother of the bride but almost as important for Rene’, the mother of the groom, is this looming question: “What will I wear for the wedding?”

Now we guys, we have it easy. As the father of the groom, I will join my three other sons, Matt, Chris, and Jack, renting tuxedos along with the other guys in the groom’s wedding party. Simply show up, allow someone to tuck a tape measure up your crotch, stand around for a few moments feeling awkward, pay the tab, and the deed is done. All of the lamentations that accompany the decision making the two moms must go through are lacking. The choices are made for we men and there’s no allowance for deviation. I like simple. I like being a guy in a wedding. I wouldn’t want to be girl in this crazed process, bride, bride’s maid, or mom, for anything. Too many choices to be made. Too many decisions about my least favorite thing on the planet Earth: clothing.

So what’s up with the snapshot of the carnival at the Mall of America, you ask? Well, typically, I like to stay as far away from my wife and her clothes shopping as possible. After 35 years of marriage, I know the traps that a female on the hunt for a dress to wear at a formal event can set for her significant other. Been there; not falling for that. But sometimes, you just can’t say “no”. Like when your wife wants you to drive down with her to shop for a dress to wear at your second son’s wedding. So, a week ago tomorrow, when my wife proposed that I plop my wide ass in the driver’s seat of the Pacifica and join her in her sojourn to the Twin Cities on her vision quest, I had little choice. I said “yes”.

When we arrived at the Mall of America parking ramp in Bloomington, it was filled to the brim with cars and trucks.

“It’s pretty damn full,” I muttered, still a bit reluctant in my role as supportive husband.

“I wonder what’s up?”

The reasons behind the packed house at the Mall on a below zero Saturday in January became readily apparent as we stood at the railing on the 3rd floor of the shopping center and looked down on a huge crowd gathered in front of the mall’s stage. We’d wandered down from the tundra and walked smack dab into some sort of national cheerleading competition. The hallways were crammed with preteen and teen girls of all shapes, colors, and sizes walking with parents, watching other girls performing routines on the stage, or shopping in between their events.

“I think we found the reason for the packed parking lot.”

My wife nodded.

“I’m starved,” she said, looking around for the nearest eatery.

“Twin Cities Grill?”

“Sounds good.”

That’s one thing about the Mall of America. Whether it’s the Twin Cities Grill, Crave, Tony Roma’s, or a host of other classy joints, the chow is pretty darn good. Far better than the food court at the Miller Hill Mall in Duluth. The Twin City Grill has a bit of something for everyone. Our lunches were perfect. But the delay in the inevitable dress shopping was short-lived.

Mother of the Groom

Mother of the Groom

 

“Call me if you find something you want me to see,” I offered, standing in the bustling throng of girls in short skirts, shorts, sparkles, and war paint.

“I will. I think I’ll check out Macy’s and Nordstrom’s. Let me guess. You’re going to Barnes and Noble.”

Indeed. We went our separate ways, connected eternally by not only love and vows, but by technology. I wandered around the BN store on the main floor of the mall, reminiscing about the two occasions the store had me come down and do readings and signings of my books. That was a long time ago, when BN was more interested in local authors. With Amazon and eBooks kicking the shit out of bricks and mortar bookstores, it’s nearly impossible for a little regional writer like me to get his face behind a table hawking books in any of the BN stores throughout the state. As I strolled around the store, stopping to peruse a copy of the Qua ran,  a sacred text I intend to read sooner than later, I grew weary of thinking about the status of books in America. I left the store and ambled around, people watching.

Like so many couples today, the message I received from my wife via cell phone wasn’t audible but in the form of a text.

“Frustrated. Can’t find anything. Looking for coffee.”

“Where are you?”

We made plans to meet in the food court for a cup of coffee. I met my wife at the top of the escalator.

“There’s nothing for summer out yet,” Rene’ said as we sat near a railing in the food court and looked out over the carnival atmosphere of the Mall of America. “It’s all winter stuff. Stuff for old women and little girls.”

“Nothing for a voluptuous, mature babe?”

My wife ignored my tainted compliment.

We left the big mall and spent some time at Rosedale, one of the old standbys my wife likes to visit when she is in a serious shopping mood. Again, Rene’ couldn’t find a dress she liked, one suitable for the mother of the groom.

In the end, we headed back north, dressless but happy. We made our ritual stop at Tobie’s in Hinckley for pastries and something to drink. The apple fritter and the cold milk I devoured as I drove home seemed a perfect end to a day with my wife.

Legoland

Legoland

Peace.

Mark

Posted in Blog Archive | 2 Comments

Lacking Grace

Red

Red Knife by William Kent Krueger (2008. Atria. ISBN 978-1-4165-5675-6)

There is no question that Krueger is one of Minnesota’s most beloved and avidly read authors. Along with Brian Freeman, John Sanford, and Vince Flynn, he forms the North Star State’s pantheon of mystery/detective/thriller writers with national audiences. There is also little question that this author can put fingers to keyboard and create stellar work. Witness my review of Ordinary Grace (see the “Reviews” tab above and click “Books” or use this blog’s search function at the upper right) wherein I wrote:

Anytime an author writes outside his or her genre and tries something new, regardless of the result, they deserve respect. Here, Krueger, much like John Grisham did with A Painted House not only tested the waters of literary fiction but he swam confidently across them.

I rated Ordinary Grace 5 stars out of 5, a level of esteem for a writer that few achieve in my reviews. So when my aunt and fellow writer, Susanne Schuler, mailed me her copy of Red Knife, I was eager to take up the fictional journey of Krueger’s Irish/Ojibwe protagonist, Cork O’Connor. I hadn’t visited the fictional town of Aurora, Minnesota (not to be confused with the actual NE Minnesota locale by that name) since Purgatory Ridge, the second book in the series. I was hoping that the tired writing that eventually enters into all successful authors of a series had been reinvigorated and ingrained with the literary tenor of Grace. Unfortunately, it hadn’t.

It’s not that Red Knife isn’t well written. There’s no question this author knows how to lay down sentences into paragraphs into pages into chapters. But rather than being propelled along by a suspenseful, engaging plot, I found myself sort of drifting through the story, like the canoe on the book’s cover. The players, including Cork, pretty much emulate cutouts standing inside a child’s dollhouse; there’s little unveiling of their inner demons, their pasts, their dreams. I found myself feeling like, as one reviewer wrote on Amazon, watching actors reading lines on a movie set rather than having all my senses engaged in the active task of reading. In addition, the citizen reviewers who have taken Krueger to task for the simplistic and bloody ending are right on: The carnage doesn’t add anything to the story and it goes against type that Cork O’Connor, a generally virtuous protagonist,  would suddenly capitulate and join in the slaughter.

