Opinion

Typically Minnesota ranks high on all sorts of charts, whether it’s for US Census participation or quality of life. So I was a little disappointed when I read we are ranked 39th in SNAP Access.

At least once in your long and delicious life you owe it to yourself to go hear Olivier Messiaen’s “Turangalîla-symphonie” and don’t wait until you’re 80 as I did but finally last week went to hear the New York Philharmonic take us on this wild 90-minute roller- coaster ride in which Catholics are kidnapped and Baptists go Buddhist and you think in French and fly in a formation of geese and get a taste of molecular physics as horses go galloping down the aisles, and in the gorgeous slow passage “Garden of Sleeping Love” you will fall in love forever with the person next to you so be very careful where you sit. I sat next to my sweetheart and after years of thinking I was averse to modern music, here was a hymn to joy and time, movement, rhythm, life and death, with big Wagnerian chords, delicate intervals, a dozen percussionists, a genius pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet, and we’ve been happily married ever since.

Last week my son spent the majority of it trying to convince me (still) to fly out to New York to be at his Army promotion ceremony. Alas, it wasn’t a possibility at this time with so much going on here. So when it came time for his ceremony to begin, one of his buddies was kind enough to man the phone so I could watch on FaceTime.

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.

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.

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 talked to a friend last week whose Lutheran church in Minneapolis is trying to attract people of color. Lutherans have been white for centuries, coming as they did from Scandinavia and Germany, countries that were never great colonial powers and didn’t grab big chunks of Africa and Lutheranize the indigenous people.

I will share a secret with you – I get a little nervous when I sit down to write this! Each column presents an opportunity to share resources or ideas to help make life easier and I want to be sure I’m making the most of it. When I’m looking ahead at my calendar and see there is one due soon, I say a little prayer for guidance.