A Civilized People
2013
I take a seat at a corner table facing the window. A blustery spring day. The mutter of cars and buses as they pull up to the stop sign. Western Avenue, once the city limit back when little farms lay between St. Paul and the milling city of Minneapolis.
Nanny and Nanny’s Daddy
2013
p>Nanny is my grandmother. Daddy is her husband, my grandfather. One day, years ago, Nanny and Daddy were out looking for the Winter Carnival Medallion. They watched others find the medallion on the grounds of Nanny’s old house.
End of the Line
2013
Take the bus? Sure, I can take the bus. Moving to Saint Paul from a small southern Minnesotan town in 1976 was thrilling. I was nineteen years old and fearless; riding the bus didn’t seem like a big deal.
XXX Searle
2013
A chunk of snow falls while my grandma Dorothy Marie Miller Wick Rangitsch Hayes stares out the window. She is eighty-nine years old and lives in the disorientation and terror of dementia.
Tickets
2013
A RENOWNED RECYCLER with a long history of community service, Richard Miller writes parking tickets as part of his job as Building Service Assistant for the Minnesota Historical Society.
The Sweetest Kiss in Saint Paul
2013
As you go through life you get kisses you remember forever. There is the kiss you get in the parking lot of Porky’s Drive-In when you are fifteen. There is the first kiss that tells you this is the girl you are going to marry someday.
Workin’ on the Railroad— Dale Street Shops
2013
Driving through the intersection of Dale Street and Minnehaha Avenue, in the Frogtown district, you couldn’t help being impressed by the massive yellow-ochre brick building with the exceptionally tall glass block windows.
Bridge
2013
There’s no time in traffic on 35E to honor a place such as this—my old neighborhood in ruins. In one second my car wheels cover what was once my brothers’ bedroom with the nursery rhyme floor.
Swimming with the Sharks
2013
Among our family stories is one with a lesson: Don’t try swimming with the sharks.
Mawk-Eyed
2013
A RETIRED NEUROSURGEON, John Mawk teaches all the sciences at the international high school in Lowertown.
Poem for the Saint Paul City Council
2013
The New Year, with its dependable timing, its greeting full of bells and whistles and promises, has arrived. We stand, once more, at a new beginning.
Hats Off to Larry Ho: Saint Paul Poet and Politician
2013
Laurence “Larry Ho” Hodgson (1874–1937) was a unique combination of poet and politician, a prolific writer who produced thousands of poetic and prose works.