I also wonder about the Ojibwe community of Minnesota and how they view this tale. Not that folks who write shouldn’t attempt to write outside their experiences. So far as I know, Mr. Krueger isn’t Native American, or at least, not a member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe. Lacking an ethnic tie to a racial or cultural group being portrayed in a novel isn’t a bar to writing about that group. Hell, in Esther’s Race, I wrote in the first person as an African American, twenty-something, female nurse. If anyone can be criticized for writing about a culture, a skin, that he knows nothing about it would be me. It can be done but it is, I fear, a very delicate task to write outside of one’s ethnicity and gender. Simply tossing a few Ojibwe words or cultural and spiritual references into the mix doesn’t save this tale from coming off as condescending and false. One white man’s view. Others may disagree.

This is a spoiler alert: If you are going to read the book, skip this paragraph! Then there is the final scene in the book. I can’t really explain why the author decided to take a very minor character, a young Goth teen who was a friend of one of the other more visible teens in the story, and make him the centerpiece of a wholly unrelated, exploitative, and unnecessary second coda. Darrell Gallagher’s swan song, where the disaffected youth shoots up the high school Cork’s daughter Annie attends, mimics, in very deliberate ways, actual events that took place at Red Lake High School on the Red Lake Ojibwe Reservation in northwestern Minnesota in 2005. It is unsettling that Krueger didn’t bother to disguise his lifting of the facts and circumstances of that tragic day whole cloth from newspaper accounts in attempt to further sensationalize his fictional story. The addition of the final scene adds absolutely nothing to the main plot. I’ll give you that it’s well written and worthy of exploration in its own right, perhaps with the deft hand and sensibility shown by Krueger in Ordinary Grace, but that’s not what the author does with that scene in this novel.

This is not a terrible book. But as I’ve said in the past regarding other well known authors, the question to be asked is: If the name on the cover wasn’t William Kent Krueger, would this story have been published? Just wondering.

3 and 1/2 stars out of 5.

Peace.

Mark

 

 

Posted in Books | Comments Off on Lacking Grace

Diminutive Tales

Short

Great American Short Stories (Anthology. 1986. Watermill. ISBN 0-8167-0798-7)

One of my three older sons left this book behind on the family bookshelf. It was likely an assigned text in an English class at Hermantown High School that either Matt, or Dylan, or Chris slogged through. Not that my boys aren’t readers. All three of them read for recreation in their own way. But I doubt any of them would have picked this book up and read it but for scholastic compulsion and consequence. This very small (105 pages) collection of short fiction somehow found its way into our upstairs bathroom, which is where, over the past several months, I’ve perused these iconic tales from five American master storytellers. There are some very familiar classics in this collection (like “Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” by Ambrose Bierce,”To Build a Fire” by Jack London, and “The Gift of the Magi” by O. Henry). There are two other stories that I wasn’t familiar with, “The Open Boat” by Stephen Crane, and “A Village Singer” by Mary Wilkins Freeman, both of which are also American very well done.

At the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, short fiction was abundant and accessible to every reader in America. Many writers wrote a short story a week, sold their tales to magazines, and made a living feeding the literary hunger of mainstream America. Sadly, contemporary magazines that feature good, concise short fiction as their contribution to American letters are now the equivalent of the California Condor: nearly extinct and very hard to find. Oh, there are university-sponsored and not-for-profit niche’ publications still providing literary fiction in small doses to readers. But the old days of Look, Atlantic, Ladies Home Journal, and scores of other monthlies featuring short fiction as the centerpieces of their offerings to the American public are long in our past. Reading this thin volume takes a reader back to the era before radio, television, and the internet, back to a time when words on paper were the means of communication. My favorite story in the book? London’s “To Build a Fire”. As I type this, the mercury hangs below zero outside my writing studio in NE Minnesota once again. That fact alone is enough to create a connection between reader and writer in a tale where London profiles a neophyte visitor to the boreal lands near the Arctic Circle who, along with his dog, sets out from the safety of one cabin to meet up with his mates holed up in another remote camp. There are only two characters in the tale: the human and his dog and London does a masterful job of exploring what each of his players experiences during their respective journeys.

A fine way to spend a few moments of time with some very memorable folks.

4 stars out of 5.

Peace.

Mark

Posted in Books | Comments Off on Diminutive Tales

Enough Already!

Shoveling the Rood

Shoveling the roof

The photo above was taken before Christmas. It was one of the many below zero days we, as hardy Northlanders, recently endured. -15F that day, to be exact. Since then, I’ve recorded three days colder than thirty below (-34, -32, and -31) on my car thermometer. Here in the Cloquet River Valley, our weather is usually closer to what’s being experienced in Hibbing or Tower or Embarrass (despite the fact we’re only about ten miles as the eagle flies from the airport) than Duluth’s reported temps.

Speaking of eagles. It’s 7:35am on Saturday as I type this, listening to Ramblin’ Jack Elliot tell a story on West Coast Live on KUMD. There’s no sunrise to greet me as I cobble, first a book review (see below) and then this blog. It’s a gray, dismal, northern Minnesota January day. But the fact that a bald eagle just flew within fifty feet of my iMac, and that it’s nearly twenty degrees above zero outside, well, those facts alone make it worthwhile to be in this place, in this house, living this life.

Anyway, back to the photo. The roof of our house has one place that’s susceptible to ice dams and the all-too-familiar leaks that follow. You can’t really see it in the photo but just below the freshly shoveled shingles, three roofs meet in one place, creating a niche, if you will, perfect for the formation of ice. Ice that, if permitted to perpetuate, will eventually stop the flow of the melt, which in turn, will cause the water to seek the easiest path, which in turn, will seep into the house. That’s happened twice in our 14 years in this house. I don’t want it to happen again. And so, shortly before the craziness of Christmas (both sides of the family were here on two different days to eat, drink, play the dice game for awful presents, and generally have a pretty good time), I donned my Carhartt insulated bibs and jacket, winter boots, gloves, and stocking hat, pulled out our extension ladder, found a couple of snow shovels, and dragged my tired old ass up onto the roof of the house. Four hours later, I had the suspect areas free of snow. I was dog tired and ornery. But all the snow I’d tossed from the roof loomed up at me from the front sidewalk. I took a short break and then, after another half hour of shoveling, the deed was done. At least until the next big snow.

