And the Days Dwindle Down...

And the days dwindle down like a precious few…September.

Yah. Sure.

The Managing Editor and her husband, Josh Cragun, wandered Copenhagen in search of truth and whatever that other word is. By month’s end they’ll return and we can get on with it. I’m getting a jump on this issue because by month’s end I may be doing something else that’s almost as important. Maybe more later.

Just finished reading a long novel set in Oslo. Never been there myself, but the half-breed that I am began to feel echoes, almost-memories. It was a strange experience. Who cares, I can hear many of you hissing. Well, I’m not going to make a thing of it, but yah sure all those words with slashes and other weird markings. My father spoke Norwegian until he was a teenager, he claimed, and then managed to forget it all. He was an American, goddamn it, and that was the lingua franca on Snoose Boulevard, aka Riverside Avenue, back at the turn of the century, that is the turn into the 20^th.

So I will say something about the 65^th anniversary bacchanal celebrated by the Academy of the Holy Angels of Richfield, Minnesota, class of 1958. Herself and classmate Sharon Hansen (St. Helena, 1954, of Danish descent) were in charge, with the strong help and direction of Jesse Foley, a mainstay at AHA for some years now. In keeping with the Danish theme. Mr. Foley played basketball in Denmark after college. Kids had such fun back then.

The inimitable Mary Ann McCarthy Campbell, the 1957-1958 all-school president, still rules that roost. Husbands and other significant others were told to stay home. AHA of that era had standards. And besides, my guess is that the women write the checks anyway. All right by me. When Maureen comes back with a full report, I may add another word of two.

To wit, Mary Ann had composed and presented her prayer as she was asked to do. Maureen said the prayer was beautiful, and Sharen read the names of 47 classmates gone to glory.

Then there is Yanischka (aka Steve Yanisch) as I came to call him. Once a quiet, maybe even modest bond guy at the then Piper Jaffrey, and now a canoe adventurer in the northern depths of Canada, hundreds and hundreds of miles into the wilderness. It was that or golf, he explained, and he didn’t think chasing the little white ball offered enough of a challenge as avoiding polar bears and ice floes. He lives in New Orleans in the winter. “Some place different,” he explains. He summers over in Wisconsin when he isn’t snowshoeing through the way-north tundra. Go figure.  Yanishcka of the North!

And to the south from my fifth floor condo on Oak Grove Street… An urban mish-mash of old three story mansions a little tattered around the edges, morphed now into half-way houses and bed-and-breakfasts, an ugly slash of inter- city freeway where the police chase gunmen and women who wield weapons made from kits. Great hulks of high-rise apartments and condos, huge churches and hard-to-maneuver  parking lots and other jigs and saws, the thick summer trees, the dog-walkers, most of whom pick up the leavings of their canine companions. The silent giant airplanes powering off to the west and northwest and much, much more. Always stories, always mysteries. And Loring Park, the biggest mystery of all.

And Liz and Josh did indeed make it back from Denmark, bearing really good candy and a bookmark for me. I absolutely needed one. And just in time to help the Big M tend to me in my recovery from minor surgery. Boy, I played that one to the hilt. Doctors and nurses lots of fun to be around, and a chance to get legally and appropriately high. Ba Da Boom, Ba Da Bing, Yah Sure.

Finally, R.I.P. Islanders, Aloha and Peace.

Finally, of all a much, much more. Always stories; always mysteries, sad and happy.