How wonderful it is with summer at its height. The sun is out today, the purple blooms of our clematis are brilliant, and memories of a beautiful drive through the countryside of western Wisconsin on Sunday and Monday are still strong in my mind.

Our short trip took us only 100 miles or so from our home in Minnesota to Eau Claire, Wisconsin, the largest city in western Wisconsin. We approached from the west, on scenic roads. Well, nearly every road is scenic in this beautiful area. Our route took us through Red Wing, Minnesota, to Highway 63, then Highway 72 and County Road C to Eau Claire. It’s a beautiful route through farming country and forest-covered hills, passing through the towns of Ellsworth, Rock Elm, Elmwood, Downsville, and Dunn. It includes some very hilly, thickly forested country - an area that was not covered by the most recent glaciers, and terrain that most people probably do not associate with the Midwest.

For three of the last four years I’ve spent time during the summer working at my former employer, Educational Testing Service in Princeton, New Jersey. I still do freelance work for ETS’s Test of English as a Foreign Language, and my stints back at the mother ship help to keep me “calibrated,” as they say.

Although I spent most of my time working, I did enjoy my trip. The area from Princeton west to the Delaware River Valley is a wonderful part of the country, and summer is a nice time to be there. This is a place that has managed to retain some of its rural character, even though it sits in the most densely populated state in the country.

How did they do that? I don’t know for sure, but I do know that some of it came through open space initiatives that involved land purchases by government; private trusts and zoning ordinances probably played a role as well.

I stayed in Princeton, not far from the university, and was rather awestruck at the building they’ve done on campus in the last several years, most of it on the southern edge, including Whitman College (named for Meg Whitman of eBay fame). This is what money will do for you.

During my trip, the high price of fuel was on people’s minds. I got a feel for high gas prices when I filled up my rental car near the Philadelphia airport and paid $4.13 a gallon. Perhaps prices will come down, but with higher demand around the world it feels as though we are crossing some kind of historic watershed and moving into unfamiliar territory, to use a geographic metaphor.

Now it is good to be back home in Minnesota. Our baby boy is six months old now and can sit up on his own - though he is still prone to toppling over. He is cuter than ever, of course. And I’ve been getting lots of hugs from our daughter, who says she missed me a lot. It is nice to have been missed, and better to be home.

I recently traveled for work to the East Coast, flying the thousand miles from Minneapolis to Philadelphia, then driving to the Princeton, New Jersey, area. I lived in Princeton or its environs for eight years, first in grad school and later working there and marrying my wife, and I’ve returned there several times since then. So it’s familiar turf for me.

My first stop after leaving the airport was South Philly, just south of downtown. I was happy to find it’s much the same since I first visited 20 years ago.

If you appreciate the urban Northeast or are interested in experiencing it, this is one place to get a feel for its teeming streets. And what streets! I approached the area from the south, first driving up South 10th Street, then 9th Street. On 10th Street I saw tiny, tiny one-level brick houses, and on 9th Street I made my way through a narrow one-way corridor, cars parked on both sides of the street in front of small row houses, apartment buildings, shops, and restaurants. To my eyes, accustomed to a small town in the Midwest, the density of the place, especially its buildings, was remarkable. The people, meanwhile, were out on the sidewalks or their front steps and porches, enjoying the evening air and the sights and sounds of the neighborhood.

I made my way north to the Italian Market, an Old World-style area of shops and sidewalk stalls that was featured in scenes from the movie Rocky. South Philly is still largely Italian, though today it increasingly includes Hispanics and Asians.

I stopped at Geno’s, famous for its cheese steaks and cheese fries, and ordered “one American with” - a steak sandwich with American cheese and onions. Though busy and vital, Geno’s seemed to be desperately trying to hold the area’s diversity at bay. It proclaimed its patriotism and nativism through displays of the American flag and signs proclaiming the necessity of speaking English. Just as prevalent were pictures of local police officers, nearly all of them white.

Meanwhile, across the street, Asian and Hispanic youth played basketball and seemed uninterested in the greasy fare that I was consuming. The future is ours, they implied with their quick movements and bouncy steps.

I was left wondering what would come of this tension of cultures, what would happen to Geno’s and the descendants of the Italians, to the newer kids jumping for the rim on the other side of the street. Some kind of truce, I hope, some kind of kind of blend that is born of acceptance.

My friend Chris Schons asked me to post a poem I published in Minnesota Monthly back in the mid-nineties. It was kind of him to remember it, and I include it below.

Reading it again is bittersweet - sweet because I enjoyed reading it again, bitter because I have not been a good husband of the poetry muse. That is, I haven’t been writing poetry lately.

The poem is one of only a handful that I managed to publish. It was written when I was living on Grand Avenue in St. Paul and teaching as an adjunct in the English Department at the University of Minnesota. It wrote it after a frosty night caused a tree outside my apartment window to lose its leaves, which were still green, in a single day. The ground around the tree was littered with these strangely green leaves. I could not resist the image and its metaphors.

Green and Falling

Night’s frost sank deep into the tree,
Plunged headlong with the mercury.
In morning each leaf fell, spiraling
Down - one, two, four, one - raining
Down green on a black, cold ground.
By afternoon it was through. I found
The bare branches stark, surprising.
Strange to be still green and falling.

