Film Fest Notes 2026

The MSP International Film Fest is in full swing once again, and the riverfront across from downtown Minneapolis is lively. The glorious weather doesn’t hurt.

The organizers have rearranged the venue somewhat, moving the office and various lounges a block down the street. There are now more bars and glitzy social spaces, but the buzz that used to enliven the halls east of the theater lobby is largely gone. Hilary and have developed a new routine, too; we cross the river at Plymouth Avenue and park on Marshall across from the Ukrainian Church, as close to Hennepin as we can get. From there it’s a ten-minute walk to the theater.

We’ve seen six films so far, covering a range, geographically, from China and Viet Nam to Belgium and Montreal, with stops in Iceland, Syria, the French Alps, and Germany. It’s been lots of fun.

Three of the best were Living the Land, Ky Nam Inn, and A Lovely Day. Also good were Girl in the Snow, and A Silent Friend.

Living the Land offers a portrait of rural China circa 1991. It follows the daily life of a young boy who’s been left behind to be raised by his aunt and grandma while his parents look for work in the city. Promotional material for the film highlights the themes of modernization and social change during that era in China, but the film actually dwells almost exclusively on village customs and farming techniques that haven’t changed for centuries. There’s a lot of shouting and horse-play, a funeral or two, a wedding, and disruptions caused by the local officials who are trying to keep track of who’s related to who, during an era when the appearance of a second child could lead to the loss of social benefits or a civil service job.

It’s polyphonic narrative. and the documentary style might remind some viewers of Tree of the Wooden Clogs—less polished cinematically, perhaps, but far more energetic. Director Huo Meng won the Silver Bear for his work at the 2025 Berlin Film Festival.

A Lovely Day is a comedy focusing on a single wedding day, but it draws together strands of narrative from every direction by means of flashbacks to earlier periods in the groom’s life, and also to incidents in his parent’s life before they divorced. 

Weddings tend to be fun, and this one is no exception, though it’s sullied repeatedly by Alain’s parent’s animosity, the untimely reappearance of an old “friend,” and especially by Alain’s long-standing personal anxieties and other health issues.

Alain, played by Neil Elias, reminded me of Northern Exposure’s Joel Fleishman—smart, fidgety, annoying, prone to excess … but likeable just the same. The film’s original title, Mille secrets, mille dangers (A Thousand Secrets, a Thousand Dangers) perhaps better conveys the atmosphere of the tale. Alain’s fiancée shows remarkable—almost unbelievable—calm and forbearance throughout the day.

It was a treat to listen after the film to director Philippe Falardeau answer questions. He’s a witty man, sharp, scattered, and self-depreciating. One highlight of the Q & A was the remark by a young woman in the audience who said; “I’m Lebanese, and I want to let you know that you nailed the ethos of the Lebanese community perfectly.”

Falardeau replied, looking right and left into the crowd, “Does she work for the festival? Did someone pay her? Thank you SO MUCH!”

The Girl in the Snow is an unusual piece, and all the better for it. Set high in the French Alps, it follows a few months in the life of a woman who’s been hired to give lessons to the children in a small hamlet during the depths of winter, when most of the village women have gone down the mountain to find work as domestics. The kids are unruly, the men taciturn and stand-offish. The snow is deep and it gets dark early. But gradually the woman begins to fit in, attending a gathering in a nearby lodge where the dance steps are as lively as the hurdy-gurdy music is simple.

Much of the film is shot indoors, in rooms lit by firelight with dramatic chiaroscuro reminiscent of Caravaggio. The men and older women tell stories about ghosts. Avalanches are an ever-present danger. But it isn’t long before one or two of the men start to take a deeper interest in the attractive newcomer. And as the story unfolds, it begins to take on the form of one of the occult tales the mountain folk have been sharing by the fire.  