I love snow. I’m a downhill and cross country skier. I also own snowshoes, though I rarely use them, preferring instead the steady glide of skis to tromping through knee high powder on aluminum and mesh. But the point is, with the temperature hovering close to deadly for most of the holiday season, my opportunities to ski on the trails that run through our land have been limited. Since November, I’ve only been able to get out on my cross country skis twice. I haven’t yet made it to Spirit Mountain to test my knees against gravity.

Kena loves -15!

Kena loves -15!

The photo on the left is from one of my two recent excursion into nearby woods. That’s Kena, our seven-month-old Labrador, looking quizzically at her master, as if to ask, “So why, Old Man, are we stopping here?”

Kramer

Kramer

 

General Custer, Survivor of the 1918 Fire

General Custer, Survivor of the 1918 Fire

The dog on the far right is Kramer. He’s a rescue dog that my third son Chris brought home one weekend from River Falls, WI, where he was going to school. Kramer’s up there in years and, unlike Kena, who bounds through the snow like Tigger on Quaaludes, Kramer is content to follow behind my cross country skis, ambling patiently from place to place, staying firmly on the trail. The day these photos were taken, it was -15, the warmest it had been in a week. When I stopped at General Custer, my favorite white pine on the place, and laid back in the deep snow to take photos, Kena promptly jumped on my crotch to lick my face. Daisey, the third dog in my “crew”, stood off to one side watching the pup, satisfied to be outside of our heated garage where she and Kramer had been holed up during the deep freeze. The problem with taking photos of the tree? Beyond the fact there’s a dog’s hind end obscuring the bottom right hand corner of the shot is that I laid down on my back in the snow, my skis still on, to take the shot. I also momentarily forgot my age and the stiffness of my joints. It took a hell of a lot of effort to become vertical! I made it, but not before Kena had, in ways too indecent to describe in this family blog, her “way” with me.

Maybe the title of this piece is a bit over the top. I mean, I’ve spent 51 of my 59 years on Planet Earth either in Duluth or here, in Fredenberg Township along the banks of the Cloquet River. I should know that winters come and winters go. Some are cold and snowless. Some are warm and snowless. Some are cold and snowy. And some are just plain cold. Penetratingly, isolatingly, demandingly cold. How this winter will shake out in the next three or four months (one never knows, as last year showed us, what season April belongs to) is left to God and caprice. But though I relish the occasional below zero day; a day full of still, calm, windless moments of intense silence as proof that I am still alive; I’ve had enough cold for awhile. Bring on the snow. I want to slap on the boards and head over to Spirit Mountain for a few hours of night skiing. There’s nothing better than standing above the green, red, yellow, and white lights of the most beautiful city in Minnesota waiting to pounce on a mogul. Maybe I’ll see you there. I think we’ve had enough below zero weather for a while, don’t you?

Peace.

Mark

 

 

Posted in Blog Archive | Comments Off on Enough Already!

Edible but No Feast

Under

Under Two Flags by Ouida (Marie Louise Rame’) (Amazon Digital Services (Kindle version). ISBN B004NBYX28)

Like many boys who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, I was an avid reader of Classics Illustrated comic books. The series attempted, fairly successfully, to convert beloved novels from the 19th and early 20th century into what we now call graphic novels. The condensed, illustrated format of Classics Illustrated introduced me to A Tale of Two Cities, IvanhoeLes Miserables, and Under Two Flags, a fairly forgotten and obscure novel of the French Foreign Legion by Marie Louis Rame’, an English novelist and contemporary of Dickens, who wrote under the nom de plume, Ouida. You can learn more about this prolific author (over 40 books) at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouida. But as all things Wiki, be advised I found a slight error in the narrative. The article claims that Under Two Flags “describes the British in Algeria.” That’s not accurate as you will learn below. Ouida has been called a writer of romantic/historic novels. With respect to Under Two Flags I would agree with the categorization.

The first half of the novel takes place in England, where we are introduced to Bertie Cecil, the illegitimate son of a British peer, whose tainted blood is a family secret. Secrets are a common thread throughout the plot of this lengthy, at times, cumbersome exercise of Victorian prose but, in most instances, the author conceals the truth from the reader with a fairly adept hand. At times, the wordy style (think a clumsy Henry James or Charles Dickens) gets in the way of a pretty fair story. Bertie’s fall, due to his gambling, his sense of honor, and his younger brother (who has learned all of Bertie’s less admirable qualities) is swift and extreme, sending the former playboy/cavalry soldier into hiding to avoid criminal prosecution as a forger and thief.

The blackguard fallen noble re-appears as a corporal in the French Foreign Legion posted in the deserts of Algeria where the indigenous peoples, sons and daughters of Mohammed, aren’t too keen on being part of France’s Second Empire under Napoleon III. Reinventing himself as the heroic common cavalryman, Louis Victor, Cecil flaunts death and leads his fellow soldiers into battle with acclaim only to have his superior officer (a Frenchman known unaffectionately as the Black Hawk who has guessed Cecil’s upper crust roots if not his identity) continuously discipline and belittle the former British officer.  Rounding out the cast of characters is Rake, Cecil’s aide de camp who left England with the fallen man and the only person who knows Louis Victor’s past, and Cigarette, a half French/half African child of the army who adds not only comic relief to the tale but is a wickedly vicious unofficial soldier for her beloved France. Enigmatic and post-pubescent (though hardly mature) Cigarette saves Ouida’s novel from being a patterned parade of expendable Victorian characters. Diminutive in stature, unschooled but educated in the ways of men and the world beyond her tender years, Ouida conceals nothing of the inspiration behind this wonderful creature of fiction: There are multiple references in the story to others perceiving Cigarette as the second coming of Joan of Arc. The connection is not subtle but labeled as such by the author, making this reviewer believe that Ouida didn’t think her readers were well-read or smart enough to make the link on their own. Talking down to your audience is never a good thing for a writer to engage in and this sin is one that does, in the case of Under Two Flags, find itself repeated. Still, despite this flaw of faith on behalf of the author, there’s enough action in the second half of the book to interest male readers and enough romance to draw in, to use Ouida’s phrase, the “delicate sex”. As far as action goes, the ending is a bit too theatrical and implausible; not one of the better imaginings within the text. The horse racing scene in the English portion of the tale, along with the battle scene that sets up Louis Victor’s fate and Cigarette’s being honored by a Marshall of the Legion in the Algerian section, are well written. The desert battle scene in particular causes one to feel the searing Algerian sun and inhale the odors of sweat, horse, blood, and fear.

