Tinges of Autumn

And aren’t they grand! Who knew (or remembered) that cool morning air could feel so good.

Our weekend commenced with a Friday morning trip to the downtown farmers’ market. Such color! Such hubbub! We contented ourselves with a few spectacular tomatoes, two long and massive leeks, a huge clump of kale, and a cardboard tray of oversized zucchini and summer squash.

One teenaged kid was unloading ears of corn from the back of a pickup truck by the armload onto his table.

“Think you’re going to sell all that?” I said.

“Yeah,” he replied blasély, and went back to work.

I asked the guy with the zucchini if he’d do a three-for-ten deal. “No. I work too hard,” he replied.

We had a few friends over for a late afternoon meal on the deck consisting of kale salad and a simplified version of cassoulet in which the duck and sausage are replaced by a few slices of bacon to go along with the chicken, cannellini beans, squash, and leeks.

Almost by chance, we kept to the southern French theme with the wines: a Saint-Véran, a Vacqueyras, and an obscure white from the Costiéres-de-Nîme.  

The air was cool, the dappled evening light was beautiful coming in through the trees, and the chipmunks were plunking. One red-eyed vireo passed by and lingered to examine the white berries on the dogwood shrubs along the deck. For a moment we thought it might be a warbler heading south!

The next morning, hardly fazed by the food and wine, we loaded our bikes on the car and drove up to Elm Creek Regional Park, which has the finest bike trails in the metro area—at least for the kind of recreational biking we do. 

It’s a nice mix of hills and flats, woods and fields, marshes and lakes, with relatively few cyclists and nary a dwelling in sight along its 20-mile length.

Another thing I like about it: there are so many twists and turns and so few recognizable landmarks that you seldom know quite where you are or how far you still have to go.

Catbirds meowed and squawked from the woods, peewees pined, goldfinches chuckled. We passed fields of goldenrod and black-eyed Susans. The sumac is not quite turning red, but a few plums are ripening on the trees.

Back home, Hilary diced a few of our market tomatoes and raided the garden for a handful of basil to put together a topping for bruschetta. She added some drizzled olive oil, salt, a minced clove of garlic, or two; that’s all it takes.

The tomatoes were moist and red and absolutely flavorless. The vine-on tomatoes at Trader Joe’s are far better. But the ensemble tasted good heaped onto pieces of toast. The mild afternoon heat was already on the wane.

 And one of our resident owls started to hoot again. Everyone likes it cool.

   

The Revolution of Everyday Life

The recent death of Raoul Vaneigem, at the age of 92, must give all of us pause for thought.

To be honest, I’d never heard of the man until I saw his obituary in the Times. His chief claim to fame was to have written a manifesto in 1967 called The Revolution of Everyday Life, which was an inspiration to the student uprising that closed down universities in Paris and elsewhere in May 1968.

The literal translation of this little book of aphorisms—sort of like Mao’s “little red book,” I suppose, also popular at the time—would be The How-to-Live Handbook for the Young. Whatever wisdom this book may contain, I’m probably too old to benefit from it. But I requested a copy from the library, and I also requested another of Vaneigem’s many subsequent books: A Cavalier History of Surrealism.

Meanwhile, I fetched from my basement stacks a slightly musty paperback copy of The Spirit of May by J.-J. Servan-Schreiber (marked ‘25 cents’ in pencil on the front fly) and also the hardcover volume right next to it, The Taxis of the Marne, by Jean Dutourd (one dollar).

Perhaps you see the connection. The taxis Dutourd refers to were used to transport soldiers to the front lines in the exuberant early days of World War One.

I had originally planned—that is to say, forty years ago—to include a third volume in a study of the vicissitudes of the modern French state: Strange Defeat by Marc Bloc. That essay never got written. None of those books got read. I can’t find the third one. Is it still around somewhere? (Who cares?) Anyway, if you're familiar with the books, you can connect the dots.

Perhaps I was intuitively following the path set out by Vaneigem: down with capitalism, screw the state, abandon the quest for wealth and glory and enjoy yourself, your friends, your community.

In one line quoted in the Times obit, Vaneigem asks: “Who wants a world in which the guarantee that we shall not die of starvation entails the risk of dying of boredom?”

I guess this is where surrealism comes in.

Vaneigem’s name came up during a breakfast conversation I had recently with a friend of mine at the Buttered Tin. We also talked about Agora, the classic film set in ancient Alexandria in the months before its famous library burned down. Jeff had recently had breakfast with a mutual friend, the documentary filmmaker and poet Mike Hazard. Jeff did the sound production for several of Mike’s films.

I’ve heard it said more than once that “everyone knows Mike.” It might almost be true. I worked with Mike briefly on a book of poems by the late Roy McBride, but I’ve run into him here and there at other times. He once came up to me at a book convention covering his face with three pieces of “poetry on a stick.”