Ky Nam Inn might be the most polished film we saw. It follows Khang, a quiet, well-mannered young translator who's landed a job translating The Little Prince into Vietnamese, in part due to the influence of a relative he hardly knows. He moves into a collective housing block and soon becomes acquainted with Ky Nam, the widow downstairs, who makes a living cooking meals for people in the neighborhood. When she injures her hand, Khang offers to help her out in exchange for regular meals.

In the course of the film, we also get to know quite a few of the building's other residents, including Ky Nam's son, who's soon to be married, and an elderly doctor with whom Khang plays chess when he's not in the kitchen or at the typewriter. It's inevitable that several of the younger women in the building take an interest in Khang. Everyone knows everyone, and gossip gets around. It comes as no surprise for us to learn that Ky Nam has a checkered past. We just don't know what it is. And neither does Khang.

The mysteries and complexities of the plot aside, the film has an unusual and attractive "look." Is this what Viet Nam looked like in 1985? I should have asked the director, who was present and spent a good deal of time answering questions after the screening. He told us some funny stories about the censors, and tried to explain some of the racial nuances between northerners, southerners, mixed-race Vietnamese, and "left-behind" offspring of American soldiers--distinctions of which some in the audience, including me, were only dimly aware.

Time and Water is a low-key look at Iceland through the medium of home movies. Its central event is the discovery by Icelanders that one of their smaller glaciers has entirely disappeared. It was declared dead in 2014. This really shouldn't have come as a surprise, considering that the glacier has been shrinking for a long time, Icelanders have been studying their glaciers for centuries, and the understanding of global warming can be traced back to the nineteenth century. In fact, glaciers have been coming and going for almost two million years now. Yet the narrator keeps repeating, very slowly, "I never imagined that ..."

More interesting than the central thesis are the grainy home movies that show the narrator's family having a good time, going on expeditions, celebrating birthdays, smoking endless cigarettes, cross-country skiing, and so on. Views of the landscape, the waterfalls, and the glaciers themselves also contribute to the film's interest. 

Our Silent Friend is a far more polished and ambitious film. In fact, it's three films in one. They're set in different time periods and are connected only by the fact that they focus on botanists and take place on a college campus in the vicinity of the same ginkgo tree.

The best of the three examines the history of a brilliant young woman who's struggling, at the turn of the twentieth century, against the rampant sexism of academic gatekeepers who would rather she devoted her sense and intellect to making coffee than to exploring the jungles of Indonesia. It's shot in a glistening black-and-white tone and is well acted. (Luna Wedler recently won the "emerging actress" award at the Venice Film Festival for her performance, joining the company of previous winners Gael Garcia Bernal, Jennifer Lawrence, and Mila Kunis.) Every frame is a pleasure to watch.

The second tale focuses on a young woman in more recent times (maybe the eighties?) who's conducting research on a potted geranium in her dorm room. She's hooked it up to a polygraph to study its responses to her watering schedule, among other things. She leaves on a backpacking trip and entrusts her research to a newfound campus friend--a self-styled farm boy who's sick and tired of plants and would rather spend his time reading Rilke. But in her absence, he begins to take an interest in the experiment, and eventually makes some remarkable discoveries.

In the third narrative, a child psychologist who's trapped on the same campus grounds during Covid, modifies some experiments he'd been using on pre-verbal children to see if he can arrive at similar insights regarding the inner life of trees. He eventually resorts to harvesting magic mushrooms from the botanical garden in his quest for results.  

These strands are intertwined time and again throughout the film, but they never coalesce, and none of the three arrive at a conclusion. The film ends, somewhat arbitrarily, with what might be called a cosmic New Age sensory forest bath.

One critic has described Our Silent Friend as "beautiful, elusive, and peppered with provocative nuggets about the nature of life and our place in it." My reaction was more in line with that of the critic who, in a generally positive review, described it as "glacially slow," "prioritizing philosophical atmosphere over narrative momentum," "not driven by cause and effect," and demanding a "surrendered mindset" from the audience. 

I guess I'm not ready to surrender. 

