Opinion

Last week my son spent the majority of it trying to convince me (still) to fly out to New York to be at his Army promotion ceremony. Alas, it wasn’t a possibility at this time with so much going on here. So when it came time for his ceremony to begin, one of his buddies was kind enough to man the phone so I could watch on FaceTime.

Last week, I was invited to attend a dinner in honor of the Ambassador of Uruguay’s trip to Montevideo. Everyone in attendance was encouraged to sit at tables with people they didn’t know, and so I ended up sitting with a family from Uruguay that now lives in St. Paul and a gentleman from Uruguay who now lives in Minnetonka.

Will spring ever really get here? There are hints every so often and then the weather turns colder again. I guess this slow melting is good for preventing serious flooding, but I’m so DONE with winter.

I recently came across this reading on Facebook and felt I should share it with you. If you have already seen it, it might be worthwhile to read through it again.

There are two brave artists who shared their art practice information on the new Facebook page for Chippewa County MN Arts, Artists, & Events. First up is Dee Davis, a painter working in oils, watercolor, and pencils.

I went down to the Bowery one night last week to see Aoife O’Donovan sing to a ballroom packed with young people standing for two hours and whooping and yelling — I sat up in the balcony and whooped and yelled too — and what the woman could do with her voice and guitar was astonishing, utterly fabulous, and for a man my age to be astonished is remarkable, she was competing with my memory of Uncle Jim handing me the reins to his horse-drawn hayrack and my grandma chopping the head off a chicken and seeing Buster Keaton perform at the Minnesota State Fair and also Paul Simon at Madison Square Garden and Renée Fleming in Der Rosenkavalier, but there she is, Aoife, in my pantheon of wonderment. I came home from the Bowery to learn that a dear friend, Christine Jacobson, had died — amazement and mortality in one evening, and it’s a rare privilege to be aware of both, the beauty of life and the brevity.

I talked to a friend last week whose Lutheran church in Minneapolis is trying to attract people of color. Lutherans have been white for centuries, coming as they did from Scandinavia and Germany, countries that were never great colonial powers and didn’t grab big chunks of Africa and Lutheranize the indigenous people.

You know how sometimes you think you’re going to do just a quick, little project and then it turns into something that consumes your entire day? That happens to me a lot in my house. So on Sunday morning, when I realized I had no photo sessions scheduled for the first Sunday in many months, and no events to cover for the newspaper or last minute interviews scheduled for the weekend, I decided I could get a couple of small projects done around the house that were desperately needed.

In case you’re wondering why I was not in church Sunday morning, I was in the Omaha airport at 6:30 a.m. waiting for a flight back to New York, listening to an announcement that unattended baggage would be confiscated, eating a breakfast croissant and blueberry yogurt, drinking coffee, which came to $19.74, which happens to be the year I started doing my old radio show.