There’s a touch of zaniness, color, freedom, and “Why not?” in much of Mike’s work, and his films often focus on other masters of this poetic domain.

It was a beautiful morning, and when I got back home from breakfast, Hilary and I decided to pay a visit to the Andersen Library on the West Bank, which is hosting an exhibit of Mike’s work.

We came prepared with a telephone number. The building is locked: you have to call someone to come to the door and let you in. This may explain why there was no one in the galleries but us. The exhibit spaces are small but elegant, almost lavish. Several Plexiglas kiosks contained samples of postcards, flyers, chapbooks, and photographs that either depict Mike’s work in arts education or are the result of it.

You can view quite a few of Mike's works, including videos, here. 

A second room, beyond the main gallery, has been given the look of a gentleman’s club: antique globes, finely unholstered wing-back chairs, stained glass windows, and maybe even a replica of a bust by Houdon. It reminded me of the rare books room on the fourth floor of Wilson Library and the book-collecting legacy of James Ford Bell and the library’s namesake, Governor Elmer Andersen, both of whom employed book scouts for years to explore antiquarian collections in London and the Continent in search of rare volumes.

It made for an interesting contrast—aristocratic digs and exuberant ephemera. I love them both. I have enough books in the house to satisfy almost any pang of curiosity, but I also have a cheap metal pin stuck into the window-frame behind my desk that says “Demolish Serious Culture.” I picked it up years ago at the Walker Art Center’s extensive Fluxus show dedicated to the work of Joseph Boyce and the German avant garde.

Some of that stuff is playful, some of it is pretty angry, or grim. By way of contrast, here’s a poem by Mike, reprinted in the little handout on a table near the door.

Namesake

Pounding a black gavel

Engraved with a nickname HAP,

The handle of a grandfather I never met for real,

And my last name, HAZARD—

My heart pounds.

 

It was time for lunch, and we decided to cross the bridge on the freeway to Dinkytown to find a place to eat. I don’t need to tell you that the neighborhood has changed since 1978, the last year I tended parking lots for the U of M. I don’t need to list the used bookstores, hamburger joints, bakeries, guitar shops, and Italian restaurants that have vanished either. 

We had a perfectly decent lunch at a Vietnamese café called Pho Mai that seems to be an offshoot of a more elegant restaurant in Brooklyn Park. To be honest, it was better than the tendon we used to get at the Tokyo cafe years ago. But the street is entirely different. Perrines is gone. Annie’s Parlor is gone. Gray’s Drug is gone. The Loring Café is gone. (Wasn’t I going to skip that part?)

Around the corner, the upstairs incarnation of the Bookhouse is still there and still packed with used books. Yet in this case, I find that my interest is gone. You can tell at a glance that most of the books are rattier than the ones we have at home. The poetry section is especially bad. The books are too skinny, dust jackets gone, you can’t read the titles on the bindings. All is lost. They might as well chuck the whole section into the Mississippi.

As I was passing the front desk I heard a young man on the telephone: “Books from that era are usually so ragged that they aren’t worth anything. Old is not necessarily good.” I was impressed: he’d heard it all before--and said it all before--but by the tone of his voice I could tell he was being good-natured about it.

 

Morning Meditations: Election Day

Hilary is off to her post as an election judge, and I’m facing a blank grayish day. It starts with a mug of French roast coffee and a CostCo croissant from the freezer.

Are they any good? At fifty cents apiece they’re quite good. The ones at Patisserie 46, at $6 apiece, are only slightly better. And they’re a half-hour drive away.

I can remember a time when the only place in town you could get good croissants was the New French Café. This was followed by the era that produced two important works: The Preppie Handbook and Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche. From there, it was but a few short steps to the January 6th riots and the first major attempt to overthrow a freely elected U.S. government.

Before rosy-fingered dawn had shown her smiling pink face, I’d already done the Wordle and Connections, and read Paul Krugman’s latest column, in which he restates the (to some of us) obvious fact that the American health care system has been largely government subsidized for decades. He goes on to describe the private insurance industry as “parasitic.”

Everyone should read this column, but few will read it. I would go farther and suggest that all government activity is by nature socialistic. Good governments handle their responsibilities sensibly; bad ones don’t.

Krugman follows up the reasoning and the statistics with a popular song, as usual. Today it was “Closer to Fine.” I didn’t recognize the Indigo Girls. (They were after my time.)

I'm trying to tell you something 'bout my life

Maybe give me insight between black and white

And the best thing you ever done for me

Is to help me take my life less seriously… 

By now, so many popular musical groups are “after my time” that I can hardly make it through the daily crossword puzzle. “Lead singer of REM, Michael _____.” If they didn’t do a half-time show at the Superbowl, I’ve never heard of them. I just watched Help for the first time the other day—on DVD. (I liked it.)

