Mark Hayes Peacock – blogs

LaMoine MacGlaughlin, retired director of Amery’s Northern Lakes Center For The Arts, poet, author, musician, and long-time contributor to the arts in northern Wisconsin, died. His memorial observation was held on February 15th at an Amery area brewery. I had been asked to speak. Unfortunately, the event turned out to be more of a class reunion for LaMoine’s seminary buddies and for students of Mary Ellen MacGlaughlin. One old guy, present via Zoom, yammered on about some piece of music that the Bishop back then just loved. Somehow, he thought that related to LaMoine. A former Mary Ellen student told about how they dissected a shark. The few that talked about their recent experiences with LaMoine simply talked about themselves. Only one person, an elderly man (and possibly a retired priest who was present during LaMoine’s last moments) dealt with his feelings when he read LaMoine’s wonderful poem Wind Riders. After more than an hour of listening to self-indulgence, we left. But here’s what I would have said:

First, I’m here as a friend. Second, let me commend the people that wrote LaMoine’s obituary. It’s very well done and captures him well. I’m married to a mental health therapist who has lectured at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire on the impact of childhood trauma on people as adults. And LaMoine suffered childhood trauma. There was a fire at home. Everyone made it out of the house, save for two younger  sisters still trapped inside. Their father went inside to bring them out alive. All three perished. For LaMoine, his father was a hero and he referred to it at times and wrote about it.

LaMoine’s schooling was intended to prepare him for seminary, which he did attend, although he got his degree from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. Somehow, he discerned that the clergy was not his calling. And somewhere in those early years he was part of a music group–Louie says it was a folk music group–and LaMoine thought the group needed a keyboard player. One of the guys said, “There’s a girl across the street. She plays the piano and the organ. Why don’t you ask her?” According to LaMoine, he said, “Aaah, you ask her.” The guy did. Mary Ellen said yes. She called him “Moine”. They had three daughters: Mary, Karen and Louie, an experience after which not even a terrorist threat could make LaMoine MacGlaughlin tremble.

Both Moine and Mary Ellen were teaching, Moine teaching English. How much he’d gotten into Shakespeare is unclear to me, but as a teacher, he was able to really dig into Shakespeare as poet and playwright. One of his books, Secrets From The Wings, deals with various characters in Shakespeare’s plays. Moine brings out each character, its personality, its inner thoughts, its motivations beyond the obvious and he does it in poetry. It’s a remarkable achievement. As a teacher, Moine also had the opportunity to produce plays and that paid off at the Northern Lakes Center For The Arts, where the theater is either a horseshoe or theater in the round, depending on whether or not the audience is seated in the balcony. For either instance, the actor must learn to act using his back, as well as his front and face. LaMoine solved that in Amery by having his actors move in imperceptible circles, to that no one might be deprived of seeing the total performance.

In addition to poetry, for which he was probably best known, LaMoine also could write a fine English sentence. A short story of his won first place in a state-wide competition by the Wisconsin Academy of Letters, Arts and Sciences. LaMoine was proud to share that a journalist who’d listened to him read the story at the Awards ceremony thought it was a true story. The story dealt with a depression-era farm family that hired a homeless man to help around the farm. The man turned out to be harming the family draft horse. He’s discovered by the family’s son whose father saves him just as the hired man is about to either kill or injure the boy. Now, sometimes writers can look at their work long after they’ve produced it and find things in there that they had not realized were there. Here, we have a father who’s a hero. This hero is successful in saving his child. LaMoine’s real father was a hero, but unsuccessful. Was this intentional on LaMoine’s part? I wish I’d asked. I have been proud to have had LaMoine’s endorsement in each of my short story collections.

His poetry was mostly conventional in style, meaning that it followed traditional styles that had discipline. He abhorred today’s “free verse” as poorly written prose. For him, “The Emperor Had No Clothes!”  He said he would revise a poem 100 times. That fits a music teacher, who was bound to tell most students, “Practice! Practice! Practice!” He was Amery’s First Poet Laureate. Two poems, especially, brought me to tears regularly. One, A Scent Of Lilacs, told a tale of immense family cruelty (it was based on a true story). Twice, LaMoine and I read our writings as fundraisers for St.Croix Festival Theater and I had to follow his reading of that story after wiping away my tears and finding my voice. (Not fair!) Another, The Christmas Swallow, was one he read at the annual Christmas gathering at the Center. I tried to get even with him once and asked, “You’ve written A Christmas Swallow; when are you going to write An Easter Gulp? Fortunately, he thought that was funny.