There has been a steady stream of material in recent years exploring what we might call "the hidden life of trees." I read (and liked) forester Peter Wohlleben's book by that name when it came out in 2015. The works of Suzanne Simard in this field have also been widely disseminated. Most of this material deals with biochemical relationships between trees and soil, trees and one another. Not much has been unearthed about what trees may have to say to us. 

It strikes me that we could develop a better rapport with our natural surroundings by dropping the quest for scientific exactitude and begin to think more like the infants the child psychologist describes in Our Silent Friend's opening minutes. You might get a sense of this more open and curious but less analytically focused attention in the films of Terrance Malick. In short, less science, more poetry.

 

Why a Duck?

We drove south along the river to meet and greet the ducks migrating north and were welcomed with open arms. Well, that’s not entirely true. The ducks were too interested in one another to pay much attention to us. In fact, they tended to drift off any time we opened a car door or pulled the spotting scope out of the trunk.

The appeal of the spring migration has several sources, prominent among them being its mystery. Why do tundra swans depart in huge numbers from Chesapeake Bay and fly 4,000 miles to the arctic wastes of northern Canada? Hilary and I were walking the upper trail along the cliffs at Frontenac State Park when we first heard their joyous shouts and honks. (You can listen to it here.) We looked up and there they were, silvery bodies no bigger than grains of rice, flying in formation, hundreds of feet above us.

Five or six flocks passed as we wandered the park. The sky was clear; the air was cold and crisp. I could feel the ardor passing back and forth as these very large birds churned their way north. The excited, clamoring voices set the mood and also told the story.

Hilary and I were also in a quietly ecstatic frame of mind simply to be out in such a beautiful morning, The bluebirds were iridescent. Field sparrows called in the distance—at a more rapid, insistent pace than they do in summer heat. Several woodpeckers were hammering away in the woods along the path to the overlook, as loud as I’ve ever heard them, but hitting notes more than an octave apart.

The previous afternoon we’d driven around Lake Pepin, and in the town of Pepin itself we came upon a huge assembly of ducks milling around near the protection of the marina. They were mostly scaup and ring-necked ducks, with a few handsome canvasbacks and redheads here and there.

On our way out to the end of the pier, we met a short, energetic, casually dressed woman returning from the breakwater. She was excited. “Oh, there are so many!” she said. “But yesterday there were even more. What are they?”

“Mostly scaup,” I told her. “Hunters call them bluebills.”

“Oh, ruddy ducks!” she exclaimed.

 “Well, no,” I corrected her. “Ruddy ducks do have blue bills, but they aren’t called ‘bluebills’. And do you see that duck with a big white ring around its beak. It’s called a ring-necked duck. But you can’t really see the ring around its neck.”

“Strange,” she said. “But I’ve got a duck with a blue bill in a plastic bag back there on shore. An eagle was eating it. It’s dead. I’m going to bury it.”

We passed the woman again on our way to the opposite end of the marina, where the ducks were now congregating, and she showed us the bird in her bag—or what was left of it. Mostly guts.

When we reached our new viewing spot, I noticed that one of the eyepieces on my binoculars had fallen off. But where? We retraced our steps around the harbor, scanning the grass and rubble along the path. No luck.

Then our new friend appeared out of nowhere and said, “Did you lose an eye ring? I found one.” She showed us where it was. How nice.

A few hours later, at the wayside rest north of Lake City, we got a much better look at another raft of ducks. To identify them is one thing. To see them well enough to thrill at their beautiful is something else again. Once again, the redheads and the canvasbacks stole the show.

Before checking into our motel on the western outskirts of Red Wing, we took a little trip away from the river and up into the hills on the urban fringe, in search of Spring Creek Scientific and Natural Area. I’d printed out some details before we left home, and we had no difficulty finding it. We parked in the single slot provided and headed down a path through the woods. Ten minutes later it opened out onto wonderful views to the west of the valley created by Spring Creek eons ago as it cut its way down through the Rochester Plateau to the Mississippi. Three ospreys drifted by overhead—or the same osprey three times? Pasque flowers were blooming inconspicuously amid the dry grasses on the rock exposures.