Right now my main concern is to determine which translation of The Odyssey is best. The Emily Wilson version that I requested arrived at the library the other day. I’m finding that the iambic pentameter doesn’t really flow. She might just as well have straightened it out into prose paragraphs.

Of course, any translation will be radically different from the film, a medium that even in the surest hands lacks the tools to bring the lyricism of the original to life.

Down by the stony trail they made their way

As far as Clearwater, not far from town—

A spring house where the people filled their jars …

And round it on the humid ground a grove,

A circular wood of poplars grew. Ice cold

In runnels from high rock ran the spring,

And over it there stood an altar stone

To the cool nymphs, where all men going by

Laid offerings.

Yesterday was a marvel of serendipitous conversation. We chatted at length out in the street with our neighbors Brendan and Sara. They were hard at work digging up a rectangle of bare ground the local energy company had disturbed while installing a new gas line. We discussed the neighborhood owls, Brenden’s success at selling odd pieces of junk on Facebook Marketplace, and the deterioration of their mini-camper, which hasn’t left the driveway all summer.

Our next-door neighbor Rocky was also out in her yard—a rare occurrence. Brendan told me she bought a robot lawn-mower, and it seemed she was trying to program it with her phone. 

We might have stopped over to say hi, but we were heading down to Edina to pick up a book-club book from some friends. They were expecting us. We sat in their imaginatively landscaped front yard sipping drinks that Michel concocted in a big wooden bowl with fresh limes, Brazilian rum, and salt. Conversation roamed from the nature of “borderline personalities” to office politics at Metro State to the rising stars on the women’s tennis tour. Michel later brought out a succession of choice morsels from the kitchen. I might call them cheeseballs or bruschetta; he would call them acılı ezme or bolinho de aipim.

Late in the afternoon I took some newspapers out to the recycling bin and ran into our neighbor Brian, out for a walk with his daughter, Vivian. He’s seldom around; we chat maybe once a year.

“How’s the sound-track industry treating you,” I asked him.

“It tanked. My sponsor lost his funding. Now I’m installing audio systems.”

“Well, at least it gets you out of the house,” I said.

Vivian has grown in the course of a year. “Gee. Are you in college now?” I asked.

“I’ll be a high school junior next fall.”

Favorite subject? “English, I think.”

Good answer. All young people should read Middlemarch, All the King’s Men, Notes from Underground, and A Farewell to Arms, don’t you think? But who knows? Maybe she’s been reading Gravity’s Rainbow, Bel Canto, Olive Kittridge, and Bright Lights, Big City?

Now the sun is out. Rising. Along with the heat. It's the same thing every day, but with variations. The hummingbirds are starting to get belligerent around their red plastic feeder. 

"Take it easy, fellas. There's plenty for everyone."

And the catbird is devouring the berries on the dogwood. Cats and dogs.   

Any time now, I'm going to go vote down at the fire station. While I'm at it, I might as well check the water clarity at the bridge above Bassett Creek. It's getting better, year by year. 

Chalk it up to the efforts of the Bassett Creek Watershed Management Commission.  I wonder who's paying for that ...

Winona Beethoven Overnight

Winona has been holding a midsummer Beethoven Festival annually for almost two decades now, with world-class performers and a wide array of classical ensembles, styles, and programs. After reading about the event for years—often after the fact—we finally committed ourselves this year to an evening of Beethoven quartets performed by the Ariel String Quartet.

It wasn’t the most auspicious moment to embark on an overnight getaway to Winona. Temperatures were in the 90s and forest fires in the BWCA had sent the air quality index to dangerous heights. The smell of stale smoke was everywhere, and the Minneapolis skyline had been reduced to a vague dystopian silhouette.

We went anyway. We’d already booked the tickets and the motel. And there was reason for hope. The forecast mentioned the possibility of rain, which would wash some of the smoke away, and the NW wind might just shush the nasty stuff east into Wisconsin.

We left town at 1:30. There was water on the roads in Red Wing. The air had improved. Patches of blue sky appeared. Clouds took shape.

It rained heavily while we were checking into our motel on the outskirts of Winona. (Good timing.) We dressed for the concert (summer casual) and headed down into the city a few minutes later, looking for a place to grab a bite to eat. Hilary was scrolling the possibilities on Trip Advisor and happened on Sapori di Sicilia, which described itself as a “panificio : pasticceria.” A bakery and pastry shop?

It was only three blocks away. We parked right in front of the steps leading up to the place. Downtown Winona is full of half-decrepit storefronts, but this place seemed to be housed in a repurposed bank. Modern. Large tiles on the floor. Bakery cases half-full of tasty-looking morsels.

A closer look at the menu on the wall behind the cash register suggested that we’d come to the right place: truffle fries, falafel fritters, capicola panini. aglio e olio, gnocchi. And six or seven house wines at $ 6-8/glass.

