DAILY BLOG
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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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I have said here before that Bibliomysteries are one of many subgenera that are always in my wheel-house. Books, bookstores, libraries, book collecting make the perfect subject and setting for mysteries. David Bell’s stand-alone, short story, “Rides a Stranger” is a great example of the Bibliomystery sub-genre. Don and his father shared a love of… Read more
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Believe it or not, this blog posting for the first Saturday of March 2025 is actually being written on December 23rd, 2024. That is how far ahead I am working now on ClimbingSky. I am not certain if that is a good thing or a bad thing from a reader’s point of view. But for… Read more
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“Failure is a part of success. There is no such thing as a bed of roses all your life. But failure will never stand in the way of success if you learn from it.” – Hank Aaron Read more
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