We spent the next day puttering south, indulging ourselves with a series of side trips and detours. We discovered a coffeeshop in Lake City we'd never seen before. I asked  the young woman behind the counter how long it had been open. She thought for a moment and said, "About eleven years, I think." 

We took Highway 84 out of Kellogg and came upon a large group of blackish ducks frolicking in a vast puddle out in a farmer’s field. They were hard to identify in the midday glare but Hilary finally noticed the flash of green on the face that convinced us they were green-winged teal. Looking up that species in the bird book she read: “Common in very shallow marshes and flooded fields.”

A few miles further south, we heard three eastern meadowlarks during a short hike through the Weaver Dunes. And our duck quest received a further boost as we wound our way though the backwaters of Goose Island County Park, a few miles south of La Crosse: Gadwalls, shovelers, blue-winged teal, and a single widgeon, his white forehead glistening in the early morning sun. “The hunters call that one a ‘bald pate,’ “I would have told our new-found friend from Pepin. “But the forehead isn’t really bald.”

Pelicans are a common sight on the river this time of year, sometimes soaring together in graceful arcs, at other times bobbing far off shore in large, brilliantly white clusters. One evening a few years ago we watched four hundred of them—I counted—come gliding in at dusk in a long line to a back bay south of Goose Island to spend the night.

Our pelican sightings on this trip were more sporadic, but we did come upon a huge congregation on our last day, just north of Winona, at McNally Landing. The wind overhead was fierce, but they all seemed to be having a good time together!

 

Mercurial Season, with Books

The first day of spring arrives at this time every year—usually more than once. I mean, one day it’s warm and sunny, the next two it’s chilly and drab. 

A few days ago the temperature topped 70 degrees for the first time. This means that everyone gets out of work at 3 p.m. At any rate, that was the rule at Bookmen, and I try to remain faithful to it, which isn’t difficult these days; I hardly have any work to do.

One gray day recently, we made an effort to cook up something special. Hilary spent the morning and a good part of the afternoon at the potting studio in Minnetonka. But we’d marked out an itinerary, and when she got home we set off.

Our first stop was Pioneer Park on the east bank of the Mississippi in Northeast. We took a stroll across the railroad bridge and made our way around Nicollet Island, on the lookout for stray buffleheads and early arriving kinglets. My thoughts turned to the history of the island I’d helped Chris and Rushica Hage put together a decade ago. Nowadays few are aware, perhaps, that most of the attractive clapboard houses we were admiring during our stroll were moved there from South Minneapolis during the 1960s as part of an urban renewal project. It remains one of the few neighborhoods in the vicinity that has been neither neglected nor overbuilt.

Our next stop was Kramarczuk’s deli, where we picked up a few tasty-looking dessert items. Then it was on to Eat My Words used bookstore, which has recently relocated to the western fringe of Southeast, right around the corner from Brasa and only a block or two from the apartment where Hilary and I lived in 1975. (Egad!) 

Hilary was looking for a copy of Wuthering Heights for her book club. No luck. "That type of thing goes pretty quick," the young man behind the counter told us. But before we left she did buy a slim paperback copy of James Thurber’s My Life and Hard Times. It was an inspired choice.

On the way home we stopped briefly at Gorka Palace to pick up an order of chicken biryani and beef korma we’d ordered before leaving the house. Everything fell into place like clockwork.

After dinner we sat around in the living room reading  goofy narratives with titles like “The Night the Bed Fell on Father” and “The Car We Had to Push.” To add to the fun, I fetched copies of S. J. Perelman’s Last Laugh and Robert Benchley’s My Ten Years in a Quandary: and How They Grew from the other room.

_____________________

The next morning was as bright as the previous afternoon has been overcast, but a sharp wind made it as chilly as ever—possibly more so. In the midst of scanning the news—terrible as ever—Hilary noticed an article reporting the opening of a new bookstore in St. Anthony Park in the building where Micawber’s used to be. We decided to get out into the day and take a look.