Everything tastes better in an oversized bowl.

We ordered a Greek salad and pasta carbonara, took a table by the window, and settled in to watch the passing scene. The chairs were remarkably comfortable. Hilary had a great view of a group of seven elderly women engaged in animated conversation. A book club? University professors discussing some upcoming candidate for tenure? Or were they all headed to the Beethoven festival later that evening?

We nursed our orders, passing them back and forth across the table, happy to be inside watching the weather improve through the window. At one point I went up to the counter to get two glasses of water and said to the young woman behind the register, apropos of nothing, “This image on your menu looks like it came from Crete.”

“Well, it happens to be in the center of the Sicilian flag,” she replied, cracking a hint of a smile.

The concert took place at a theater on the campus of St. Mary’s University, tucked into the wooded bluffs a five-minute drive up the hill from our motel. The night wasn’t cool, but it was no longer unpleasantly hot, and the air had improved so greatly that Hilary spotted the crescent moon peeking through a rift in the clouds. People were milling around on the terrace in front of the concert hall, and it seemed the only thing missing was the sharp report of a passing nighthawk.

The concert itself was deeply expressive and thoroughly engaging: Beethoven—early, middle, and late. Works like these don’t carry you along like a breeze, they draw you in like a compelling argument, and the Ariel Quartet offered a flawless exercise in emotional logic and probing intensity. The first half of the program ran 90 minutes. The single piece after intermission was a mere twenty-two. The balance seemed perfect.

I was impressed. I had never heard of the Ariel Quartet prior to coming upon them in the festival schedule, though they’ve been playing together for almost thirty years. But I’m sure these musicians are less concerned with impressing people than with fully exposing the challenge, the anguish, and the beauty of Beethoven’s imagery.

The next morning, after a "light breakfast" at the motel, we returned to our new favorite Sicilian cafe stop to sample the bakery goods. The same young woman was behind the country, and when she brought us our coffee we learned a bit about the owner's background.

From there it was across the river to Trempealeau NWR, where we drove the nine-mile gravel circuit, stopping hear and there to take a walk or get a better view of a bird. The sky was clear and the humidity had dropped, though not by much. 

We spotted four or five indigo buntings along the way--they like to sit in the open at the tops of trees, displaying their iridescent feathers--but most of the birds were sheltering in the shadows of the vegetation. We heard warbling vireos, common yellow-throats, great-crested flycatchers, Eastern towhees, robins, pewees, yellow-bellied woodpeckers, catbirds--the usual suspects. Hilary spotted a few pelicans drifting out in the river. A beaver swam by. Perhaps our best sighting was of a red-headed woodpecker disappearing into the underbrush. 

   

California Wedding

In the past we’ve sometimes carved out a week in California in early April, when Minnesota is struggling to emerge from hibernation, while the Pacific Coast is awash in fragrant air and riant with color. We amuse ourselves walking along a beach or across the grassy headlands above the beach, or into the redwood canyons extending up through the hills.

But June is a fine month to be here in Minnesota.

We went to California recently because our niece was getting married. And a glorious wedding it was! It was held at an organic farm on the Russian River a few miles outside Healdsburg, with a barbeque the night before at a park nearby in the shade of a grove of redwoods.

The happy couple met while working in an olive grove run by monks up in the hills somewhere north of San Francisco. Scott later paid Emily a few visits when she worked at the farm where the wedding was being held. They found they had a lot in common. And the rest is history.

 Emily arrived at the late-afternoon riverbank ceremony via the Russian River, in a canoe. Her dad was in the stern. Her mother, Mary, officiated at the service, and her sister, Nora, read a poem. Music for the event was provided by Scott’s father, Phil, an accomplished guitarist.

Emily, Scott, and Sarah

It was a golden afternoon.

After the ceremony, Scott tried to get me to eat an oyster. "I haven't eaten one of those since the spring of 1978," I said. "It didn't go down well." 

"Well, here's your chance to get the hang of it," he replied with a grin.

Emily and Scott have a lot of nice friends. I would be tempted to use the word “attractive,” though the fact is that they were simply young, fresh, animated, and casually well dressed. I never talked to any of them. They were busy talking to one another, and I’m pretty sure Hilary and I were the oldest people there.

Emily’s dad, Jeff, was beaming throughout the afternoon. Love, joy, and relief were jockeying for position on his smiling face. Things were going well.

Meanwhile, there were plenty of relatives for Hilary and me to catch up with, or get to know. I chatted with Scott’s father at some length about the guitars of Grenada and the wonder of synthetic fingernails. I expressed my enthusiasm for a few flamenco guitarists—Paco, Tomatito, Chicuelo, Vicente Amigo—and offered to burn him a sampler CD.  I chatted with Mary’s nephew John about all the family (and historical) lore that’s being lost while the youth of today flip through their phones. I chatted with my niece Sarah, who lives in Portland, about her chickens. Brother-in-law Paul described a few episodes in his family’s free-wheeling seat-of-the-pants road trip down the coast from Oregon. And I chatted with my sister-in-law Mary’s sister-in-law Gretchen about the urban attractions of St. Louis, where she lives.