Teaching apparently didn’t produce the income needed by a growing family, so after a brief stint in Green Bay, the MacLaughlins found themselves in this area, where LaMoine went to work with Impact Seven, a non-profit involved in low income housing development and other community building work. Impact Seven has just announced a planned mixed income housing development in Osceola along Highway M. It was there, I think, that LaMoine learned the skills he would use to ensure that the Northern Lakes Center For The Arts remained in the black for more than 40 years. However, constantly dealing with permitting, zoning regulations, grant requirements, and other bureaucratic details eventually ground him down, so when he saw Mary Ellen setting her own schedule and enjoying teaching music, he thought he’d like that better. With all three daughters launched, it was time for the two of them to found the Northern Lakes Center for the Arts. They bought an old church building and made things work.

As far as we know, Amery’s Center had the only Chamber Orchestra in the USA in a town with fewer than 3,000 people. The fact that it operated in the black was notable enough so that I wrote about it for the St.Paul Pioneer Press. It was unusual. Just last week, the Minnesota Orchestra, a professional organization of long standing if there ever was one, announced a deficit in the millions of dollars, despite playing to full houses. The Center boasted music classes, recitals, drama performances with local actors, guest performers (Gordon Bok, an internationally known folk artist, said the Center was his favorite venue in the nation in which to perform), voice lessons (a retired opera singer with a fine European reputation came home and gave voice lessons in the Center’s downstairs), and writers, whose writings they not only read but were published in the Center’s magazine, Soundings. The MacLaughlins even used the Center’s walls to feature local arts, including painting, photography, weaving and quilting, and even a hubcap collection. Lou Jappe cobbled together a pipe organ from various places, including Oberlin College.

LaMojine conducted the chamber orchestra. He was not Toscanini; I’m not aware he ever threw his baton at anyone. And he did not throw himself around; he was not Leonard Bernstein. But he could be impatient (No! No! You enter here!) and it was the same with drama rehearsals. He used orchestrations done for him by a friend and since he couldn’t ask another favor of the same kind, we heard the same pieces repeated often. (Orchestrating apparently was beyond LaMoine’s abilities or he figured he just didn’t have the time to do a large task like that.)  However, repeats also meant that the annual Christmas concert had a warm, friendly, feeling of family. Tammy Turcotte would recite The Night Before Christmas. Don Hansen would rock back and forth on his feet while waiting for his aunt to answer the door in A Cup Of Christmas Tea. LaMoine would recite A Christmas Swallow and I would read the Christmas story from Luke’s Gospel. One could almost swear your Christmas stocking hung from the balcony rail.

LaMoine was a consultant to other arts organizations–probably for free–because of the Center’s financial success.

Then, there was the newspaper, a publication filled with things of local interest, local history, obituaries and LaMoine’s thoughts.

He could be quick with a tease. He called my German-born wife a Nazi. I won’t tell you what he called me.

Music instruction was very personal. I don’t think anyone ever felt like a number.

His heritage was Scottish. He celebrated Robert Burns. He and Mary Ellen traveled to Scotland at least twice.

For his age, he had remarkable singing voice, even as he was pushing eighty. He read his poetry for years on radio WPCA-FM. They called his show “The Poet’s Corner”.

He boasted about the quality of the Clear Lake Public School system and cited his successful daughters as good examples of what the schools produced.

It became apparent, though, that Mary Ellen was developing Alzheimer’s. That was evident at one of the last events I attended. Her job, one of many, was to handle the lights prior to performing. She would dim the house lights and bring up the lights for the performance space before she took her place in the cello section. But that night she just couldn’t get it figured out. LaMoine had to coach and correct her from the podium. How many times had she done that job before? It was obvious that there was a problem. I believe he saw what was coming: the two of them could not sustain what they had created. He would have to shut down the Center. (I have learned since that there were discussions about how to do that but from what I knew at the time I would have simply said that there was anger involved.) It was not the positive ending people might have hoped for. It reminded me of Sampson, who leaned on the pillars and the entire temple came down, taking Sampson with it.

