Moscow on the Hill

Mari thought summer might just frazzle away, but it didn't. It almost came unglued. It had something to do with Joe Mauer and about half of her faculty experiencing bilateral leg pains or viruses or something, so she has had to find last-minute work-arounds. She says she understands Ron Gardenhire and the Twins, and what a Disability List is, much better, now.

She worked late yesterday, but we arranged to ease the disabilities with a nice dinner somewhere in St. Paul before she came home. We agreed to meet at a restaurant bar, and I strove mightily--I am learning how to talk biblically by listening the Republican presidential candidates--to get to the bar in good time. I did not want to be rushed into dinner, bone dry!

A peculiar group of locals mingled familiarly at the end of the bar. One of the minglers gave the impression that she was still at work, and another, perhaps forty years her senior, caressed her arm with one hand and his wallet with the other. She didn't cringe, so I assumed it was just business.

When Mari came, and the unwinding had begun, we decided to go to "Moscow on the Hill", a Russian restaurant in the shadow of the Catholic Cathedral of St. Paul. "What," I wondered, "does Moscow have to say to Rome?"

One of the delights of real cities is that there are restaurants! There are ethnic restaurants! The faces were Slavic, except for those of us who had Scandinavian or Irish or African faces. The food was Russian, even when the fish was Canadian walleye.

Having begun my hydration early, I found my way to the restroom. Like the building, it was old, and not originally Russian, but there was a small, round table in the corner, covered with a blazingly deep red cloth, and dubious flowers. "They have added a Russian touch here, too!" I thought. There was music playing: "Standing on the corner, watching all the girls go by. Standing on the corner, giving all the girls the eye."

Cathedral Hill: a perfect remedy for school daze and dazed politics!

Comments

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back: two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed! Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore. The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil. We farmed, too, of course. All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor. Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer. We do have an answer. We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...

SmokeSound

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