It’s a small shop, utilizing only two of the tree rooms Micawber’s stocked. Stepping in from the bright morning, the lighting struck me as poor. And to my eyes, the shelves seemed to contain a large number of paperbacks with unpleasantly colorful pastel bindings. I don’t know why. The few used books I spotted had been stocked on rotating wooden spindles that looked cute, but tottered, creaked, and groaned when you tried to spin them.

Then again, I have so many books at home that few retail bookstores hold my interest for long.

A few minutes later, perusing the sale items in the public library a block away, I came upon a thick, good-as-new, hardcover biography of Adam Smith, priced at fifty cents. I was thumbing through it when it occurred to me that I already owned a biography of Adam Smith back home, half the size, waiting on the shelf, unread.

Later that afternoon we took one final jaunt in search of Wuthering Heights. The website of Magers and Quinn, in Uptown, reported several copies and editions in stock.

It was a pleasant drive down the parkway, though the skies had turned gray again and the ice on Cedar Lake was even grayer. Having parked the car on a side street near the store, we walked past a block of shuttered restaurants, several of which we’d had it in mind to try, but never did.

Magers and Quinn is the best bookstore around, in my opinion. And I was happy to see there were plenty of people inside, browsing. Hilary hunted down the edition of Wuthering Heights she was looking for, while I drifted through the archway to the chaotic remainder shelves on the back wall. I thumbed briefly through an astonishingly thick volume of Elizabeth Bishop’s collected letters, then hit on a less massive Oxford edition of the complete poems of Robert Herrick, priced at two dollars. Bingo!

I know next to nothing about Herrick, which is why I bought the book. I’m finding his religious poems less uncanny than those of George Herbert, and his amorous secular poems less brilliant than Donne’s. 

I’m not giving up on him yet. After all, he did write these famous lines:

Gather ye rose-buds while ye may,

Old time is still a flying;

And this same flower that smiles today,

Tomorrow will be dying.

But let's get real: he’s no match for Thurber.

  

  

The Academy Awards 2026

The Academy Awards ceremony has come and gone. We watch it very year, not slavishly, but with mild anticipation and curiosity, hoping the clips will be long and the production numbers short.

This year was a good one, right from the beginning, on the red carpet, where the breathy interviewers asked intelligent questions, mostly ignoring who made the gowns, and the stars mostly responded in kind.

Conan O’Brien handled his responsibilities well as MC, in the best Johnny Carson tradition, reaching neither the highs of Bob Hope and Billy Crystal nor descending to the lows of David Letterman and Kid Rock.

The tributes to Rob Reiner and Robert Redford were sincere and touching. The comedy skit about repetitive dialogue aimed at distracted viewers was hilarious. And to top it all off, the run of nominated films was good. Well, I only saw half of them, but I liked what I saw.

If someone asked me to rank them, I’d put them like this:

One Battle After Another. An adventure comedy with numerous twists and turns and an exquisite visual flow, marred only by the absurd overacting of Sean Penn as a deranged military man.

Marty Supreme. A good old-fashioned bildungsroman with lots of energy and color and an annoying protagonist. (Well, Citizen Kane was also annoying and abrasive. And when was Jack Nicholson not annoying?)  

Sentimental Value. A wandering family drama with four acting nominees including an Oscar-worthy performance by Stellan Skarsgård. (The question in my mind remains: by the end of the film, had Dad really changed?)

Hamnet. A “small” film with a single theme, but emotionally affecting.

Sinners. Many parts of it looked like a filmed theatrical performance, which isn’t good. It reminded me of the Saturday matinees I used to go to at the Avalon Theater in White Bear Lake when I was twelve. In short, hokey and over-the-top, yet fun.

After decades of movie-going, one thing I’m convinced of is this: However you imagine a film, based on reviews, clips, or word-of-mouth, it’s likely to be different … and richer, than you expected. Even if it’s bad, it’s likely to be bad in ways you never imagined.

