A hometown newspaper with a local office, local owners & lots of local news
A hometown newspaper with a local office, local owners & lots of local news
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It’s a Friday night in June, just before 10. At the corner of 12th Street and Carlton Avenue slow cars drone by, going somewhere, their dull Doppler pitch rising and falling. An occasional cop car eases — then races past, sometimes with lights and sound. The cop traffic glides west, toward Pinehurst Park and the just-set sun. A purple pickup truck with Minnesota Vikings decals and a skinny driver with a tapered beard makes its way east, toward Highway 45, apparently where the trucks live. Rob...
When the philosophers and theologians and other Smart Alecs living in the realm of Enlightenment remind us that “Beauty Is Everywhere” if only we’d open our vacant, searching eyes to it and allow the reality of it to blanket us like a saffron, terrycloth robe, they tend to leave out the part about beauty — the aesthetic elements of it, anyway — being inherently subjective. Your Beauty may not be mine. So, when we’re encouraged to “allow beauty in,” we’re, in fact, being encouraged to define what...
The young mother rubbed oil on her already brown legs and lay back on the towel in the sand, her skin a shiny offering to the sun. Nearby, her blond, husky son, covered in sand, sucked orange pop from a straw. “Don’t spill that,” the mother said, not opening her eyes, not moving her head, her brain slowly melting in the heat. “I’m not,” the boy said, truthfully. He looked at the pop and the sand around him, checking for signs of spillage. “I don’t want any ants,” the mother said, breathing a...
We’re stuck with each other. All of us. All of us Trumpsters and all of us Biden-Buddies and everyone wishing there was some sane Other Option and all of us Christians and all us Muslims and all of us Jews and Palestinians and all of us short, fat idiots and all of us tall, lean geniuses and all of us Cops and all of us Robbers and all of us addicted to chemicals and all of us addicted to religion and exercise and gambling and shopping and eating and all of us Having and all of us Wanting and a...
One of the things people say in the receiving line at funerals is "If there is anything we can do, please let us know ...." So, we did. We let you know. And we will continue to do so. Drowning people are rarely too shy to ask for help. And everyone has been amazing. The prayers - we feel them. The food - we've eaten it. The flowers - we've smelled them and done our damnedest to keep them alive. The nervous awkward smiles at the grocery store - no one knows what to say and how could they? We...
This really happened ... On a bright, azure-sky Christmas day, 2003, my wife and I corralled the kids and the dog and strode out into the snowy landscape to find a good place to take a Christmas card photo. We'd fallen into the tradition of featuring just the kids in our annual photos because either Blythe or I would have to take the photo. And having just one parent in the photo would give the wrong impression. Eventually, we ended up at Spafford Park after unsuccessful attempts at Pinehurst,...
Since matter cannot be created or destroyed, it follows that the same earthly deposit of gold, from which Cleopatra’s boat was built, as she sailed the warm, breezy, mosquito-thick Nile with Marc Antony — no wait, Julius Caesar (Cleopatra got around!) — approximately 47 years before Jesus of Nazareth was born — is the same stuff in Olga Korbut’s Olympic gold medal from 1972 and the wedding ring I gave my wife in 1988 and again in 2009 and the same stuff my dad gave my mom in 1962 and the same...
I get it that it never ends until it ends. Until I do. I get it that it never mends until it mends. And that it never will. And, I get it that life includes sorrow. As it always has. And, I get it that mine ain’t special. As no one’s is. Still, the narcissist in me wants the planet to bow to my individual misery and worship at the altar of my living loves. And to raise the specter of my unliving loves, like the Holy Ghosts they are, not make believe. And when I drive down the freeway and that so...
When the cops knock on your door at the stroke of midnight, it usually isn't to say you've won the lottery. It's typically bad news. It was. The worst news. The well-intentioned young officer and his no-speaking-part partner did what they could, which was mostly stand there and say, "I'm so sorry" as I fell to my knees and wailed, clutching at the partner's cop collar, trying to drag him to the ground with me, working toward someone else's injury. Misery loves company, and creates it if it can't...
Some friends are lifelong friends and others are seasonal. I once got an emotional email from a friend of 8 years calling me out for not being more friendly — I hadn’t been paying enough attention to our friendship due to my unacceptable time commitment to my wife and diaper-clad children. He’d said: “You don’t pay as much attention to me as you do to your wife and kids and you don’t Get It because you don’t Get It.” I got it. Another Best Friend of mine from college, Tim — a guy I’d literally...
It’s when you vaguely realize that you’re dreaming that it gets the worst — when you recognize it’s your fault, that you gave birth to it/are presently birthing it, that somewhere in there, the horror show has your tattoo — the Sign of the Beast. Rosemary’s Baby. When enveloped in a typical nightmare, there’s a certain opaqueness to the reality, no lucidity at all — it’s So Real that the option of some alternative reality, sans horror, is simply not a piece of the puzzle. The horror simply tic...
While adults never quite lose it, the intuitive, psycho-emotional trigger that gets pulled in kids around mid-to-late August is as keen as the intuitive trigger that gets pulled in geese two months later. For geese, it’s: Fly South. For kids, it’s: Have Fun. Squeeze every last pinch of summer out of Summer before the reality of September and Back-to-School accountability and order takes over. Accountability and Order. …as mentioned, even adults never quite lose the aversion to either. Earli...
Before You Die you should read “Moby Dick.” A lot of us from varying generations will have had this title as Required Reading in high school or as an undergrad student. I remember trying to plow through it in ninth grade, as the assignment of Ms. Swanson after sprinting through “Huck Finn” and finding it infinitely less interesting than what 5-years-older Jeff Kapinski was buying my eventual wife and Ever-Ever Girlfriend for a birthday present. “I guess it’d be okay if you bought me skis and a...
