WannaskaWriter

                                                                 True North Minnesota When I bought my farm in 1971, I sought solitude and escape from a city environment that I felt alien to my nature. I did not seek places of social activity, but places of tranquility with semblances of wilderness; not lakes with boaters and water skiing, but tree-lined lakes and rivers, canoe waters, few people. My wife and I take pleasure planting trees, noting their growth and resulting beauty of forty-one years, photographing the landscape. This must be the most photographed farm in all of Minnesota. So this separates us from those in our families whose lives center wonderfully at liv...

                                                                    DREAM ON     I have a re-occurring dream that I own a huge warehouse of old phonograph records: long-play 78s, and 45s. I don’t have a history of these things so they aren’t intimately familiar to me, although my folks had a very modest collection and I bought one or two as a teenager- - and I accidentally broke an old record at the Larson Brothers sale. I have a digital image of that somewhere.      The building is a metal, a steel-framed building; its description isn’t detailed, but sometimes I’m inside of it, perusing with both wonder and frustration that...

    My wife and I watched the Robert Redford movie, "The Company You Keep," in which a former member of the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) turns herself in to the FBI after thirty years on the run; the story unfolds from there. The film is an American history lesson that occurred during our era of the 1960s and 1970s. The geo-political issues of war and inequality, the violence that accompanied the protests nation-wide, generated action from a few aggressive groups seeking to affect change. The dialogue in the movie articulates exactly the angst of so many of my generation. I remembered I felt the same way.      I didn't go through a period of 'enlightenment' until I moved from Iowa (and if one recalls all the jokes about Iowa and being Iowan, enlightenment is exactly what happens when you leave it) but that being said, I didn't live in a vacuum either. It was difficult to hide your head in the sand during that time with all the newspapers and tel...

    One reason, I moved to northwestern Minnesota was to get away from all the hatred and violence that was happening all over the country. I was tired of living under lock and key; tired of watching riots and demonstrations on television; just fed up with society at large. Northwest Minnesota seemed just the place to go where there wasn't any of all that. No racism, no prejudice, everybody is happy, yada yada yada. What a dope!    I had spent a few winters laid-off from various jobs I had and began writing journals, reading and studying American history. I've always been bookish and possessed a penchant for reading and writing versus watching TV or whatever the rest of the world is doing in their spare time; I don't mind isolation or quiet places. Outside stimulation, like video games, is out: a brilliant display of the northern lights is in. I lean toward the natural, fade from the artificial, that sort of thing.      I learned year...

    I grew up in Des Moines, Iowa in the 1960s, and experienced the effects of racism and rioting throughout my junior and high school years. My experiences of schools emptying within minutes, arrivals of ambulances and police cars, having riot police as hallway monitors and the rising tension between blacks and whites leading to violence on a daily basis, were mirrored by students of that era in larger cities like Boston, Chicago, and Detroit. As a result, people are genuinely surprised to learn that Des Moines too, had its civil rights turmoil.     I grew up in an old neighborhood on the city's east side. My elementary school was only a couple blocks away from my house,  on Des Moines Street, east of the railroad tracks. Brooks was an integrated school, having a body of 'culturally-mixed' students, if not teachers. We played together on the playground, as kids do. Two of my classmates, one black and one white, were close friends, who lived near one an...

    In factories of the upper Midwest today, the available employee pool isn't what employers wish it was, in my opinion. It's been reported in business journals and newspapers previously, I realize, but I offer a first-hand viewpoint backed up by many of the Baby Boomers who are retiring faster than their roles can be filled. Forty percent attrition is now common place in industry across the region as new employees come and go on a whim, some walking off the job the same day they started.      I recently met a young woman, at the toy factory, who, after I asked if she was summer help, answered she had been there two years. "Amazing!" I said, smacking myself in the forehead. "I know." she said, smiling, seemingly quite proud of the fact.     Maybe it's just me, but when I walk into the building some days, judging by the apparent age and appearance of my fellow co-workers, I feel as though I'm walking among the middle-school crowd. I am th...

    In the past, there was a lot of horseplay. Some guys did it all the time and got away with it. I could hear women, in particular, scream infrequently, as they were frightened by somebody or the victim of some prank, most in the nature of good fun, but some bordering on the vulgar as was the man's nature and sadly, the woman's humiliation. As a kid, whenever I acted the teaser, it sometimes backfired on me and someone would get hurt- - (sometimes it was me)- - and so, lent a reluctance to further participation. So it was at work too until I became the butt of a few pranks. Accepting the notion of, "Kill or be killed," I hid away under an assembly table during break, just before a female co-worker came back to the department. I grabbed her leg as she walked by and she let loose with a wild ear-shattering scream, threw her coffee cup- -with all her coffee in it- -into the air, where it hit me on its descent, as I crawled out from under the table. I never did that aga...