All in all, not a great book but a fairly good read. Especially since you can access it on Kindle for free!

3 and 1/2 stars out of 5.

 

Posted in Books | Comments Off on Edible but No Feast

Joulu (Christmas)

Christ Church Lutheran, Minneapolis, MN 12/14/2013

Christ Church Lutheran, Minneapolis, MN 12/14/2013

Light snow fell as I pulled out of my brother and sister-in-laws’ place. My Garmon GPS was tuned to Christ Church Lutheran, an enclave of Finnishness in a Minneapolis neighborhood a stone’s throw east of Uptown. The freeways from Lakeville to the big city were relatively clear. Traffic was light. It wasn’t until I pulled off the Interstate and onto city streets that the significance of the snowfall made it’s presence felt. Throughout the night, a good five or six inches had accumulated on the roads, causing no end of slick intersections and the possibility of collisions. But the all-wheel-drive on my Pacifica acquitted itself admirably. I stepped out of the warm car into winter and shuffled my shoes through the accumulated powder towards a freshly shoveled sidewalk. Two men were working the business ends of shovels with dutiful determination, making ready for Joulu, Finnish Christmas, at the church. I was there as part of the tori, the marketplace, to hawk my best selling regional novel, Suomalaiset: People of the Marsh to folks of Finnish extraction. I was also hoping to sell a few copies of my latest book, Black Water, a recently printed collection of my outdoor stories. I was even optimistic that some copies of Laman’s River (my most recent novel) and Mr. Environment: The Willard Munger Story (a thick-as-a-brick biography of my legislator-uncle, Willard Munger) might get sold.

I hadn’t done a book event outside of Duluth in nearly a year. I’ve been concentrating my efforts on converting my older novels into eBooks, polishing my manuscript (Sukulaiset: The Kindred; also a novel about the Finns and related peoples), and experimenting with CreateSpace, Amazon’s publishing arm. As I’ve written before, I’m done with outdoor art and craft festivals. My EZ-Up tent is relegated to a storage building that holds tons of household crap looking for a home. The weather. The economy. The time. They did me in, made me realize I had to find a better way, a more efficient way, to promote my writing, than sitting in a tent all summer long trying to sell books to strangers. But I haven’t given up on indoor events and when I read an article in New World Finn promoting Joulu and touting the architecture of the church, I just had to sign up.

Plaque at the Church

Plaque at the Church

Inside Christ Church’s education and social wing, I found my table space in a classroom off a hallway. Venders were already set up along the main corridor of the church’s annex. Outside, across a snowy courtyard, the sanctuary of the faithful sat, empty, waiting for sinners. Entering the classroom, I was greeted by the only other vendor occupying the space, potter Lenore Lampi, whose birch-inspired ceramics are so realistic, you half expect a red headed woodpecker to land on a piece’s surfaces and begin hammering away. We introduced ourselves. Lenore, far more market savvy than I, placed a small table outside the door to our room where she displayed a sample of her work and a copy of Suomalaiset.

“Should help draw folks in,” she said.

Table at Joulu.

Table at Joulu.

We talked a bit about her art and my writing. She hadn’t read any of my books but offered that she might buy a copy of Suomalaiset for her son, a Twin Cities filmmaker. Traffic was light but, as the time for the Joulu buffet, the centerpiece of the church’s celebration, loomed, folks began to trundle in from  the snow. The hallway was soon bustling with hungry Finnish Americans, their spouses, children, and friends. A few passers-by trickled in. I began to sell books. The funk that had plagued me for most of the past year (due to poor sales and seemingly unappreciative customers) lifted.

“Finns buy books,” I said to Betsy Norgard, a member of the local chapter of the Finlandia Foundation I met at Joulu. Betsy wasn’t a complete stranger. She was someone I’d corresponded with in an attempt to drum up support for my application to the national Finlandia Foundation seeking a publishing grant. “I always do well wherever Finns are shopping.”

I learned that Betsy is a book editor. She expressed interest in taking a crack at Sukulaiset. A connection was made with plans to further discuss her fee.

Other patrons stopped and bought more books. Willard and Suomalaiset were the day’s big sellers. Traffic was moderate but steady. I couldn’t help but smile.

During a lull in the action, I wandered off to the basement and found a hot bowl of Finnish sausage soup. Finns insist on putting rutabagas in everything. There were big chunks of my least favorite vegetable (OK, that’s a lie. Brussel sprouts are my least favorite but rutabagas are a close second!), along with carrot and potato floating in brine. It was quite a feat dodging the crowd, an over-filled bowl of soup in my hands, as I climbed the stairs. But lunch was delicious and book buyers continued to stop in.

I received warm greetings from folks who’d organized the event, including Dan Salin, the person I’d emailed about renting space. They were all gracious and kind, wholly unperturbed that a non-Finn had infiltrated their festival. As the afternoon waned and I still hadn’t been inside the sanctuary of the church, I left my table, walked across the open space between the wings of the building, carefully opened the door to the church, and found a place to stand and listen to hymns. Of course, the lyrics were in Finnish. It didn’t matter.

The courtyard.

The courtyard.

 

In the end, I sold more than I’d expected, made a few new friends, firmed up some important contacts within Minnesota’s Finnish American community, and maybe, just maybe, found an editor for Sukulaiset who can correct my misspellings of Finnish words.

Christ Church Lutheran.

Christ Church Lutheran.

Peace.