The best thing to do when you lose confidence in yourself is find it. Unless you’re not breathing, it’s in there, somewhere. Even in the meekest, most humble and fragile of us, the thing that makes us human — that certain self-consciousness, that self-awareness, that option we keep in the back pocket of our ego, that self-abasing, soul-roasting, self-loathing, catch-all, Ace Card: I suck, is proof positive that we’ve got the power to make decisions about how we manage our view of ourselv...
Typically, when cops show up at your door, it’s not the best news of the day. When they show up after midnight, it almost always isn’t fun. Back in the day — 10/15/25 years ago, in this town, when the cops showed up it was 100-percent likely to be a chubby-esque white dude in his 50s (or looking like it) with either coffee or liquor or both on his (always “his”) breath and either impatience or disdain in his attitude. Things have changed around here. One of the few benefits of qualifyin...
Here’s what’s beautiful: Your daughter’s firstborn, rolling on the floor like she did at that age, chin-drooling like she did, round, wet eyes like underwater jewels and an insatiable appetite for pretend-rough, morning bed-wrestling, the inexplicable joy of him giggling and growling and the unfathomable poignancy of watching her watch the two of you, seeing her remembering herself as him, a lifetime ago and a moment, something in her catching every time you get close to Too Much, the way your w...
Every now and then it crowds into one’s consciousness: Why am I rich, poor or middling? How’d I get here? How does Relativity matter? What if I was in Ukraine? Now what? What after I’m dead? At the risk of revealing the obvious: while this is largely an Old Person Conundrum, the fact is, people go through this self-audit on a constant basis from a very early age. It’s the intensity of the boil-from-simmer that differentiates the younger consideration from the more seasoned. Water boils at 212...
When Mary Jo was 7, someone called her “Fatso” as she and her family were walking out of the Our Lady of the Sacred Heart church on a sunny Sunday morning. The offending girl was Mary Jo’s age and she leaned into Mary Jo’s ear as the crush of exiting churchgoers pressed them together, the Confirmed adults reaching for the Holy Water font, dutifully dipping their fingers. “Yer a fatso,” she’d whispered and then pulled away, back to her place between her two parents, who remained perfectly ign...
Until a month ago, I’d been to Hawaii exactly zero times. Then, in something of a Bucket-List-Moment, my daughter, her husband and their perfect-and-beautiful, baby — my third perfect-and-beautiful grandson — 15 months old and embarrassingly genius, heartbreakingly sensitive, flirtatiously affectionate and the perfect amount of manipulative — like everyone else’s grandkid, but just better — convinced me and my beautiful, embarrassingly genius, heartbreakingly sensitive and flirtatious...
My wife was in California for a week, so I turned on the TV and watched all the stuff I'd been hoarding - a sickening amount sports, including UFC - which isn't really allowed when she's around unless I wanna put up with incessant eye-rolling and her sleeping on her side facing the wall for three nights. Then I watched deliciously nauseating political and historical documentaries, including one on Caligula that everyone should eventually see. Or not. The spoiled narcissistic, hedonistic,...
The guy in the wheelchair and Chicago Bulls basketball shorts and no shirt with the shiny, sun-tanned watermelon belly and aviator sunglasses waits at the stoplight for the WALK sign at the bottom of the hill on Carlton Avenue, where it intersects with Highway 33. The other guy, 20-something, with much better sunglasses and much worse taste sidles up to wait with him. “Headed to the pool?” The aviator glasses spin to the right, over the shoulder, to see who’s that, and the eyes behind the glass...
There’s that Russian-born fable that everyone’s heard, about the Scorpion and the Frog in which the scorpion convinces the frog to ferry him across the river despite the frog’s reticence about the likelihood of being stung, which the scorpion logically mitigates with the sound point: “Why the hell would I sting you? Then we’d both drown, dumb-dumb. Just give me a ride across, for God’s sake.” The chagrined frog nods assent, the scorpion climbs aboard and they’re off. In mid-river the s...
Tell your friends who live in Eden Prairie and Anoka and Fargo and everywhere else but here — tell them, but not the annoying ones, that you live within minutes of one of the most accessible Wonders of the World that hasn’t yet made the List of Seven. Lake Superior contains 3 quadrillion cubic gallons of fresh water. That’s a lot. If one were to take all 3 quadrillion gallons, freeze them, and stack them, one on top of the other, the stack of frozen gallons would reach from here to Pluto. And b...
Freedom of Speech: We can say what we want, whenever, wherever we want. Except “Fire!” in a crowded theater when there is no fire. Most of us get that. Freedom of Assembly: We can peaceably gather when and where we want. Except when we can’t because it is patently against the law and compromises someone else’s rights. Most of us get that. Freedom to Keep and Bear Arms: I can have a .12 gauge for a partridge dinner and you can have an AR-15 for … for … what, again? Oh, yeah. Target practice. I...
On Thursday, Aug. 22, 2019, at 5:20 p.m., Kathie Kemi, resident of Esko and Cloquet since age 8, was told she had a mass on her pancreas. As the stranger/doctor looked into her eyes and spoke the words, in the small consultation room where she sat, the walls of the room didn't crumble. The earth didn't shake. No lightning bolt flashed and her life didn't flicker by like a clicking highlight reel. "I just felt normal." Kathie insists. "Well, maybe not normal, but numb. I mean, I wasn't thrilled...
