Skip to main content

Road-Tripped-Up

The next generation, not having learned a thing from their elders and fumble-bums, continue to commit themselves to the old and mysterious art of marriage.  This time the young couple proposed to cement their vows in a little wooden church at the side of the Norwegian-American Museum in Decorah, Iowa, and then amble on down Water Street to the Old Opera House next to the Winneshiek Hotel.  
The Hotel and Opera House have been resurrected with 20th century money to a condition they certainly had imagined before, and may or may-not have attained before Mrs. Basler took the job upon herself. 

We drove from Tucson to Decorah because we knew that we would have reason to transport a treasure or two.  We did:  a Heltne family chair, a couple of already-tested plastic dump trucks with big tires for Jao (our newest grandson, so far as we know), and a boxfull of treasures for me; things like a marlinspike from days in Alaska on fishing boats, and other tale-generating tools saved for me by Joel.  

 Like much of the 21st century world, we have misplaced our cameras, except for those on our phones.  That is how I took a picture of Mari trying to see what she had just taken a picture of.  That is Mari, above, shading her phone screen.  People driving by took pictures of us, wondering what they had just seen.  

 Elena's wedding took place in a 
well-traveled immigrant church, having been moved from North Dakota just because there is no one left in North Dakota to look at it:  they are all looking for oil under the grass.  I sat there, delighted at the flowers on the window ledge--on every window ledge.  We all nodded and whispered to each other, while Elena and Joe waved and whispered to us that they were up front, just on the other side of the preacher, who kept interrupting our re-discoveries of each other.  

 It was a fine time, there, and up the street to the Old Opera House, where we admired the work of a local microbrewery, and each other.  The next morning, we all gathered, again, in a little dormitory village on the Luther College campus where the Refsals hosted us for breakfast and uninterrupted talk, proof that friends make weddings and life very good.  

 Now we are back in Tucson, but you shall surely hear more of that.  Mari has come out from under her darkroom, and I intend to unload the pickup pretty soon now.  

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard
1 comment
Read more

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. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Under the Football Stands

There are times and places when and where the Milky Way really is a milky way; a ragged band of light stretching across the horizon.  I still recall--all this time later--catching sight of something much fainter than what you see here--asking my mother what the Milky Way was.  I do not recall her precise answer, probably because it was not precise.  I am not sure that there were many people--seventy or more years ago--who would have said, plainly, that it was what we see when we look toward the center of our galaxy; that our sun--our star--was one of an uncountable number of stars circling about what is undoubtedly a huge black hole, something like a swarm of bees caught in a cosmic maelstrom.   It is to look across the center of a monstrous swarm of stars.  It is brighter in that direction, quite naturally. Just as we had to get used to recognizing that our sun was a star, pretty much like most of the other stars we see, we had to remind ...
Post a Comment
Read more