The food was spectacular and tasty. It arrived in leisurely stages, which tended to encourage over-eating. One never knew what was coming next. If anything.

The wines were also far better than average. I was especially taken by the GMS blend made at the farm, to which they’ve given the proprietary name Palmeri.   

And to top it off, the speeches given by friends and family members after the meal were affectionate and also informative. It’s a part of a wedding--one of many--that’s difficult to relate effectively after the fact.

 You really had to be there.

The Heavenly Regions

Bright sun, a moderate breeze, and temperatures in the low sixties. These are the conditions that prevail in the heavenly regions, I suspect, and last weekend we were blessed with the same regime here in town. After rejecting three or four more exotic cycling options, Hilary and I decided to pump up the tires and make the time-honored, but often overlooked, trip around the Lakes.

What lakes? Bde Maka Ska, Harriet, and Isles, of course, a few minutes’ drive down the parkway from our house.

We got an early start. The air was sharp, and traffic on the bike paths was moderate. We were soaring.

It’s become fashionable to describe such episodes as “being in the present.” More than a few books have been written celebrating that level of innocent awareness, and offering advice about how to reach and sustain it.

I have no advice to give. I’m tempted to argue that such a concept is inappropriate to the occasion. At the least, it seems to suggest that our recollections of the past are filled with remorse, our anticipation of the future fraught with anxiety. That’s not necessarily true.

We used to live much closer to these lakes, and throughout our leisurely tour I was pleasantly reminded of people and events from the past. The recollections added an emotional depth to the visually spectacular scene. I was reminded of the years when our friends Greg and Betty lived in a condo across Bryant Park from us. As we locked our bikes and took a stroll through Harriet Gardens, I was reminded that the bedding plants near the fountains were once set off by a trim row of buckthorn hedges!

The tennis courts at Beard’s Pleasance reminded me of matches with an old friend interrupted again and again by snippets of conversation about food, films, and travel. We passed my cousin’s house, where we all used to sit on the shady porch as the morning heated up. And at one point, on the west side of Lake Harriet, I was reminded of a party I went to in the mid-1970s in an upstairs apartment before Hilary and I had even met.

On our way back to the car, we sat on a bench overlooking Bde MaKa Ska, trying to pick out a good place for lunch. Yum? No. Niviya Thai Kitchen? It’s gone downhill. Hazelwood? Too suburban. Convention Grill? Might work.

In the end, as we often do, we went home and cooked up something new, in this case a pasta salad with corn and cherry tomatoes from a recent recipe in the Times. Not bad. (But might not be a “keeper.”)

*   *   *

The next morning was equally brilliant but far more blustery. We drove down to the farmers’ market to pick up some parsley and a few discounted zinnias. Did some planting back home.

But the real highlight of the day came later, when we once again drove into town to attend a concert by Lux String Quartet being given at St. Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral in association with a traveling exhibit called Violins of Hope. The display consisted of six or seven Plexiglas cases holding a selection of violins that had been owned by Jews who died in concentration camps during WW II.  

This is serious stuff, and it might almost have seemed a bit morbid, except for the subtlety and zeal with which the members of Lux worked through their program, and also the verve with which each of the four performers announced a piece and also described what it was like to play an instrument from the venerable collection.

As an added twist, the performance consisted of isolated movements from several compositions—Grieg, Shostakovich, Kodaly, and, best of all, the first movement of Ravel’s String Quartet, one of my favorites. Taking them out of their broader musical environment seemed to refresh them.

And as chance would have it, we ran into five of our friends at the concert. But is that really chance? They all live near the Lakes, and three of the five are musicians.

After the concert I ran into composer David Evan Thomas in the hall where the instruments were on exhibit. I told him the tale of the LP of Ravel’s Quartet that I had in college, a Nonesuch recording with a pink hot-air balloon on the cover. He agreed that Nonesuch album covers could be outrageous.

“You should write something for the Lux,” I said.

He cleared his throat and replied, modestly, “Well, they premiered my second string quartet.”

Oh. I didn’t know.

 

   

The News from Campus

I have a soft spot in my heart for things related to campus life. There’s something “cool” about those years you spend learning things while doing crumby part-time jobs and hanging out with your friends. And in more recent years, Hilary and I have wandered over from time to time to see a play or an opera staged by the music department. I've attended a few programs hosted by the Carlson School of Business, the Heller School of Economics, and the English Department. I taught a class on the St. Paul Campus for several years as part of their Compleat Scholar program. And now that I think about it, I was once invited to join the programming committee for the West Bank Film Society. 

