Say Hey From Grand Marais Friday Round-Up

We met a man at the marina who had long wavy gray hair, so long it reached his collar and beyond and he became fascinated with our dogs and their having been sled dogs and after walking away, turned back to tell us that he was retired from the Department of Corrections and had run a program that brought retired greyhounds into the prison for inmates to train. Which goes to say you truly never know about people, who they are or were, what they think or like unless you have a dog that builds some weird kind of common ground between strangers. I never would have put mister with the long hair as a corrections guy, much less one working with greyhounds, without Swirl pointing the way.

The cloud comes over us like a vessel sent from outer space, blocking the sun, and ending the day outside. All day the weather has acted like a member of the family, disrupting and then quieting, being the center of attention. We got up early and, seeing the calm of Lake Superior, decided to load our canoe in the truck and head over to Sable Lake. There, we carried our big wide old canoe a hundred yards to put in at the small beach and paddled off in the still waters watching the newborn dragonflies flutter until biting flies landed on our knees and told us to paddle back to shore.

The Warmth of Other Suns is important to read. It is astonishing to me how ignorant a well-educated person can be. I studied the Great Migration – the incredible movement of millions of rural Black people to the urban north. This piece of history was fundamental to understanding urban issues and that was my thing – urban studies/urban affairs, it was called many different things. We analyzed the migration streams, connecting the movement to the lure of manufacturing jobs. Black people left the south because of economic opportunity in the north. Maybe that was the pull. But the push was Jim Crow, terrible violence, and constant deprivation. Our analysis somehow skipped that part – the truth. I may be ignorant but I don’t mean to stay that way.

To get old, and by this I mean to become truly old, not jokingly old, not I’ feel like I’m a hundred’ but to have being a hundred something that you consider as a possibility, is to witness a ceaseless battle between resignation and exhilaration. Every day is a choice between feeling weakened by age and freed by it at the same time, a parade of forks in the road. I have found this impossible to explain to anyone younger since they look at me from their own frame of reference in which they worry not about their physical selves and think they will live forever because, of course, they should. I did. Meanwhile, I wake each day with the choice – give in or rise up. No two days are the same.

A hummingbird came within three feet of me the other day so I bought a new hummingbird feeder. It cost me $25.Our old one, made of dime store plastic fell apart last year so a new one was in order but this seemed like a Cadillac driving in a Chevy lane. I made nectar, filled the feeder to the brim, and hung it in its place but no birds have come. Meanwhile, a man in an orange sweatshirt talks quietly to his dog about their day and what lovely, sunny things will happen tomorrow.