March 2025
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“Throwback Thursdays” at ClimbingSky feature posts I wrote over 15 years for various blogs. This was first posted on June 24, 2011. As a literary and film art form, the Western’s time has passed. And yet… there remains a small number of dedicated western fans who remain loyal to this most American of all art Read more
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This past winter besides reading short stories and mysteries, I re-read Thoreau with an eye to arriving this spring in a different place: poetically, philosophically, and ontologically. Ontology is a word I hear seldom in my work-a-day world (read that never), where once it was such a prevalent word in all my worlds: work, academic, and reading. Read more
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As a very amateur bird watcher living in the North Country, the surest sign of spring for me is the return of Red Wing blackbirds. Their trill-trilling from marshy areas is a song without compare. Here is a poem by Wordsworth about spring and birds and so much more. Enjoy! Lines Written in Early Read more
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There they were, everyone with a coffee cup, lined up at the urn. Because I took my time with the smoke I had to join the end of the line, and it was a good thing I did. It gave me time enough to get the pitch. Everybody had been watching me covertly anyway, saying Read more
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Spring has made its way to the North Country and the baseball season starts in less than 2 weeks. Everything is right with the world. Each morning I open the sports page of the StarTribune hoping to read about spring training. Inevitably there is more coverage of the Minnesota Vikings and the NFL. Don’t get Read more
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“In normal life we hardly realize how much more we receive than we give, and life cannot be rich without such gratitude. It is so easy to overestimate the importance of our own achievements compared with what we owe to the help of others.” (cf. Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Letters and Papers from Prison.) Read more
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“Throwback Thursdays” at ClimbingSky feature posts I wrote over 15 years for various blogs. This was first posted on July 21, 2016. I first read Langston Hughes’s “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” in 1981 when I was living in Chicago. It was part of a volume of Hughes’s poetry that I bought in a used Read more
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I have mentioned here before that one strategy I am trying to use to deal with the anxiety Trumpian Chaos causes is to avoid the 24-hour news cycle. This involves avoiding online doom-scrolling, social media, and not listening to or watching the news. My only news source currently is my local StarTribune newspaper that I Read more
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The attendant filled my cup and made change without waking, moving as if his starched coat was holding him up. I sat at the shining enameled counter, slowly burning my throat with coffee and thinking with a chilly three o’clock brain. Ruth was clear, of murder at any rate. But the Schneiders’ alibi was at Read more
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