What’s next on the list? It Was Just an Accident? or The Secret Agent?

 

Before the Blizzard

Waiting in front of the fire for the storm to hit,

drinking wine and nibbling a dish of nuts.

I’ve thrown a thick log on the blaze,

Unsplit. Now I’m wondering

which tree it came from. And when.

I saw the first flake two hours ago,

while we were walking down by the creek.

A loner. A scout. The avant garde.

Hooded mergansers were drifting in pairs;

(I’d forgotten how beautiful they are.)

 We met a couple on the trail

who’d seen a brown creeper!

(Did I hear crane croaking in the distance,

Moving north above the clouds?)

 I’m reading a biography of Li Po. It fits the mood.

Now Hilary’s in the kitchen mixing dough.

The pasta machine’s clamped firmly in place.

The pesto thaws as the world turns white again.

  

My Zen Retreat

Hilary is down in Costa Rica hunting up some rare birds with a few friends, and I’m making use of the free time to participate in my own private retreat.

As luck would have it, my old friend Dave came to town for a family wedding during my week of solitude, and I took him out to lunch at a restaurant in a strip-mall on Highway 55. 

We reminisced about old times a little—high school and college days. We ranted for a few minutes about our current Bloviator in Chief, chatted with our young waitress about her aspirations to become a dental hygienist, and made a stop at the Goodwill out in Minnetonka.

Due to the snow in the ground, I was denied the pleasure of weeding the moss garden in the back yard—the traditional monastery task--so I chose an equally tedious and fulfilling one: spackling over an unsightly stain on the kitchen ceiling that I have been ignoring for quite some time.

The first morning I applied some spackle from a half-empty container I found in the basement. The next morning I sanded it down and applied some more. I could see I wasn’t making much progress, and on the third day I stopped at the hardware store to get some coarser sandpaper. 

While I was downstairs fetching the spackle that first day, it occurred to me that I ought to tidy up the basement and dispose of some useless junk. Such a task takes time; every item needs to be evaluated. But I had time. In the end, I kept all the memorabilia I’d saved from high school; it wasn’t much. I tossed all the term papers I wrote in college but kept the pay stub from the first article I wrote for City Pages—an unsolicited review of a Pat Metheny concert. I threw out several boxes of travel brochures from Europe, Nebraska, New Mexico, and other places, most of them dating to the 1980s and 90s. I also threw out most of the maps we’d collected of various parts of the BWCAW, some of which were old enough to be printed on that old-fashioned crinkly waterproof paper. Jigsaw puzzles? Out. An old Jeopardy game? Out. Anything smelling of mildew? Out.

During my retreat I kept to simple meals. To maintain the Asian vibe I made my way through a big bag of yellow curry Thai potato chips from Trader Joe’s, accompanied by kale coleslaw from a bag. Pickled herring and Jarlsberg cheese on Wasabröt added a Scandinavian touch.

As mid-afternoon rolled around, I was usually ready for a stroll along one of our favorite routes. We call it “the pines,” because it takes us past a grove of pines halfway along the parkway—very Zen-like.

You might imagine that in the midst of this toil I would take a break to read a few lines from a classic like The Seven Pillars of Zen or Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, but I’m beyond all that. You know what they say: “Those who teach don’t know, and those who know don’t teach.”

(I don’t know precisely who said that, but you’ve got to admit, it’s more than a little redundant.)

Yet I didn’t entirely ignore that interior stuff. In fact, I came up with a small library of thought-provoking material that I was confident would drive me to new depths of enlightenment.

A few examples:

1) Julien Marias: Philosophy as Dramatic Theory:      

“Since philosophy is something that ‘has to be done,’ this means that it is not made or finished, but is something “to be made,” a chore or a task, which is to say that we have to make ‘another’ philosophy, different from those that have preceded us.”

2) Withold Gombowitz: Diary

“Knowledge, what ever it is worth, from the most precise mathematics to the darkest suggestions of art, is not to calm the soul but to create a state of vibration and tension in it.”