Mark

 

 

 

 

Posted in Blog Archive | Comments Off on Joulu (Christmas)

Pappy’s Tree

Pappy's Tree

Pappy’s Tree

It started out innocently enough. At the suggestion of my life-long best friend, Eddie, and his wife Sue, Rene’ and I agreed to try out Jim Pappas’ Christmas tree lot on Morris Thomas Road in Duluth. I grew up with a couple of Jim’s kids. Ann and Andy Pappas were classmates of mine at Piedmont Elementary School. Jim was my first scoutmaster at Troop 67 located in the old Piedmont Community Center. Both the troop and the center are long gone. But I discovered, as Rene’ and I searched for Pappy’s Trees on a below zero winter’s Saturday night, our 19-month-old grandson A.J. in tow, our bellies full of Bridgeman’s burgers and malts, that Jim and his wife hadn’t left the old homestead. (Did I mention that the Piedmont Elementary School I went from kindergarten to 6th grade with the Pappas kids is also long gone, replaced by a gleaming new building?). Anyway, when we spotted the sign “Pappy’s Trees” tacked onto a post, we knew we were at the right place. Rene’ got out of her car. I climbed in the driver’s seat to keep A.J., who was safely tucked in his car seat in the rear, company. I left my Pacifica idling and watched as Rene’ studied rows of trees leaning against 2×4 frames, the evergreens bound in plastic mesh, an orchestra of floodlights illuminating Pappy’s front yard. Through the windshield of my wife’s Matrix I watched my wife. After five minutes or so of scrutiny (you keep a marriage going for 35 years by yielding certain tasks to your partner. I am not the guy you want picking out the family Christmas tree!), I watched Rene’ approach the front door, knock, and engage in a brief conversation with a familiar looking old man.

“I found one,” my wife said upon her return.

“Which one?”

“The last one in the last row. I’ll take A.J. home if you pay for the tree and load it into your car.”

“OK. I wanted to say ‘hello’ to my old scoutmaster anyway.”

I had a pleasant few minutes talking to Jim Pappas, the first conversation we’ve shared since the 1970s. Quite frankly, he hadn’t changed much. He was still diminutive and sinewy in stature, spoke with a slight stutter, and had a marvelous twinkle in his eyes. At 86, he’s still cutting and selling trees to neighbors, an impressive feat for someone half his age. After catching up on family news, I said my goodbyes, lugged the tree to the back of my van, opened the tailgate, rolled the balsam into the cargo area, closed the hatch, and roared off into the night.

Normally, we watch It’s a Wonderful Life as we decorate our Christmas tree. Because the tree was so cold, we let it sit a day to allow the bows to descend. Sunday evening, Jack lugged bins of ornaments and lights up from the basement. I sawed the base of the tree. The three of us, with minimal curse words, got the balsam secured in the tree stand. Rene’ looped lights around the conifer’s girth. The two of us set about placing ornaments on the springy branches of the tree. We watched a forgettable Christmas movie on Hallmark as we worked. George Bailey’s story of redemption would have to wait for another night.

Pappy’s tree did well for two weeks. The only minor difficulty was that both Kena (pronounced Keena), our energetic Labrador pup, and Jimi, our severely paranoid miniature Dachshund, discovered the water in the tree stand and decided it was their own personal watering trough. Try as we might, the humans in the house were unable to keep the dogs away from the tree. Finally, tired of drying out the tree skirt because of the dogs’ shenanigans, Rene’ left the skirt partially open as an accommodation. Things seemed to be going smoothly. Pappy’s Tree had acquitted itself quite nicely.

Yesterday morning. I woke to the radio at 5:00am, my normal routine on a work day. I generally spend an hour to an hour and a half working on my writing. Every other morning, I follow the writing up with exercise. I’m a religious patron of “Body Electric” on PBS. I’ve been working out with Margaret Richards for over twenty years. She hasn’t aged a bit (the ageless magic of re-runs) but I certainly have. Anyway, in the midst of neck stretches, I yelled down to Jack to get him up and into the shower for school. Rene’ had already showered, dressed for work, and was in the kitchen sipping coffee as the credits rolled on “Body Electric”. Kena had eaten her breakfast. Jimi had gorged on water I put out to dissuade the dogs from drinking from the tree stand. I clambered up to the master bath and was seated on my throne surveying my kingdom with Kindle in hand, finishing another, more delicate, portion of my morning ritual and reading Under Two Flags, when my sanctuary was disturbed.

“Mark, get down here!” Rene’ yelled. “Kena knocked over the tree!”

It took some doing but I eventually arrived on scene. There was Pappy’s Tree toppled into the couch, ornaments scattered, some broken, some not, lights still blazing, my wife standing over the mess in perplexed anger.

I wasn’t in the mood to be righting a Christmas tree in my boxers. Words were exchanged. Threats were uttered regarding Kena’s demise. Jack vamoosed to his bedroom.

Long story short. We managed to tilt the tree back into something akin to straight.

“We can deal with the mess tonight,” I said to the back of my wife’s head as she left the house. Things had started to calm down when I discovered that Jimi had puked up all the water he’d ingested, leaving a nice pool of water, stomach acid, and yesterday’s kibble on the hardwood floor.

“Shit,” I cried out as the door shut. “The damn dog puked on the floor.”

There was no response from my departing wife or my secretive son.

I muttered some more bad words and proceeded to clean up the vomit with paper towel. As I walked into the kitchen to toss the mess into the garbage, I found another surprise.

“Shit,” I repeated. “The damn dog puked on the carpet.”

This time, my cursing had an audience. Jack was eating his cereal at the kitchen counter when I made my second discovery. Wisely, Jack made no response.

My son finished breakfast and padded back to his room to dress for school. I pulled out the carpet cleaner, a bucket of hot water, a rag, and commenced to clean up another puddle of puke. For good measure, I moved an arm chair and foot stool, got out the Dyson, and sucked up what needles I could from the great tree disaster of 2013. Being OCD, I’d normally try to get the entire great room shipshape before leaving but Jack was already late for school and I still hadn’t taken my morning shower. I left the vacuum in the middle of the carpeting, confident that the stains from Jimi’s indigestion had been bested.

Speaking of Jimi, I’d tossed both him and Kena outside after Rene’ witnessed the toppling of Pappy’s Tree. As I moved towards the stairs to the upper level to take my long-delayed shower, Jimi scratched at the front door. I stepped from hardwood onto a rug near the front entry intending to let the dog in. I was wearing socks and I stepped right into a pile of dog shit.

More bad words were said. I didn’t kill the wiener dog (the deposit was clearly his) though I was sorely tempted to end his miserable little life. I muttered more epithets as I peeled my shit-covered-sock off my foot. If Jack heard the cursing, he ignored it. I left Jimi outside and began to clean another mess.

As you can tell from the above photo, which was taken after Rene’ repositioned the tree ornaments and lights later that same night, all is once again well with Pappy’s Tree.

At least until Kena gets thirsty.

Merry Christmas.

Mark

 

 

 

 

 

Posted in Blog Archive | Comments Off on Pappy’s Tree

Size Doesn’t Matter

Cellist

 

The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway (2008. Riverhead Books. ISBN 978-1-59448-365-3).