So when I received an email from the University of Massachusetts/Boston inviting me to join a focus group to discuss ways campuses can “engage with older adults in the community” and “foster intergenerational interactions,” I signed up. Why not? The meeting would only take an hour, and I would receive a $50 Amazon gift card as a reward for my efforts.

I was a little proud of myself for noting that the meeting was scheduled in Eastern Daylight Time. That meant that the 2 p.m. Zoom session would be starting at 1. But when I tuned in, the session was almost over. The moderator invited me to return in an hour, when a second session was scheduled to start. That gave me time to refer back to the original email invitation, which specified Fri, May 22, 1:00 – 2:00 EDT. My mistake. (Perhaps this faux pas established my bona fides as an elderly person struggling to come to grips with the complexities of the modern campus world.) 

I was surprised to discover, in any case, that both of the sessions—the one I’d missed and the one I attended—were made up entirely of women, all of whom were employed at college campuses in Massachusetts. Quite a few of them seemed to know each other personally. It struck me as odd that they were all academics or administrators. None were average citizens expressing concerns about campus access--the things that the panel was purporting to address.

Except me.

The facilitator was articulate and well-organized. She had drawn up a series of questions, and also mentioned how much time she planned to devote to each—five or ten minutes—before initiating discussion. The questions were broad, on the order of “How can colleges and universities support accessibility, navigation, mobility, and safety for all ages on campus?” and “What discourages or prevents older learners from coming to campuses?” Within the confines of the time limit, our answers were inevitably superficial. Concerns about crime? Better campus lighting, more cops. Navigation? Kiosks with maps. Parking? Take a bus. And so on.

The section that seemed most fruitful to me explored ways to connect older students to academia by scheduling classes and events off-campus. Although I tried to maintain a low profile during the discussion, I couldn’t resist mentioning the Osher Lifetime Learning Institute, which supports learning programs at more than 250 universities around the country, with classes held in local churches, high schools, libraries, and online. I also mentioned the numerous readings and educational programs hosted within our local Hennepin County Library System, and the city-wide system of motorized scooters that make it easier for older adults to traverse the sprawling U of MM campuses.

(The idea of older people riding around on scooters may sound absurd, but in the minds of the panelists, a twenty-five year old would be considered an “older” returning adult. Anyway, isn't this a prime examle of the much encouraged "thinking outside the box"?)

With about three minutes left in the hour, someone brought up the issue of Zoom classes, which obviate the challenges involved in negotiating a college campus entirely. “I think they’re great.” I chimed in. Someone countered with a remark on the order of “but then you miss the interactions between student and teacher and among the students themselves.”

“That’s true to some extent,” I said. “But in the classes I teach on Zoom, there’s a lot of useful interaction going on between students in the chat—questions being answered, enthusiasms being shared. Far more than in a "live" classroom. And everyone has the opportunity to email me directly after class with questions, observations, or challenges to my remarks.”

I might have gone on to observe that quite a few people in my classes would never dream of leaving their assisted living arrangements to attend a class ten (or two hundred) miles away on a 400-acre campus serving 50,000 students. In my most recent class there were students from as far away as Crosby and Lac Qui Parle.

What I did says was: “More than 160 people registered for my most recent class. You’re unlikely to reach a third of that total in a college classroom.”

I might also have mentioned, as an aside, that Luther Seminary, after more than a century of operation in the beautiful St. Paul neighborhood of St. Anthony Park, now plans to sell its entire campus and reincarnate itself as a more lean and nimble institution, responding to the reality that even now 70 percent of its students attend mostly online. 

So many avenues to explore, so little time!

The question that remained most forcibly in my mind as I switched off the Zoom portal was this: to what extent, in its efforts to expand inclusiveness and nurture “community,” is the university willing to shed its dedication to "higher" education and refashion itself as a purveyor of community ed?     

Any professional educator will confirm that learning styles differ from person to person. At the U of MN, anyone over the age of 62 can audit courses for free and earn credits for only $20 apiece. That’s a good deal, though it doesn’t appeal to me much. I don’t need credits at this late date. And although some professors can be inspiring, my eight years on campus back in the 70s convinced me that many of them aren’t. In such cases, I’d rather just read the book.

My plan, all along, had been to devote my $50 Amazon credit to buying books that I might otherwise have shied away from as too esoteric, too expensive, too dense. The books I chose were Transcendence for Beginners by Clare Carlisle, What’s Eating the Universe by Paul Davies, and Leave Me Alone and I'll Make You Rich: How the Bourgeoisie Deal Enriched the World, by Deirdre McCloskey. 

That should keep me occupied for a while.     

 

A Cool Breeze after a Hot Night

A cool breeze after a hot night is a godsend. More than that, it’s a delight. Such a remark brings up the question of whether a delight is more, or less, than a godsend.  I would say more, but I don’t want to take up the question now. It would spoil the delight.