3) Antonio Machado: Juan de Mairena

“To think is to meander from highway to byway, and from byway into alleyway, till we come to a dead end. Stopped dead in our alley, we think what a feat it would be to get out. That is when we look for the gate to the meadows beyond.”

4) Fernando Pessoa: The Book of Disquiet

“Morning, spring, hope—they are all connected in music by the same melodic intention; they are connected in our souls by the same memory with the same intention. No: if I observe myself as I observe the city, I recognize that what I have to hope is for this day to end, as all days do. Reason can also see the dawn.”

What? Come again?

After a day or two, such ruminations were beginning to get me down, and one evening I turned on the TV to watch a documentary about Gobekli Tepe, an archeological site in Turkey that’s upending our understanding of the development of agriculture, and cities. As usual with such shows, an hour of footage was devoted to about ten minutes of information, but the scenes of stone walls and rubble, vast rolling hills, and youthful archeologists with heavy German accents scratching at chunks of rock with tiny brushes, somehow held my interest. I also enjoyed those electronically generated SHOCK chords that resounded as each new tidbit of speculation was unveiled.

Eager to learn more, I hunted down my copy of The Dawn of Everything, picking up the argument where I’d dropped it months or even years ago. Among other nuggets of information I came upon, the iconoclastic authors politely report that the so-called “agricultural revolution” took place over a span of about three thousand years, which is roughly equivalent to the interval separating us from the Trojan War.

That “revolution” was carried out almost exclusively by women, and it took place largely on mudflats in the section of the Fertile Crescent south of the Tarsus Mountains, the precise locations changing as rainfall and water levels shifted from year to year. The authors suggest it would be more accurate to refer to these pursuits as “gardening” rather than “agriculture.” It was just one activity among many contributing to the complex Neolithic economy.

I thought about that golden era the next day as I concocted my black bean/canned corn/avocado salad, laced with olive oil, salt, and cayenne.

Another means of escape from ponderous thinking lay in games. The morning Wordle was a must, of course, but I also spent a little too much time playing backgammon, using a program I uploaded years ago from a $10 CD I bought at Office Max. Backgammon comes from India, as you probably know. So does Buddhism. I think.

The weekend arrived with cold, leaden skies, and it was with great pleasure that I broke my schedule of meditations to host a game of dominoes with two old friends. (Dominoes can be traced back to twelfth-century China, by the way.) For the special occasion we made short work of a Papa Murphy’s pizza and a bottle of Gigondas, followed by the better part of a tasty Oregon Pinot Noir.

The sunny skies returned the next morning. In fact, the air was so sharp and clear that by 8:15 I was out of the house and on my way up the hill along the “oak” route, which veers north at the parkway and rises to the road following a narrow stretch of deciduous woods. At that point you cross the road and return south along the tree-lined bike path toward the “pines,” with a row of handsome prewar two-story houses lined up in the distance, just across a second sward of parkway grass. It’s a two-mile route, and it occurred to me that it had never looked better. I was reminded that before it became the name of a deity, the word Zeus referred simply to a quality—brilliance.  

Another remarkable aspect of my retreat was the nightlife. A few days in, I was awakened by the hoot of a barred owl, loud and close. It was dark—just before dawn—but as I looked out the bedroom window, I could see her on a branch maybe 25 feet away. Then the male flew in and landed on the same branch. I know it was a male because a clumsy, fluttering, airborne mating event ensued almost immediately. Five seconds later, the male was gone.

A few nights later the couple was back, this time delivering raucous shouts and trills and monkey laughs. It was 2:32 in the morning, and they seemed to be having a blast.

As my immersive meditative journey grew more intense, I finally came up for air, finding a few hours of relief in a not-entirely-relaxing film called One Battle After Another.