I was asked to read Galloway’s novel of war torn Bosnia/Herzegovina’s capital city as a precursor to the book being selected for the area “One Book, One Community” program of our local library. I’d heard whispers about this novel but had not yet picked it up. Sally Anderson at the Bookstore at Fitger’s put a copy aside for me. I was a bit surprised when I picked up The Cellist in that I was expecting something weighty and thick, on the order of my own war novel about Yugoslavia, The Legacy, or Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. Instead, the volume I walked out of Fitger’s with is best described, in terms of its physical presence, as a novella longing to be a novel. But the tale’s diminutive size was and is deceptive. There is one whale of a tale hiding inside the guppyesque stature of The Cellist.

Galloway, who is a teacher of creative writing at the University of British Columbia, transports us into the Bosnian capital city during the siege of that city by Bosnian Serbs. He doesn’t, as I often tend to do, bog the fictional tale down with historical details or dwell on the misplaced historical perspective of the attacking forces. He leaves it the reader to explore the why behind what took place between 1992 and 1996 in a valley of the Dinaric Alps and very simply (yet eloquently) tells the story of four very different inhabitants of the encircled city. There is no one protagonist in the tale, though the cellist, who explores the same tune every afternoon amidst the ruins of the city in memory of an atrocity that occurred on the very spot where he plays, forms the central figure in the lives of the other three Sarajevoians Galloway profiles. Much like The Red Badge of Courage (Stephan Crane’s brilliantly terse and compact fictional account of the American Civil War) The Cellist of Sarajevo leaves much to the imagination and discovery of the reader as it guides its audience into a once beautiful and graceful mountain city now wrecked and torn by insidious destruction and hate. There is no preaching, no pontificating to be found within the 231 pages of this tale; only the examination of struggle and the day-to-day dread of civilians constantly harassed and under threat of ethnic cleansing and extinction from the Serbian irregulars hunkered down in the surrounding hills.

Brilliantly conceived. Excellently executed. You will remember the end of this novel, a haunting scene worthy of portrayal by our best young actress in a film adaptation, for the rest of your life.

Incredible.

5 stars out of 5. I urge you to pick the book up and participate in the upcoming One Book, One Community event!

 

 

 

Posted in Books | Comments Off on Size Doesn’t Matter

What’s Wrong With Us?

Gander Mountain Advertisement from DNT

I know the adage.

Guns don’t kill people; people do.

As a life-long hunter and gun owner I know there’s truth behind that oft-recited 2nd Amendment mantra. Before a firearm can turn on humanity, it needs to be held in the “cold dead hands” (Charlton Heston’s words, not mine) of a homo sapien. It’s a simple premise really, one that isn’t debatable.

Except…

Tomorrow marks the beginning of December, a month that marks two milestones for me personally and philosophically when it comes to the issue of gun violence.

Two years ago, I was presiding over a criminal trial in Grand Marais, Minnesota. A jury convicted a professional boxer of criminal sexual conduct with an underage teenage girl. I was standing in the middle of the courtroom, the jurors still in the jury box, engaged in an “after the verdict” dialogue with the jurors when the sound of a metal pan being dropped outside the courtroom startled me. I heard three or four more distinct “pops” after the clatter and I knew instantly what was happening.

“That’s a gun,” I said in unison with one of the jurors.

I directed the bailiff (a former law enforcement officer) into the hallway to deal with the shooter. Though the defendant in the rape case had behaved impeccably throughout the trial, I suspected he was behind the attack. As the bailiff scurried out of the courtroom, I locked the doors and ushered the jurors into the jury deliberation room. It was not native quick-thinking that led me to take action. I’d been trained in mass shooting protocol through the Department of Justice’s Safe Schools program, an initiative that arose after Columbine. The training is pretty simple: Flee, Hide, or Fight in that order of preference when confronted by an active shooter scenario. Not knowing where the shooter was headed, not  knowing if we were dealing with a lone gunman, I chose the second option for the twelve souls under my charge. There wasn’t a lot of time to think things through. I reacted and made a choice, a choice that has haunted me every day since December 15th, 2011. At one point, as the jurors were huddled in the locked deliberation room, as I talked to the two clerks working with me that day (who were frantically trying to dial 911 but the telephone lines were all busy) I stepped into the judge’s chambers to ensure that a door to the outside was locked. It was a foolish move on my part. I mean, the door is mostly glass: nice to look out but not very good at stopping bullets. Standing next to that door, I came as close as I would that day to confronting the gunman.

As I looked through glass, I saw the young prosecutor in the rape case across a concrete portico, her hands raised in supplication. She stood forty feet away in the doorway leading to the county attorney’s offices. The door to her office was also open and I was able to hear her. I thought I she was pleading for her life. Turns out, she was pleading for the life of her boss, the county attorney who had been shot three times. I didn’t know it at the time, but as my mind stumbled around options, the bailiff was advancing behind the gunman, pistol raised, seeking to end the conflict. Like I said, I didn’t know this. What I saw was a young woman pleading, saying something to the shooter like, “Don’t do it., D_ _, you know I have children.” I later learned that she actually said, “Don’t do it, D_ _, you know he has children”. She was referencing her boss, the county attorney, who was struggling to keep the shooter out of her office.

The choices confronting me were: Do I call out to her, bringing attention to the fact that I’m still here, behind a pane of glass, along with fourteen other souls, which may well visit the wrath of the shooter upon us? Or do I leave the door open (after all, it’s only glass) as a possible escape route for the young woman? Or do I rush into the fray and try to be the hero?

Again, I chose the middle ground. Unable to connect with 911, I left the door to the chambers open in hopes the young woman could, if necessary, flee the gunman. In hindsight, my decision seems questionable. But I was determined to find a telephone, to call for help. That meant leaving the courthouse since no calls were getting out. In my panic, I was oblivious to the fact that my cell phone was in a pocket of my overcoat an arm’s length away. I left my staff and my jurors and flew down a back stairwell, out into the cold afternoon, clad in a short sleeved dress shirt, loafers, a tie, and dress slacks. I banged on the door of a nearby home. A kid gave me his cell phone. The 911 operator asked for details. I had few to give. She told me that help was on the way. I heard sirens. I hustled to the law enforcement center still uncertain as to exactly what was taking place in the courthouse.