This morning my delight was compounded by the character of the task I’d gone outside to perform. It was the most pleasurable of all gardening tasks: to divide plants we already have and rearrange them in the garden. It’s good for the garden, good for the plants … and it’s free!

Earlier this spring, as usual, I cut back quite a bit on our buckthorn forest. I suppose we should have removed it entirely a long time ago, but it has never produced berries, and it served a purpose: it supported the grape vines that emerged, year in and year out, from its shadows.

This spring I did an especially good job of entwining last year’s vines through the arch of the garden gate, looking forward to an effect similar to the faux-arbors in old-fashioned Italian restaurants. (Vescio’s. Mama Rosa’s. Mama D’s. Where have they gone?)

However, a few days ago I noticed that all the grape-vines were dead. That was bad news. I attributed their demise to a fungus that had appeared on the main stalk, Fusicolla merismoides (commonly called "deer vomit fungus"). But as it turns out, that slimy, neon orange goo is harmless.  

The good news was that the buckthorn forest no longer served any useful purpose. So I set about the task of hacking it down, sawing off the stumps and digging out the roots. It was hard work, and I’m well aware that we’ll be pulling out buckthorn sprouts for years to come. But when I was done, we had a fairly large chunk of land—maybe six feet square—to replant however we chose.

We discussed a variety of options and finally concocted a vague plan involving pagoda dogwoods, day lilies, and hostas, all of which we have in abundance, along with a hydrangea that’s been in our “formal” backyard garden even since we moved in, getting smaller every year.

New Grapes

While removing the buckthorn, I noticed that the grapes had reseeded in a few places, and I moved those feeble sprouts to the base of a metal trellis that was leaning against our neighbor’s fence. I also came upon a forsythia that had disappeared into the buckthorns years ago. It's a shapeless specimen, but we'll keep it around until we think of something better. 

I also took pleasure in handling the dead vines. Their sinuous strength is remarkable, and it’s easy to see how useful they would have been for boatmaking, goat-pen fencing, and basketry, back in the days before synthetic materials were invented.  For a split-second I thought about hunting up my copy of John Seymour’s The Forgotten Crafts: a practical guide to traditional skills. But the moment passed.

I have no recollection of what color the day-lilies are that I rescued from under the Amur maples. They never bloomed in that mediocre location. Time will tell. Maybe.

There's plenty of work still to do. But I don't call this work. And we now have a new garden zone tucked behind the volunteer cherry orchard we've been grooming. Delights of gardening! I just might bring a chair out there and enjoy an entirely new perspective on the back yard, 

Doors Open Minneapolis 2026

On a cool sunny Saturday morning we drove downtown to take advantage of the Doors Open festival, a program designed to make it easy to visit a variety of businesses and institutions free of charge, just for the hell of it. In previous years we’d joined tours of the Federal Reserve, Open Book, City Hall, the Ivy Hotel, the Lakeview Cemetery Chapel, and a low-slung building that was once home to a Ry Krisp factory. This year we studied the maps and came up with an even wider range of options.

We parked on the brief unmetered stretch of River Road between Plymouth Avenue and the lock and dam—a two-hour limit. How much money did we save? I don’t know. But matters of cost aside, the walk itself was delightful. This is an attractive and interesting part of town, though it’s changed a lot since I worked in that neighborhood. In those days it was home to the International Design Center, Moose and Sadie’s Coffeeshop, J.D. Hoyt’s, Origami, a bicycle supply warehouse, a Caribou Coffee warehouse, Rykodisc CD distributor, an Asian import shop called Indigo, a restaurant supply warehouse, etc. The few people who lived in the vicinity were squatting in genuine lofts accessed by freight elevators, perhaps illegally.

The warehouse I worked at was heated by coal, which was delivered by rail and dropped down a wooden chute into a bin in the basement, from which point it was fed into the furnace by a conveyor screw. That building has long since been converted to expensive loft/apartments.

The owner of Indigo, a kindly man named John, told me before they moved out that they’d been given a sweetheart ten-year lease back when the neighbor was struggling. The lease was up, not to be renewed, and besides, as John put it, “There’s no longer anywhere for customers to park down here!”

The day was bright, windy, and cool. We zigzagged through the North Loop, intoxicated by the towering urban-ness of our surroundings, past the Lindsay Brothers Building, the jazz club Berlin, Origami, the Yamasaki Building (soon to reopen as a luxury hotel, so they say) and a variety of other buildings, both flashy and non-descript.

It took us forty minutes to reach our first destination, the Minneapolis Athletic Club. Our tour guide, a realtor by trade, took us through the classy, old-fashioned rooms, up and down stairs, through the observation galleries of the squash courts, into and through the weight rooms, ballrooms, a tap room, and a “reading room.” with its overstuffed chairs, chandeliers, Persian carpets, and mahogany paneling. 

