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I consider myself firmly in an old-age sweet spot, sometimes called the Liberation stage. With the advent of the Covid pandemic, I’ve had to revise my criteria for Liberation. A year ago, Liberation included walking out of our home with only carry-on backpacks on our backs, catching a train to the airport, and flying off… Continue reading A Preview of Things to Come

During the last four years, while some in power denied basic, decent human values, the Arts have helped me keep the faith. Here’s some examples from my microblog.

Most days I post something about my day in a microblog. Without over-thinking, I’ve selected one post from each month of 2020. January Looking back from today, January 2020 seems like an alternate reality where we could sit in theater audiences, eat in restaurants, and ride public transport. The Minneapolis Guthrie Theater’s artistic director, Joseph… Continue reading 12 Months of Microposts: 2020

In these days of Covid, travel is not an option. Instead, learning new stuff has been fueling our ikigai (getting us out of bed in the morning), and giving us plenty to talk about over dinner. Until one of our dinnertime conversations, I thought grow lights were pretty straightforward. Apparently the cognoscente measure “photosynthetically active… Continue reading Learning in a Time of Covid

Google Photos’ People-and-Pets search feature makes it easy to click a face and go directly to photographs of that person. Here’s an example from our photo collection: Can you spot the odd person out? Yup? I’ll call her Martha. Of course, I clicked Martha’s face, and up came about 20 photographs. I’ve written about Martha… Continue reading Globetrotter Martha

I’ve been searching through my photographs for crowd scenes in Japan. Here’s one at a Tokyo train station: A woman, bottom right, is wearing a face mask. Perhaps she has a cold and wants to protect others, or maybe she’s protecting herself from airborne pathogens. If you look more closely, you’ll find other people wearing… Continue reading A Place Where Masks Are Apolitical

1987 May 30, 1987 We met at a birthday brunch at Rudolph’s Bar-B-Que in Minneapolis. He sat across the table from me. It was a buffet, so whenever he left the table to fill a plate, I had a chance to ask mutual friends about him. I think he did the same thing when I… Continue reading Our Elopement Timeline

Sometimes I feel I live in a walled city. The wall is roughly defined by the Interstates that circle the Minneapolis/St. Paul metropolitan area. When I cycle out from the city, beyond those “city walls,” I’m heading towards places that have rejected people like me in recent times. There was a time when I could… Continue reading Living in a Walled City