Thankfully, no one died. Both victims of the shooting; the father of the victim in the case (shot by the defendant as a target of opportunity) and the county attorney, survived. The young lady and the bailiff? They are heroes. When the shooter made his way into the attorney’s office, a life-and-death struggle ensued over the bailiff’s handgun. But the county attorney, the young female lawyer, and the bailiff managed to subdue the gunman until a state trooper arrived.

Early reports into the law enforcement center (where I sat on a stool while hubbub swirled around me) drove me to tears. It was reported that the young lawyer standing in the doorway had been shot, was in critical condition, and was on her way to the local hospital. My heart sank. I felt the greatest shame I have ever felt in my life. I considered myself to be a man’s man, to be someone who would, if need be, sacrifice himself for others. I learned on December 15, 2011 that I’m not as stalwart a soul as I thought. My shame is the most significant lingering impact of the shooting and no amount of counseling (I’ve had plenty) or comforting words (folks have been ever so kind) can erase the psychological scars of the event. Understand: I know I am not alone in dealing with the PTSD caused by the shooting. There were fourteen other folks in the courtroom and the court offices that day who experienced the trauma with me, along with the two shooting victims, the young female attorney, and the bailiff. That’s eighteen folks permanently affected by the actions of one man with one gun on one day in NE Minnesota.

There is, however, something to be thankful for beyond the fact that no one died that day.

Imagine, if you will, the same scenario but with a different weapon in the shooter’s hands. A man bent on dealing death armed, not as the attacker was that day with a .25 caliber pistol, but with a Bushmaster assault rifle, the gun depicted in the advertisements at the top and the bottom of this essay. A weapon capable of accepting magazines holding thirty rounds. Thirty bullets instead of six. Imagine that same man turning his rage and upset not on the county attorney, but on the peers of his community that convicted him and the judge who let it happen. He opens the door to the courtroom. The judge, his back to the door, the bailiff sitting in a chair off to the side, twelve innocent citizens trapped by the wooden rails of the jury box, are his targets. There is no escape. It’d be like shooting ducks in a swimming pool or pigs in a pen. Imagine the shooter having not one, but five magazines as depicted in the advertisements. One hundred and fifty rounds at his disposal. Imagine.

You don’t have to. On December 16, 2012, a year and a day after my experience in Grand Marais, twenty children and six adults at the Sandy Hook Elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut faced that horror, that destruction, that evil. One mentally unbalanced young man. One Bushmaster. Multiple magazines. A tragedy of unspeakable proportions in a place, a building, established to educate our babies, our future.

In the aftermath of the Cook County shooting, panels regarding courthouse security were convened. Security became a topic of conversation. But with every proposal for increased police presence or metal detection equipment or single point-of-entry into our state courthouses, came the inevitable response from government: “We don’t have the money to do what they do at the federal courthouses. We don’t have money to pay for security at every door manning metal detection equipment.” Despite such responses, things have changed. There is more, if imperfect, security at our local state courthouses. However, there was, after the Cook County shooting, no real discussion of the shooter’s easy access to weapons or gun control. The circumstances of that particular episode didn’t seem to merit it.

In contrast, following the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary there was a flurry of activity seeking to reinvigorate a debate regarding the availability of assault weapons. On the heels of the carnage wrecked with a Bushmaster in Newtown, I sent a letter to President Obama and Vice President Biden offering my experience as part of the discussion. I heard from the Vice President’s office via email and contributed what I could. I had a lengthy discussion with Senator Klobuchar’s Chief of Staff. I received a letter from Senator Franken. I wrote a blog focusing on the bravery of the teachers and aides who died at Sandy Hook. But in the end, the federal initiative to curb the sales and marketing of assault weapons and expanded magazines, including modest proposals requiring background checks on private firearms sales and gun show purchases, went nowhere. There was no political will, in the face of the NRA’s vitriolic belief in the right of every American to arm himself or herself with whatever firearm suits a citizen’s fancy, to do anything at all with respect to gun violence in America. So, when the dust settled and nothing had changed, I went about my life figuring I’d done what I could to make my voice heard.

Then I saw the advertisements at the top and the bottom of this page in the Duluth News Tribune. They were both published less than a month before the anniversary of the Newtown massacre.

Now, I understand you may find fault with me linking these two completely unrelated events. On the surface, you might argue that the actions of a disgruntled litigant in Grand Marais (using a cheap pistol to shoot two people in anger) really doesn’t have a whole hell of lot to do with a madman wielding an assault rifle and executing children and staff in an elementary school. But I disagree. As we’ve seen time and time again, in Littleton, Paducah, Blacksburg, Red Lake, DeKalb, Oakland, Huntsville, Sparks, and a host of other places there is a societal need to try and address the underlying reasons and motivations behind mass shootings in public spaces, places where all of us go to do business with the hope of safety and security. Some of the folks who’ve done terrible things (like the killer in Newtown) were mentally ill. Others were simply alienated, angry young men with chips on their shoulders and axes to grind. In this way, the perpetrators of mass school violence, or theater violence, or mall violence have much in common with the Cook County shooter. They were all angry men, feeling aggrieved, with ready access to firearms. How many hours of violent video games did each of them watch? How many times were they (at least in their own minds) humiliated, disrespected, or bullied by peers? How much did the culture of violence depicted in our theaters and on television fuel their desire to “even the score”? We’ll never know.

But I do know this. I’ve owned rifles and shotguns all my life. I’ve hunted from the moment I completed gun safety at the age twelve. I have four sons. Three of them are hunters. My dad is a hunter. My grandfathers were both hunters. One was a game warden. I’ve served in the United States Army Reserve. With all that background and experience around firearms I can tell you this with a certainty; the rifles depicted at the top and the bottom of this page were designed for one purpose and one purpose only: combat. They are not weapons of personal defense. A loaded semi-automatic handgun, wielded by someone who’s spent time on the firing range, will do that job just fine. You don’t need a Bushmaster for target practice. A .22 pump or semi-automatic is more than adequate to keep your shooting eye keen.  Assault weapons are impractical for hunting. A Winchester or Marlin lever action 30-30 is a far better choice. If you can’t hit a deer with the first five rounds, you shouldn’t be hunting. We require duck and goose hunters to plug their shotguns: They only get three chances to down a bird. Why do we protect migratory waterfowl better than we do our children? Bushmasters with multiple thirty round clips sold at a discount to the general public by big box retailers aren’t sporting weapons. They have no practical use. They’re nothing but tragedies in the making, pure and simple. And it won’t harm your or my 2nd Amendment rights one iota if Congress imposes some modest, adult restrictions on assault weapons, just like it once did through legislation that was inexplicably allowed to expire.

