The King of Wisconsin

Winter is the king of Wisconsin. Winter is owner of all the land and all the people, a grim, solemn magistrate with moments of mercy and warmth in modest portion, but majestic and terrible in power and authority. Trees drop their leaves in annual submission, paying tax for their lives, offering all the bright color and texture of their existence to the implacable monarch, ruler of forests and all who dwell therein. Animals disappear, virtually vanish and hide deep within their burrows and nests, breathing slowly as if in a long somnambulistic sigh until the king at his good pleasure shall avert his penetrating gaze and depart. Water freezes and stays motionless. Great drops cling to one another in teeth of frozen, indifferent ferocity, brittle fangs the king can snap and break or melt away and reform every day. Fish and fowl are identically miraculous in their respective mediums and […]

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The Nearest Star

The National Debt now stands at $34 trillion dollars. It is 93 million miles to the sun. The nearest star otherwise is Proxima Centauri, 4.24 light years away. The speed of light is 186,000 miles per second or 5.88 trillion miles per year. If dollars were miles and the United States were in debt one dollar for every mile to the nearest star, we would be $24.93 trillion dollars in debt by the time we reached Proxima Centauri, spending $186,000 per second in borrowed money over the course of 2.4 years. That distance and that debt, the distance to the nearest star, would be 73% of the current national debt. ♠

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There’s a Piece of Wrapping Paper That Didn’t Make It

I’m sorry. I can’t bear to throw it away. I’ll keep it as a reminder of what I might have given someone. Small and mighty as the gift might have been. I stopped when I thought I’d done enough. I probably hadn’t. Probably didn’t. Probably should have given just a bit more of what required to be wrapped in this scrap of colorful waste. I’ll try again. Maybe not wait until next year. Next Holiday. Next official and fully sanctioned way to give. I’ll look for the eccentric places, the odd, unexpected tokens of appreciation or outright love or the way the need surprises me with my own largess. I’ll keep this scrap paper. I’ll post it with my diplomas and my certificates of merit, my honors and my achievements and remember I might have done more. I didn’t do enough. I gave less than I received. I’m sorry. I’ll […]

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Rachmaninoff Opus 2

The time has come for new beginnings. Being born again is a daily endeavor, a daily emergence. Then upon occasion the blessed event is far more than it might otherwise be intended or expected to be. Another beginning hoves into view. It might be an iceberg or open water. It might be a harbor or open sea. It might be the treasure or bankruptcy that brings fiscal liberation either way. Whatever way, it is known for what it is and brings a feeling without precise understanding. Beginnings must be that way. Only the ending knows the ending and brings understanding, despite questions never to be answered. I can give you an example. Years ago I walked into a room and heard Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto in C Minor playing, the second movement adagio sostenuto to be precise and it opened for me he next forty years of my life. Melancholy years. […]

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My Dogs

I want to tell you about my dogs. The first one I named Colleen, because I wanted a dog and I wanted a name I could yell out across the fields on a farm where I lived. Colleen sounds good when you give it all you’ve got and the sound goes out and over those wide expanses, up into the sky and your dog comes running because she loves you and you’re glad, because the sight of a dog running free and over every obstacle to greet you is wonderful. You kneel down as she gets closer and you meet and you say, “Good dog,” and you both go home. Colleen is buried beneath an oak tree on the farm where we used to live. I buried her with a collar and a scoop of food in a quilt I wrapped around her and I cried for days. She’s the […]

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A Tiny Little Screw

So I went to the hardware store today to buy a tiny little screw like the ones I needed to repair a set of window shade brackets. The brackets were originally fastened to the window frames with tiny little nails and the nails came loose over time, so I thought I’d fix them. I’m that kind of guy. I thought the screws would hold more securely than the nails and if I used screws I wouldn’t have to mess with the brackets again and the window shades would work better and I like to make improvements when I can. I’m that kind of guy. I wanted to find a little plastic packet of screws in the hardware store. You’ve seen them, a dozen or so of anything in a bag on display and there’d be a price and I’d pay for not too many screws like I wanted for not […]

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On First

I want to tell you a story. A man told it to me today. I want to tell it to you. He organizes baseball games for children with mental and physical disabilities. Himself a man with a limp and a deformed arm from birth, he knows what he’s doing. After a baseball game, after being told he could not participate in sports long ago because of his own disabilities, a mother came to him with tears in her eyes and told him on the way home from a game her son spoke the first word of his life. Her five year old son had never spoken a word before. This man had been told as a child he could never play sports, so he determined to make it possible for others to play and he participates, because the impairments of his life never overcame his life. He wouldn’t let them. […]

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The Strongest Man In Poland

I will write this without amendation or revision. It comes from the heart. When I think of my family, when I think of the past I think of what I have been told and what I remember. I don’t research, but I believe and I know what I know from those I loved and one of those stories came from my father who told me we came from Poland and one of our ancestors made his living in Poland by performing as The Strongest Man In Poland. Imagine. At a time when my great grandfather immigrated to American to build a log cabin and live in Wisconsin and raise eleven children with his wife in that log cabin which still stands, one of our people made his living as The Strongest Man In Poland. There are many strong men and woman in Poland and in Ukraine today. In those days […]

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Endurance

In 1915 the ship Endurance of the Earnest Shackleton expedition to Antarctica became trapped and sank in the pack ice of the Weddell Sea. Shackleton’s men abandoned ship and began a 350 mile trek across ice and open water pulling and rowing their lifeboats to Elephant Island. It took them over two months. When they arrived they stood on land for the first time since the beginning of the expedition, a total of 497 days. Now marooned, Shackleton and five members of his crew eventually set out in a 22-foot lifeboat by dead reckoning 800 miles to a whaling station on South Georgia Island. Fifteen days afloat, they survived a hurricane that sank a 500 ton steamer in the same waters. Shackleton and two others then hiked across a previously uncharted glacier, a distance of 32 miles in 36 hours without mountaineering equipment to find help. Eventually Shackleton returned with […]

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Memorandum

I went to a Civil War battlefield recently, a battle for which I had no knowledge. Bentonville, south of Raleigh in North Carolina. There, on March 19-21, 1865, General Joe Johnson and his twenty thousand Confederates met General William Sherman and his sixty thousand Union boys on their way anywhere they wanted. They fought. Three days they fought in sandy forests, amid teeming creeks and fields under cultivation in what some described as fighting every bit as horrific as anything that happened at Gettsyburg or anywhere else during the four year blood letting that became American history. Eighteen days later Lee would surrender to Grant at Appomattox. Johnson himself would surrender to Sherman eighteen days after that. No one at Bentonville believed anything but the truth, yet they fought valiantly, bravely, heroically and without respite. Casualties amounted to four thousand two hundred men. A wood frame house on the battleground […]

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