Dec 29, 2025
On the unexpected pleasure front, holiday edition, I visited an artist’s market at Springboard for the Arts in St. Paul last week. (Not clear to me how google summaries arrive, but Springboard has a good one: “We’re here to equip artists with the tools to make a...
Dec 17, 2025
Sometime in the holiday season of 1952, my aunt Jane was hurrying through the main floor of the State Street Marshall Field’s in Chicago, a grand landmark department store. In those days, the main floor of Field’s was a full city block square, three stories tall, and...
Oct 16, 2025
Today’s joy, of the street music variety. An older woman rhythmically walking a pitbull down a park path this morning, a little strut to it, the dog pulling on the leash, her headphones over stocking cap (for it is October now), singing loudly with an accompanying...
May 8, 2025
It’s May, and this northern city is finally greening. The buildings, the built world, are the same, but the infrastructure of trees, dozing during the winter months, is rousing. Spring has moved northward on its own mysterious, rhythmic, and dependable calendar. It...
Apr 10, 2025
It’s almost axiomatic now to think unpleasantly about downtowns. They’re this, they’re that, they’re the other thing. Unappealing, worsening. Here’s a contrary view, from my desk in downtown St. Paul, Minnesota on a regular old Tuesday morning, a cold spring day....