Following Barack Obama’s “elitist” comments about the residents of small towns, our local blog extraordinaire, Locally Grown Northfield, hosted a discussion about snobbery and elitism Northfield-style. In the comments, see my own take on class and elitism (with autobiographical details) and my views on the hidden agendas of those who call others elitist. Below is a quote from the latter. Note that Northfield is a town with two liberal arts colleges, St. Olaf and Carleton:

Perhaps some of the frustration certain people have with the educational status/intellectual elites in Northfield is that those elites lay claim to power and influence that other elites want to leave for themselves.

I apologize to readers for my absence from the blog. A wife ill with a cold and coping with her own deadlines, children requiring attention, work chairing a task force, travel - all these have kept me from writing new posts.

Meanwhile, the world has gone on. Minnesota has moved into spring. Earth Day arrives, and with it much concern about our world.

Thunder claps in the night here, the first thunder since last fall, I believe. The rain is falling hard.

This writing feels like rain watering my life.

Hardened soil loosens, waking dormant seeds.

Something very encouraging is happening at my church, the United Methodist Church of Northfield, Minnesota. A group of us have formed a church “Green Team” to focus on Christian stewardship of creation.

Another label we might have chosen for the group is “Creation Care Team.” In some ways I like that better, since it connects us more to our Christian roots. For some, the word “green” has negative political connotations.

We had mentioned forming a group such as this for a while, but then rather suddenly a few weeks ago, following an adult education forum on energy usage, we decided to meet informally during and/or following the church’s Wednesday night dinners. Many of us were already attending these dinners, and child care is provided, so the setting seemed to be a natural one. Thus we began to talk about environmental issues each week.

Last Sunday, the team made a group presentation at the Sunday education forum, each taking a few minutes to address a specific topic. One person made an impressive, well-substantiated presentation on “peak oil” - the concept that a peak in oil production has been or will soon be reached. Another, an engineer, spoke on his long-standing connection to energy research, including work on solar power and innovative window designs. He said the obstacles to making significant strides in energy conservation are political rather than technological or economic. Another engineer spoke of his work on our city’s energy task force and his use of a device to monitor real-time electricity usage in his home. Read the rest of this entry »

Back in the end of January I wrote about problems I was having with my hands and feet in cold weather. As time went on, I noticed that the end of my nose and the tops of my ears were also affected. I found the latter odd, since I rarely have my head uncovered outside in the winter.

When going outside in cold weather, I noticed that I’d quickly feel cold, even slightly tingly, in the mentioned extremities, despite dressing very warmly. When going back inside, those areas would become red as they warmed up and I’d feel a stronger tingling sensation.

As time has gone on, these symptoms have lessened, probably because of time and the end of winter.

When I saw the doctor about this in January, he thought I might have chilblains, which can sometimes involve a systemic problem with the blood thickening upon exposure to the cold. On the other hand, a friend said that I might have gotten “frosted,” which made me think that I may have experienced “frostnip,” the mildest form of frostbite.

I still don’t know the cause of these problems and can’t point to one incident that caused them. It may have been due to playing outside with my daughter in cold weather, sometimes around 10-15 degrees with wind, I think, though I was dressed very warmly. Or my troubles may have been the result of riding my bike in the winter, though I did that much less than usual this year and not in the coldest weather. Read the rest of this entry »

Picture: William F. Buckley and Minnesota College Republicans, 1986. That’s me on the right with my Wm. F. Buckley Signature Model clipboard and signed copy of Up from Liberalism.

“Complaint is profanation in the absence of gratitude.”
- William F. Buckley, Overdrive

William F. Buckley passed away two days ago. The conservative intellectual was one of the heroes of my youth. In those days – from the late 1970s through the late 1980s – I idolized a diverse pantheon that also included George Will, Bruce Springsteen, Woody Allen, and John McEnroe. Yes, I was odd.

As Will and Buckley’s names indicate, I was a conservative then, though with time and experience I now accept the labels liberal or progressive. Born in 1965, growing up in the Minneapolis suburbs, influenced by a father and other family members who voted Republican, reading U.S. News and World Report, and witnessing the rise of Ronald Reagan, I was drawn to the ideas of the conservative movement, particularly its anticommunism.

The maps in U.S. News left little doubt about the perils of the Cold War: there were the red areas controlled by the Communists and the blue areas of the freedom-loving West. This was, I learned, an epic struggle for control of the world and, ultimately, our own self-determination. Despite all that I’ve learned since then about American injustice and imperialism, I still accept the broad outlines of that outlook on the Cold War, and I do not regret that position. Read the rest of this entry »

On Thursday, January 31, I spoke to the Northfield Rotary Club about the Northfield Area Task Force on Nonmotorized Transportation, on which I serve as chair. I began by explaining how I got involved in bike and pedestrian advocacy. I didn’t put it quite this way in the talk, but I’ve come to view my advocacy as really a coincidence resulting from the special character of the last two cities I’ve lived in: Davis, California, and my current city of residence, Northfield, Minnesota. Davis showed me what was possible for nonmotorized transportation in cities, while Northfield encouraged me with its potential and its people - people who agreed that Northfield could make important strides in healthier modes of transportation.

The bulk of my talk to Rotary addressed the reasons that communities should promote cycling and walking and the mission and goals of the task force. As far as the reasons for promoting nonmotorized transportation, I focused on energy issues and health issues, with more emphasis on the latter. Regarding energy, I displayed a slide showing the vastly different energy requirements for propelling a pedestrian or cyclist as compared to a person in a motor vehicle. Of course this is a function of the difference in the weight of the vehicles (or lack of vehicle) involved. Here are the examples of vehicle weights that I gave: Read the rest of this entry »