74\u00a0 bar steady 29.75 3mph W dew-point 49\u00a0 Summer, sunny and pleasant<\/p>\n
Waxing Gibbous Thunder Moon<\/p>\n
A party.\u00a0 Kate and I are not party people.\u00a0 We both prefer a night at home or the theater or classical music, but we’re headed out tonight because of Paul Strickland’s kids. \u00a0 Kate Strickland, oldest, heads out in two weeks for Japan.\u00a0 She’s going to Kyoto prefecture to teach English as part of the JET program, a government sponsored ESL that places applicants in the Japanese school system.<\/p>\n
The backyard party at their 4900 block Colfax Avenue home in Minneapolis had many people we did not know, but Stefan Helgeson and Lonnie were there.\u00a0 Stefan, Paul and I represented the Woolly Mammoths.<\/p>\n
Such parties have, like family reunions, undercurrents and subtext.\u00a0 The lines of relationship, for example, the casual observer would assume ran strongest among Paul, Stefan, and me.\u00a0 Only partly true.\u00a0 Lonnie and Sarah (Strickland) were friends of mine for a couple of years before their husbands pulled me into the orbit of the Woolly Mammoths.<\/p>\n
There was Kate Strickland’s closing of this chapter in her New York life.\u00a0 Why?\u00a0 Unsaid.\u00a0 There was Lonnie’s recovery, less than a month along, from cancer surgery.\u00a0 A rare great outcome.\u00a0 No chemo or radiation needed because they caught the uterine cancer at its earliest stage.\u00a0 Paul’s work, entangled with his across the alley neighbor, is in uncertain times.\u00a0 Stefan has had a come to Jesus moment with Lonnie’s cancer surgery, “I find it difficult now to not do the things I want to do.”<\/p>\n
Overhanging the whole is the generational tide sweeping those of us over 60 toward years of a new time while our kids go to Japan, have their own children, become 2d Lts in the Air Force, head off to college, or graduate from college.<\/p>\n
This event was in no way unusual in these subtexts and undercurrents and I’m confident there were more, perhaps darker ones, about which I know nothing.\u00a0\u00a0 Any time we human beings gather we bring with us the scent of our current life and the trail on which we have walked to get there.\u00a0 As social creatures our scents intermingle creating a perfumed community while our paths (ancientrails) intersect and deflect, generating paths of a slightly different direction than the one we were on before.\u00a0 This is life as we live it, as we must live it.<\/p>\n
Running through my mind today has been a bumper sticker I saw years ago during the controversy over the Boundary Waters.\u00a0 I was in Ely and noticed a local pickup truck.\u00a0\u00a0 Plastered on the gate the bumper sticker read:\u00a0 Sierra Club, kiss my axe.\u00a0 That was redolent of a real debate, an actual conflict between parties with drastically different visions.\u00a0 Politics and its cousin the law are the arenas in which, in a democracy, we slug out conflicts without, hopefully, violence.\u00a0 I like conflict and the clash of ideas, the taking up of the sword in defense of an ideal, a vision.\u00a0 Being back on the battlefield brings sparks to my eyes.\u00a0 Fun.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
74\u00a0 bar steady 29.75 3mph W dew-point 49\u00a0 Summer, sunny and pleasant Waxing Gibbous Thunder Moon A party.\u00a0 Kate and I are not party people.\u00a0 We both prefer a night at home or the theater or classical music, but we’re headed out tonight because of Paul Strickland’s kids. \u00a0 Kate Strickland, oldest, heads out in … Continue reading Undercurrents and Subtext<\/span>