Opinion

Spring leaped out at us in New York last week — suddenly one day it was 80, just like me — it sprang at us shang a lang lang as once we’d sung so we were sprung from the steel corset of winter and I took a couple of Londoners to lunch at the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Station where, when I was 11, I ate my first oyster on a trip from Minnesota with my dad. I saw him eat one and so I ate one and I trace my independence back to that 1953 oyster — when you eagerly devour something that would disgust your beloved aunts, you’ve taken a step toward becoming your own person.

Last week’s edition of the Advocate Tribune had a big error, that led to many a message left. Somehow all five of us that look over the pages before printing somehow missed that a story from Page one was missing the jump on the inside pages. I can’t explain how all of us missed that, but we did. Human error happens. Our deepest apologies for that.

In the last two weeks, a number of discussions in public meetings had to do with the potential transfer of land from the State of Minnesota to the Upper Sioux Community. Specifically the land at Upper Sioux State Park. While this is an opinion column, I am not here to express my own opinion on the topic. However, what I am here to express is the handling of how some of the discussion on the topic went - specifically in two different ways.

Sgt. Troy Christianson Minnesota State Patrol Question: I customized the front of my truck.

Can it really be true? The snow is melting and the sun is nice and warm. Are we really going to have a spring? Or is it just going to jump into summer? Oh, well. I’ll take whatever we get. My township road and my yard are muddy messes but that will dry and firm up soon. Now I’ll have to find something else to crab about.

I’m just curious if you enjoyed reading the “If I Get Dementia” list that I shared in my last article? As I mentioned in that article, the author of the writing is Rachael Wonderlin, an internationally- recognized dementia care expert and educator. The reading that I shared has circulated the globe many times over! In addition, Rachael has her Master’s in Gerontology and is a John Hopkins University Press threetime published author.

When you look at the body camera video of Nashville cops, guns drawn, dashing into the school, throwing doors open, shouting, “Shots fired, shots fired, move!” and a line of cops moving swiftly down the hall and up the stairs and shooting the attacker, you see men doing as they were trained to do, pursue a killer and take the killer out. From first call to completion of mission: 14 minutes.

At least once in your long and delicious life you owe it to yourself to go hear Olivier Messiaen’s “Turangalîla-symphonie” and don’t wait until you’re 80 as I did but finally last week went to hear the New York Philharmonic take us on this wild 90-minute roller- coaster ride in which Catholics are kidnapped and Baptists go Buddhist and you think in French and fly in a formation of geese and get a taste of molecular physics as horses go galloping down the aisles, and in the gorgeous slow passage “Garden of Sleeping Love” you will fall in love forever with the person next to you so be very careful where you sit. I sat next to my sweetheart and after years of thinking I was averse to modern music, here was a hymn to joy and time, movement, rhythm, life and death, with big Wagnerian chords, delicate intervals, a dozen percussionists, a genius pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet, and we’ve been happily married ever since.