By this time the remains of the black bean salad in the fridge were getting soggy—especially the avocado. I didn’t want to eat them, but I didn’t have the heart to toss them. So with a continuing emphasis on frugality, I took a small Tupperware container of old rice from the fridge and a half-empty bag of frozen “roasting vegetables” from the freezer. I spread the vegies out on a roasting pan and slid the mélange into the oven. When they were done roasting, I mixed them with the rice, added one tablespoon of fish sauce, one tablespoon or hoisin sauce, and a few splashes of siracha, and heated the concoction in the microwave.

It didn’t taste quite like anything I’d ever eaten before. I’m not saying it was bad ...

Hilary and I talked on the phone every night. She told me tales of fording mountain streams to reach jungle resorts, wonderful lunches in toney botanical gardens, hot ocean beaches and cool swimming pools, rare birds perched on almost every branch, and, more important than anything else, simply having fun with her friends.

She’ll be flying home tonight.

This morning I took another walk up to "the oaks." Most of the snow has melted along the parkway, and the air now smells earthier. We're on the cusp of a lustrous new season.

In my lackadaisical perusal of The Dawn of Everything, I’ve gotten only as far as the rise of Uruk, which flourished from roughly 4000 to 3100 BCE. But that will have to wait. I’ve got some tidying up to do. And a trip to Trader Joe’s is definitely in the cards. For flowers, of course. The flight doesn't arrive until 8:45. I'm wondering what kind of late-evening snacks would be appropriate?  

February Light

It’s the same every year: mid-February, late afternoon, and the sun is beaming into the kitchen, strong and low, rendering translucent whatever it is you’re busy chopping at the counter—onions, red bell peppers, butternut squash. This is something you need, no matter how hard you’ve been trying to appreciate the months of “cozy” winter darkness. Not the radiant energy itself, but the sensation, the effect on the eye, an effect that shoots directly to the heart. Suddenly you’re reminded of garden plants, of grilling on the deck, of listening to the barred owls hoot while lying in the woods in the dark in a tent. This is what the future holds.  

An exhilaration comes upon you in the midst of that sparkling brilliance. Everyone feels it. Couples are passing by, walking the dog, pushing the baby carriage. It isn’t just a promise of the future, it’s a visceral feeling, now.

And this year the effect has been compounded by the fact that snow is melting, streets are glistening, water is running along the gutters. It gives the city an enchanted quality due to the reflections, the urban sounds, and the balmy air, that would have been impossible to appreciate during the holiday season, not to mention the recent murderous federal “surge.”

The other afternoon I spent some time cutting back the forsythias and the grey-twigged dogwood. Years of experience have taught me that you can’t really kill these things--I've tried--so you might as well be bold. 

A few nights ago, we met some friends at a Venezuelan restaurant at 35^th and Nicollet in south Minneapolis. I’d made a reservation for 5 p.m., though to judge from the website, no one else had made a reservation at all. I was hoping the place wouldn’t be deserted. We were seated at a corner table. It was perfect, except for the loud-speaker affixed to the ceiling directly above our heads.

When the server came by, I said, “You know, we all have hearing aids. Do you think we could move to that table down at the other end?” Not exactly true, but she understood and got the okay from on high.

The food was good and the low table-lighting added to the ambiance. But what impressed me most was how animated the clientele was. And how young. These were people from the neighborhood. Well, what did I expect? I had to remind myself that forty years ago we lived five or six blocks away ourselves, and this was our neighborhood.

The other morning we headed down to the Cedar Avenue Bridge to catch the morning light. And that same afternoon we went on a drive down around the lakes. The light was low to the west, but there were fishermen standing around on the ice in the middle of Lake Harriet. The ice itself looked gray and scuffed and lustrous, with pools of water reflecting the blue sky here and there. The potholes in the road were also filled with water--a constant challenge. 

 February light doesn't merely hold the promise of spring. It's an intrinsic good. It's free, and it's all the more pleasant and surprising for the fact that, unlike the speck of a comet or the fleeting dance of the Northern Lights, it spreads itself everywhere, morning and evening, day after day.