Last week, I was invited to attend a dinner in honor of the Ambassador of Uruguay’s trip to Montevideo. Everyone in attendance was encouraged to sit at tables with people they didn’t know, and so I ended up sitting with a family from Uruguay that now lives in St. Paul and a gentleman from Uruguay who now lives in Minnetonka.

I went down to the Bowery one night last week to see Aoife O’Donovan sing to a ballroom packed with young people standing for two hours and whooping and yelling — I sat up in the balcony and whooped and yelled too — and what the woman could do with her voice and guitar was astonishing, utterly fabulous, and for a man my age to be astonished is remarkable, she was competing with my memory of Uncle Jim handing me the reins to his horse-drawn hayrack and my grandma chopping the head off a chicken and seeing Buster Keaton perform at the Minnesota State Fair and also Paul Simon at Madison Square Garden and Renée Fleming in Der Rosenkavalier, but there she is, Aoife, in my pantheon of wonderment. I came home from the Bowery to learn that a dear friend, Christine Jacobson, had died — amazement and mortality in one evening, and it’s a rare privilege to be aware of both, the beauty of life and the brevity.

Important art update: our reverse-snowbird fairies have finally picked up sticks! If you’ve walked along Prentice St. over the last week, you may have noticed that our solstice village has been unearthed from the sheet of ice that trapped it there for far longer than planned… all thanks to gallery employee Lisa, who spent multiple hours hacking away (and may have incurred a minor case of winter sunburn as a result) to safely transport the houses to their secret summer storage location.

I recently came across this reading on Facebook and felt I should share it with you. If you have already seen it, it might be worthwhile to read through it again.