Art

The summer I turned sixteen the swelter at camp was relentless. Each afternoon the temperature peaked — 101, 102, even rising past 103 degrees — and campers dropped like flies from the heat. Or like grasshoppers, really. Have you ever seen a grasshopper before it keels over under a body-blistering sun? It jumps erratically, its center of balance overridden by an instinct of perpetual motion, and then it just stops, still and stiffening as its body bakes. The kids were like that — frantic in the sports field with Frisbees and soccer balls, fueled by mediocre mess hall food — and then they crumpled to the ground, unmoving until the nurse came to time their pulses and brace them for the walk to the infirmary.

The heatstroke hit the girls almost exclusively, until the nurse’s station was out of cots and they had to clear space in the back of the gym for a makeshift second infirmary. The rest of us were told to drink water and to sit in the shade as often as possible. We rolled up the legs of our pants and tucked the arms of our shirts up over our shoulders. Camp rules for girls: No tank tops, no two-piece bathing suits, no shorts shorter than an inch above the knee. Modesty always. (more…)

I used to think I could be a writer. It was adorable.

I’m 45. From 20 until almost 40, I harbored delusional aspirations of someday publishing in prominent venues such as Spin, Sports Illustrated, Outside, and the New Yorker. In my 20s I neither enjoyed nor did well in a few full-time print and online journalism jobs. Throughout my 30s I taught writing (which I still do); I also spent a lot of time pitching Minnesota magazine and website pieces and a little time actually getting to write them; I took a short break from teaching in Duluth to see if I could hang with music journalists in Minneapolis (spoiler: nope); I made some stupid decisions I still cringe-blush about (I think I’ve now sent Alan Sparhawk five or six apology emails about a 2005 Minnesota Monthly piece about him I wrote and the magazine’s editors kind of ruined); I got fired from a few freelance jobs and submitted some work that sucked; I did some OK stuff and some pretty good stuff; I realized being able to arrange words well does not make me a writer and even if I ever become what I believe a writer is I’ll never refer to myself as one.

I grew up in a word incubator. Mom reads constantly, Dad taught English then worked as a library director, and they have big, agile vocabularies. They started reading to and conversing with me when I was in the womb. Before I was out of kindergarten, the words and images in The Magic Carousel, Cranberry Christmas and Cranberry Thanksgiving, I Wonder if Herbie’s Home Yet, Diggy Takes his Pick, Never Tease a Weasel, Old Witch and the Polka Dot Ribbon, I Wonder What’s Under, The Ice-Cream Cone Coot and other Rare Birds, and a bunch other Parents’ Magazine Press books, Arch books, Little Golden books, and Dr. Seuss books (especially I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Solew) were forming my lifetime perspective at least as powerfully (and for just as much bad and good) as Sesame Street, Zoom, Captain Kangaroo, and the Electric Company were. (more…)

We were at the graduation ceremony for the Harbor City International School in Duluth, and the commencement address was by Gaelynn Lea Tressler. She is the winner of the 2016 National Public Radio Tiny Desk Concert series and she knows about and exemplifies overcoming hardships and truly appreciating the things we take for granted. She is beautiful and eloquent and she speaks from a position only she can speak from. She sings and she plays her violin from somewhere deep in her soul.

She talked to the graduating high school seniors and she talked to our son and she reminded them to always enrich their own lives and to enrich the lives of others. She talked to them of pursuing their dreams and never giving up. She played her violin and she sang to them and the crowd was speechless and the auditorium was silent as her last notes were fading. Below is an excerpt from her NPR Tiny Desk concert performance. Please don’t pass it up; it’s five minutes and six seconds you will never regret. You have time to watch this: (more…)

Learning lessons in love from my parents’ relationship was nearly impossible. They were a couple if ever in love, fell out of love long before the sperm hit the egg that created me.

But my father Steve, a very logical accounting professor, taught me much about love. That it is a force of nature, learned through our adventures in woods and canyons. If you get caught up in a storm, make sure you have a sturdy Hefty trash bag to wear, a flashlight, and wait it out in a cave. Always carry toilet paper because you never know when you will have to clean up the crap you’ve created. In other words, like nature, love is unpredictable; he thought it best to prepare logically.

This brings me to Sam Cooke’s “Wonderful World,” a song which deeply perplexes my father. As I was growing up, every time this song came on the radio my father would begin a conversation. I was unsure if he was speaking to Sam, God, the Universe, or me. My father has a tendency to think aloud, usually the same string of comments or questions sparked by the same stimulus. “Wonderful World” is one of those stimuli that baffle him. (more…)

I have no memories of my father or the life my mother, sister, father and I lived until age four. Our home was in the middle of the city, but it was so old, it used to be the center of a farm. The garage had lived a former life as a barn, with hay lofts refitted for storing unused garden tools.

I don’t remember my parents’ divorce. In kindergarten, I understood that my mother filed, and that my grandparents moved in with us, because my mother was afraid that he would hurt her. By middle school, I understood the kind of hurt she feared.

My father is my paradigm case of what it means for a man to use force.

I’ve been thinking about the use of force. And every June, I think hard about fatherhood. The thinking is coming together this year.

Christian thinker and philosopher Simone Weil describes force as something that “turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing.” She is writing about Homer’s Iliad, a poem about war, the force that turns men into corpses.  But she goes beyond war to talk about the threat of force as well. (more…)