“So, this is a reading room …” I asked him. “But I don’t see a single book.”

“It’s the same with my real estate clients,” he said. “I used to examine their books, their CDs, and the contents of the refrigerator, to get a better feel for who they are. Now, the only thing of interest is the refrigerator.”

Our walk back to the car took us down Nicollet Mall, which was far drearier than I’d expected. Most of the shops are gone. Pedestrian traffic is almost nonexistent. Along the way we did have the good fortune to come upon some public works employees who were showcasing the city’s sewer system. We looked down a manhole to the pipes eighteen feet below. And one of the men let me drive his mechanical exploratory mouse back and forth through a foot-wide plexiglass tube.

A few blocks to the west we stopped briefly into a small digital advertising agency called Shinebox equipped with a bar and lounge on the first floor and eight or ten cubical work stations in the basement. We chatted briefly with a young woman from England.

Back at the car, we headed to Northeast, where we tossed around several ideas for lunch—Anchor Fish and Chops, Aki’s, Sample Room—before settling on Mayslack’s, a Polish dive bar that’s been around since 1956. I heard about it often back in my days on the loading dock, but had never been there. The waitress was friendly, the atmosphere authentic, the sandwiches huge.

Where's the sandwich?

Our next stop, the Mississippi Watershed Management Organization, is housed in a low-slung modern building on the river just north of Lowry. There’s a motor boat parked out back. The task here is to monitor the river for phosphorus, chlorine, and other chemicals, but they send most of the samples to a lab off-site. It seems the place is mostly used as an educational facility, and various exhibits were attended by cordial and well-informed high school kids.   

From there it was on to the U of MN off-site book storage facility, located In an obscure corner of the Como neighborhood, a few blocks south of the Newgate car donation center. The doors are 12 feet high—the tallest in the university, so we were told. But they’re dwarfed by the shelving area itself, which is fitted with seemingly endless rows of shelving that are 32 feet tall.

The building is equipped with numerous eco-friendly features. I was not aware of any volcanic activity in the area and asked our tour guide about the geothermal heating system. She told me they collect rainwater in the summer and pipe it deep underground. In the winter they heat the place with the water, which is now much warmer than the surrounding air.

The building is designed to hold 3.7 million books. The storage is based on nothing but the dimensions of the book; putting books of the same height in the same box saves space. Each book is given a bar code. Also, each box. Beyond that, it’s all just a matter of sliding the boxes in and using the reference system to retrieve whichever book a patron requests.

Retrieving a book that’s 30 feet off the ground isn’t all that easy, however.  

Part of the fun of Doors Open is cooking up a route from one site to the next. From the library mega-stacks we took an interesting route down Como, past Van Cleve Park, then south across the 10^th Street Bridge to the KFAI radio studios at Cedar-Riverside.

I don’t listen to the radio much, but I thoroughly appreciate and admire the social commitment and musical range of this mostly volunteer broadcast endeavor. Inside the second-floor studio, equipped with offices and three or four broadcast rooms, we spoke at some length with program manager Miguel Vargas about the standards and methods of the station, the methods they use to store and organize new releases and antique collections. In the next room, a volunteer told us about a show he’s planning to produce about some local punk bands—high school kids mostly. “I’ll be taking classes this summer to get my license.” He looked to be at least 50 himself.

As we were leaving, we met up with another visitor, who said. “I love this place! Look at it. Paper-clips, compact discs, Scotch tape, and not a video screen in sight. It’s like the 70s!” 

The next morning we set out for Northeast again. Our first stop was Clay Squared, a custom tile manufacturer fitted with electric kilns and all sorts of tools for creating ceramic tiles. Down the hall was the studio/classroom of Layl McDill, a polymer clay artist who was hand-shaping beads and buttons for an upcoming class. We waxed nostalgic for a minute or two about the Play-Dough Fun Factory sets we both fiddled around with at kids. Layl went on to make a career out of the artform.

Our second stop was the Groveland Galley, set on the hillside of a tony neighborhood the Walker Art Center. Lots of nice landscapes and prints ... but a little out of our price range. The smallish exhibition rooms were crowded, but programming director Victoria Keith took the time to draw my attention to the subtle works of plein air master Joshua Cunningham.   

A short dash on the freeway took us to the Russian Museum, where we wandered through an extensive display of Cold War American and Russian toys, posters, comic books, and other kitsch. The collectors themselves were present, and not hard to spot.

"Is that an official NASA spacesuit?" I asked one of them.

"How should I know?" he replied. "I got it on eBay."

We took the long way home, north on Lyndale, west on 36th Street past the tulips in Lakewood Cemetery, north along the shores of Bde Maka Ska, then a meandering route up the parkway past Cedar Lake. 

We were taking our time, relishing the wonderful afternoon, and also the richness of our fine urban world.