We would have coffee or lunch with the two of them, during which LaMoine would announce that “Retirement is BORING!” I told him that the most boring part of it was his home cooking: very repetitious and certainly not the Mediterranean Diet. After Mary Ellen’s passing and a few weeks after her memorial event, we invited him to join us for lunch at Pure & Simple. I told him he could order anything on the menu; it would be a nice break from his home cooking. He ordered a grilled cheese sandwich. I figured he wanted to go easy on my wallet. We had a nice lunch, during which he shared some of what I’ve shared with you here. Afterwards, we headed to our cars and that’s when he said that Mary Ellen had fallen here in this parking lot. WHAT? All this time here and you’ve said nothing about that? This is where she staggered backwards and fell and you stood there, waiting for the ambulance that took forever, and she didn’t recover? And you didn’t even mention it? Ice had begun to fall, so we got into our cars and headed home. I realized then that the cheese sandwich wasn’t about my wallet; he didn’t have much of an appetite.

During our lunch, he’d slid a sheet of paper across the table. It was a poem he just finished. It consisted of groups of two lines each that rhymed. I didn’t think it was very good and disregarded it at the time, but before tossing it when I got home I noted two of the lines. One in the middle said, “Grown Old, So Cold”. The other was at the poem’s end: “My wife; my life”.

Perhaps 10 days after that lunch Louie called to say that LaMoine was at Regions Hospital after a major cardiac event but that he was expected to do well. Two day later I called to check on him and Louie said he was progressing but they had to tie down his arms because he kept trying to pull out the tubes and wires put into him. “That’s LaMoine,” she said. I gave it another two days, maybe three, and called to tease about how much better jello and broth was than his home cooking. He responded (they held the phone to his ear) but I found him difficult to understand because he still had a tube in. He wasn’t even enjoying jello and broth. And two days after that he went to join Mary Ellen.

People in the old days would say that he died from a broken heart. I believe that was true.  I also think there is more here. “My wife; My life.” Over the years, I’ve asked psychiatrists and psychologists if it’s possible for us to determine the timing of our exit from this life. The universal answer has been yes. And I saw this play out when I spent 9 years as a nursing home chaplain. Someone would tell me they told God they were exhausted and done here; God could take them home. And they would die that night. Or I’d hear something similar on Tuesday and the person would die on Friday. I believe that as the anesthesia wore off, LaMoine saw what was ahead of him: when he got out of the hospital, he would not be able to go home, but would need rehabilitation and care. That meant a nursing home. And if he ever did get out of a nursing home, he’d go home to the place on the lake that both of them loved and that he wrote about so  often. He’d open the door and the only sound would be the humming of the refrigerator or, if in winter, the furnace, too. And then only the sound of his footsteps in the empty house. Realizing that, it was “I don’t want that!” and desperate moves to pull out the tubes and wires that would keep him tethered to this life. “My wife; My Life”.

I have the sense that God, upon seeing LaMoine coming towards him with his short, quick-step walk and having somehow gotten past Peter at the gate, leaned over to Mary Ellen and said, “Please. Please, could you please handle this one?”

I first heard LaMoine read Wind Riders at Harvey Stowe’s funeral. He read it at Mary Ellen’s memorial event, although from just five feet away from him I could barely hear him.  Here’s what he wrote:

“If you row from the dock at noon and I at half past three, I hope that when you beach your boat you’ll turn to wait for me.

And if I push off after one while you stay until four, I’ll wave and guide you through the mist and greet you on the shore.

We’ll laugh until tears fill our eyes as time and space rescind, then, holding one another close, we’ll ride upon the wind.”

And when that time comes for each of us, my prayer for us all is that the wind blowing will be warm and welcoming. May it be so!

And all the people said: “Amen!”

 

I received a call from Bob Zank, the broadcaster with integrity who believes that having a radio broadcast license is a sacred trust. He said that in working to re-balance its programming, WPCA-FM (91.3) will be scheduling broadcasts of my short stories on the first Tuesday of each month at 6:00 p.m., rather than their long-time slot of 7:00 p.m. That schedule begins on Tuesday, May 5th.

I am delighted, of course, and as I’ve said often, I appreciate very much the privilege of having my stories broadcast. Very few writers enjoy that kind of an opportunity and I am grateful. My thanks go to Bob, LuAnn and all those at WPCA for continuing to share my stories with the listening public.

WPCA-FM has broadcast my stories once monthly for a number of years now and with 27 stories recorded and out there seldom has there been a repeat. As I’ve said before, here and elsewhere, I’ve appreciated and am grateful for the station’s sharing my stories with its audience. That is a privilege few authors have and I thank Bob Zank and LuAnn for making it possible. It has been a good run. I suppose I can be grateful, also, that the cancellation of the story series is not due to pressure from the POTUS.

