Seek and find this remarkable view of downtown Saint Paul, from the public dock on Harriet Island.  (Directions below.) Go at the end of the daylight one of these cool fall evenings. The sun goes down, somewhere over toward the Cathedral, and the skyline comes up...

In our old house outside of town, I used to work out in the mornings after the kids were picked up for school. I relieved the drudgery of the NordicTrack in a not-very-ennobling way, recording reruns of an over-dramatized medical show of the time called ER and...

I was in a nearly-empty small town supermarket this summer and fell into a conversation with the checkout girl. I am always falling into conversations. It was a rather downscale grocery and all the women workers were wearing drab smocks. This young lady was not yet...

One of the signature aspects of the pandemic for me has been a profound sense of confinement, which may be why I’ve found such pleasure this summer in modest solo road trips. The Midwest world is beautiful, even though driving solo at 65 mph allows only brief...

Is wit even wittier in the co-op? I think so. After all, the colors often seem brighter...the lettuce greener, the dairy whiter, the bulk foods more like themselves somehow, in their bins. The orderly procession of cartons are well-lit behind doors that release a puff...

I enjoy city banter, and the little moments of urban connection it makes. It’s downtown, and it is also somehow small town. Hello to Mr. B, whose barbershop opens onto the skyway. Hello to Granville the shoe man, and to Rodney the young security guard, and the...

The war I grew up with, the Vietnam War, is history now and its events sometimes look like what you see when you accidentally put  binoculars up backwards to your eyes. Instead of bringing things close, you see a small image in the distance. If you’re lucky. My...

These three are those "damned Condon kids", rascals who ran wild in the Fort Worth, Texas, Stockyards and environs, ca 1901. The eldest was Frank (r), my grandfather. Their dad was boss-of-bosses JW Condon, superintendent of the meat-packing behemoth Swift and Co, and...

My friend Sally is nearing ninety, and for decades we’ve been laughing like loons telling each other foolish tales. (I can remember sitting in a theater with her waiting for the curtain when she, chatting with the stranger on her other side, described herself as...

Sometimes someone else’s words are too beautiful not to hold and consider, and to quote, especially as we near Independent Bookstore Day. From novelist Jane Smiley, in an old essay from Publisher’s Weekly, with thanks to Coffee House Press, which printed a gorgeous...

Our apartment building is large and diverse, and I’ve become peculiarly fond of the elevator. Each ride holds the potential for a wonderful surprise. On some of these pandemic days, it provides the only possible proximity to strangers, and I love strangers.  When the...

My aunt Jane, of beloved memory, was small, neat, and never passed up a piece of free furniture. Oh, she would say, the Depression was hard. Someone who laughed freely, lived contentedly, and was, for a period of time, the belle of a considerable ball. Before the...

At the beginning of 2015, I was working toward the completion of a book project, a labor of love in which the love part had been in the first half and the labor part seemed to drag on and on. I found an absolute stopping point in a Unitarian pilgrimage to Alabama,...

I live on the skyways of St. Paul, Minnesota, an above-the-street series of enclosed walkways, a habitat which runs through buildings, jumps across the city streets, and permits a certain separation from the bitter weather this time of year. This last week we had a...