What can one person do about the corporate greed and insensitivity displayed by retailers running ads that shout discount pricing for weapons of personal mass destruction? Well, he or she can stop spending his or her hard-earned money at those stores. That’s just what I intend to do. You can join me if you want, or not. It’s your choice. But something’s gotta give.

Peace.

Mark

Dunham’s Advertisement from DNT.

 

Posted in Blog Archive | 4 Comments

God and Garrison

2013 Pumpkin harvest

As the light fades and the pumpkins orange, it’s hard not to look back on the summer and wonder how it passed by so quickly. Oh, this year, I was a little better at getting away: I managed two fishing trips to Canada, one with my aging father and one with my ever-sprouting teen. Even with a multitude of complex trials at work and Jack’s soccer games and tending the vegetable garden and all the rest, I found space to enjoy life. But that space seems, in retrospect, awfully short-lived. Up here in the North Country, one senses, all scientific data aside, that time compresses from May through September and enlarges and extends and seemingly slows to a crawl when the seasons shift, when the sun’s rays seem to dwindle, when the harvest is done. Of course, this isn’t so. A month is a month, whether it’s gauged against summer or autumn or winter light. Still, I stand by my observation. Thirty days in July leaves one feeling short-changed, cheated. Thirty days in October, despite the glory of nature’s color scheme, feels elongated, extended. The suspension of time that arrives with falling leaves is a harbinger of winter’s inexorable crawl. Even the extension of the growing season this year, which saw crops a full month behind schedule, did little to alter the whirl of the hands of the summer clock. Hell, as I write this piece, the last of Rene’s very large tomato crop ripens on our kitchen counter, the green skins reddening months after harvest. But even with reminders of August lingering into November, this summer seemed to rush past me like an unexpected grouse taking flight.

Ripening tomatoes.

Life, unfortunately, mimicks this phenomenon. All of us, I am certain, remember the summers we spent as kids. I’m sure the emotions I recall are universal. As children, we could not wait; we fairly sprinted for the doors when school let out in early June. Freedom, blessed freedom, and the promise of bike riding, trench ball, fishing at Engwall’s pond, pick-up softball games, Saturday matinees at the Grand or the Norshor or the Lyceum or the West or the Granada theaters, or golf outings at Enger followed by dips in the murky but cool waters of Twin Ponds, awaited us as the doors to Piedmont Elementary slammed shut. By mid-July, once the shine of summer had been worn off by frenzy and familiarity, we were bored, listless, done in by the heat and extended time. Our thoughts began to migrate to the upcoming school year and to the onset of autumn when we would enter a new grade, meet new friends, and share new experiences. By January, as snowbanks rose to cover window sills, as temperatures plunged below zero, as night fell within an hour of our release from school, the slow, dawdling advance of the calendar forced us to look ahead. We couldn’t wait for spring, for the coming of the rains and the mud and the greening, and with it, the promise of Little League, and games of marbles played with vigor on the way to and from school, and for renewed contests of four-square, hop scotch, trench ball, dodge ball, and tag.  The wet, drizzly, cold spring seemed to last forever until, miracle of miracles, it was June and we were again released from bondage to contemplate a universe of freedom, at least until the cycle of midsummer boredom returned. Between each change of seasons, time seemed, in the throes of childhood (to resort to a cliche’) to stand still.

Adulthood doesn’t follow a similar pattern. At least not for me. Though it’s not universal and I do not feel the acceleration of time every day or every hour, there being times when things do indeed slow down and mirror the calendar of my youth (such as when I’m on vacation, away from work, the house, and responsibility), most days and weeks and months, the clock feels to be churning ahead at an ever-increasing rate. Why this is so, I can’t say. But I know I am not alone in chronicling this feature of maturity. Sometimes, when considering this conundrum, I Imagine what time must be like for dogs. After all, even the smallest ankle biter, the sort of canine that lives an inordinately long dog life, gets at best, fifteen years. That’s a fifth of the time we humans typically exist. Do dogs know this? Do their limited life spans begin with the same slowly patient youth only to lurch forward with ever-increasing velocity? I have no idea but I have  the suspicion that Kena, our new Labrador pup, isn’t thinking in those terms. She seems far more interested in dragging dead deer parts home than engaging in philosophical contemplation.

Kena and the sleeping vegetable garden.

I had a dream last night that some bit of my writing, a piece I didn’t recognize and likely haven’t written yet, was being recited by Garrison Keillor on A Prairie Home Companion. Given the maudlin tenor of this essay, I doubt the great sage of Minnesota letters will be wrapping his heart around this piece and reading it in public. It really wouldn’t fit in with the cheery vibe of his show. And while it’s highly unlikely that a man I’ve only met once in my life, whose bookstore has never invited me within its walls for a book signing or reading, knows who the hell I am or cares one iota for my prose, that scene, where Keillor was reading to America from a Mark Munger original, when scrutinized under the flickering  light of rapidly advancing time, intrigues me.

Is God sending me a message?

 

A summer day when time slowed down…

 

There are any number of explanations for such dreams. Wishful thinking is at the top of the list. Too much taco salad for dinner resulting in indigestion, a cause ascribed by Scrooge for his immersion in ghosts, might be another. But maybe my dream, in the face of seasonal melancholy, was truly a message from the divine, an invitation to set aside my trepidation of an accelerating internal clock and simply be. That’s right. Be.

As I write this, as I listen to Mountain Stage (being broadcast from Grand Marais, Minnesota I might add) and try to place one word ahead of the next in coherent order, plucking and pasting photos from the iPhoto program on my iMac to highlight my thoughts, things are slower than they have been in quite a while. I find myself straining, over the music and the tapping of the keyboard, straining to hear just what it is Garrison is reading. I think I hear the beginnings of a story I knew once, that I intended to write but haven’t yet put to paper. The experience of listening to the future, to my future, unfolds unhurriedly.  Canada geese call from the river below my window. A blue jaw caws. The autumn sky stands folded like a quilt over a silent,  monochromatic land. I hear a small, clear voice inside my head. I have no idea if it’s God’s or Garrison’s.

There is time.

I don’t really care who’s talking to me. I just need to listen.

Peace.

Mark

 

 

Posted in Blog Archive | Comments Off on God and Garrison