Meanwhile, you can read all of my stories and acquire them through Amazon.com and your favorite book store. Locally, these retailers carry my paperbacks: Kenneth Larson, downtown Luck, Wisconsin; River Stone Book Shop, downtown Osceola, Wisconsin; Pure & Simple, Highway 8, Amery, Wisconsin; Polk County Information Center, St.Croix Falls, Wisconsin; and the pharmacies and gift shops of St.Croix Health.

Tonight’s short story broadcast on WPCA-FM was The Duo, which probably is the most autobiographical of my 27 stories in print. You’ll find it in The First Gathering of The Break Time Stories and as an ebook in Yet More Break Time Stories. It’s also one of the shortest stories I’ve written. The protagonist is a retired Navy officer, Frank Dodd, who is linked at the hip with Mary, his wife. They join the narrator in Graduate School. After graduating, Dodd goes into business and then gets elected to the U.S. Congress representing West Anglia in southern California. Dodd is an idealist, but several terms in office erode his idealism enough so that it is obvious. Those terms in office also lead to many questions.

When I’ve been writing I’ve tried to avoid reading other pieces of fiction, but now, after some years of not writing, I’ve been reading some fiction. The latest: This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald. My sense of it: it’s astonishingly dull and even boring, with weighty conversations few people ever would have held in highly unlikely situations. Fitzgerald wrote it when he was 23 years old, which might explain things, but the feeling back then was that he managed to capture the essence of the emerging jazz age. I’d rather be living now, if that’s the case.

Our weather of late has been warm and the snow is receding rapidly from all areas of our property. The ground still is frozen and logs at the bottom of the piles in the rear of our property still are frozen to the ground. I’ll need to dry them out, as we still have many weeks of cooler temperatures and probably more snow before Spring and before the lake begins to thaw in April. I still see vehicles on the lake and I expect that, per usual, someone will lose what was a nice truck when it goes through the ice close to shore.

Jennifer Randall has opened her new book shop in Osceola and I’m delighted that River Stone Book Shop has all four of my paperback books for you. The shop is located just two doors north of the light in downtown Osceola on the west side of the street (205 North Cascade) and from her first week it looks like there will be plenty of activity there. In fact, things were so busy in the moments following her 11 a.m. opening on Friday that she had not had time yet to put on the coffee pot! Frankly, Jennifer’s shop is just the kind of place that’s needed in Osceola and I hope she does outrageously well!

Kenneth Larson’s in downtown Luck also carries all my paperbacks, as does the Polk County Information Center. Pure and Simple, out on Highway 8 north of Amery, carries Some Mangled Fairy Tales. The gift shops/pharmacies of St.Croix Health clinics may still have some of the fairy tales available. And, of course, Amazon.com handles both my ebooks and paperbacks, while the paperbacks are available through Barnes & Noble and your favorite book store.

Tonight’s WPCA-FM story broadcast was “I’ll Cook For You”, a tale found in my first paperback, “The First Gathering of The Break Time Stories” and as an ebook in the “Yet More Break Time Stories” collection. I have to say that this story is one of my favorites and it’s also great fun for me to read out loud. When I have read it aloud, the story produces an audible listeners’ reaction as it ends, which, of course, brings great pleasure to my writer’s heart. The inspiration for the story came from a business venture by a colleague at the nursing home where I served as a chaplain. Her cook-and buy groceries-business found itself transported from our snow and ice to Hollywood in the Korean War era and took place in a grand vintage southern California house owned by a silent movie brother-sister couple. That house, a meld of homes I’d been in and with servants I’d seen at work, serves as the backdrop for a glamorous lifestyle era now long past. Throw in some of what I experienced as a young man and ta-da! you have “I’ll Cook For You’.

Other stuff of late includes a stretch of uncomfortably cold weather. How’s 25 below zero sound, especially when the furnace’s gas line freezes and I have to be outside seven times a night to thaw out the line with a hair dryer? Also, we sold a small rental house in the Village of Luck. The tenants simply walked away after four months of no rent payments. They left everything: a closet full of dresses with price tags still on them; cupboards, shelves, and a pantry full of food items when they’d declared they hadn’t even enough money to buy food (they must have hit every food shelf in the five county area); twelve bags of clothing in all sizes; furniture from every room but one; and even wedding pictures from the time they were happy together, which they were not now. In six days I filled two roll-off dumpsters myself and hired a guy to haul away several bulky/heavy items like a sofa, a huge mattress and box spring, stereo cabinet and a dead chest freezer. (Fun fact: he called his new business “I Haul”, as opposed to U Haul. I hope he becomes very successful and as an old ad-man, I love the name of his new business.) The impact of selling has not hit yet but in time I’m expecting to notice a difference in my schedule.

Daughter Alice hit town and stayed with us Sunday and Monday after a performance in Excelsior with Dave Rodriguez. We had a great visit and I’m grateful that Alice could make the time to be with us. All the kids checked in because last week included my birthday. When one lives this many years, you become quite aware that every day is a gift from God. I try to remember that and wish I were more successful about it. My son, John, reports that ICE is everywhere, even in Golden Valley where he lives and our cabin neighbor, a recent US citizen from Mexico, was stopped while driving to Wisconsin from Iowa. Fortunately, his wife had insisted that he have all his papers available on his phone, so the guys in the three ICE vehicles that surrounded his truck let him go. The way this administration is handling rounding up “the worst criminals” is criminal itself. We can see where this is heading and we need to stop it before we lose our great experiment in self-government to a violent surveillance state.

Tonight’s WPCA-FM broadcast of my short stories featured “Sinner Ella”, a “mangled” fairy tale found in the ebook Yes, More Break Time Stories! and in the paperback book, The Second Gathering of The Break Time Stories. Ella, of course, is modeled faintly on the classic Cinderella, but this girl is dissatisfied with the mega-church she attends and goes exploring to find something different. What she finds and what she does when she finds another church is bound to offend some church people, but the story has a happy ending despite a nasty step-mother, bratty step-sisters, her AWOL father, the mandatory fairy godmother, and, of course, a prince charming. As a retired church pastor, I’ll take the heat.

Speaking of heat, today we’ve had ice that has made our place a skating rink, at least the parts I’ve cleared of snow. Trudging through snow to the back of my property to haul some wood closer to the house for the wood stove was much safer than sliding on the patio blocks and slipping on the paths to fill Marina’s bird feeders.

I spent a bit of today on the phone trying to find a way to get my books and Marina’s “Gretel and Andy” book in the Twin Cities airport’s book stores. Short stories are ideal for travelers that may have to sit around while waiting to board their flight and for reading while in flight. My stories all are written so that a reader can read a complete story on his/her lunch break and still get back to work on time.”Sinner Ella”, for example, clocked in tonight at 15 minutes, including time for plenty of laughs. Self-publishing does have its drawbacks and one of them is the challenge of getting my books into the hands of people who can make money by selling them. While I’m on this subject, I should explain that I wrote most all my stories when I was in my early to mid-seventies and my experience as a freelancer for 40 plus years was that I could send out a query to an editor and  might receive a response months afterward. Also, short stories are difficult to market, with the only thing tougher being poetry. And so I was running out of time; I didn’t have months to wait for an acceptance or rejection and until I had some exposure–people laughing at “Sinner Ella” when I read it in public, for example–I really didn’t know if my stories were any good. The response to my tales has been quite good, “Six Short Stories” garnered nice reviews, and people are buying both the ebooks and print books so I am confident about their quality and I think they deserve a much wider audience.

This week has a few “free” days, which is OK with me because driving on ice makes for tense trips. Besides, it’s tax time soon and I need to assemble the necessary numbers for our CPA. The sale of our Luck rental is supposed to close later this month and I’m hoping that the cleaning I need to do will be minimal and that there will be no unforeseen repairs.

I also should mention the passing of our friend, LaMoine MacLaughlin. LaMoine was kind enough to give praise for my stories and I’ve been able to include his kind words on each of my books. LaMoine also shared the stage with me to read his poetry twice as a fundraiser for St.Croix Festival Theater. He and his wife, Mary Ellen, who passed away just a couple of months ago, created and ran the Northern Lakes Center for the Arts in Amery, Wisconsin. It was a performance center, a music school, and featured what was likely the only chamber orchestra in the USA in a town of fewer than 3,000 people. People could share all sorts of artistic endeavors, including writing, acting, dance, music recitals, painting, fabric arts and other things that don’t come to mind as I write this. La Moine was an unusual, creative person–he took first prize some years ago in the short story competition for the Wisconsin Academy of Science, Arts and Letters. Marina and I were blessed to have LaMoine and Mary Ellen as friends and we will miss them.

Tonight’s story broadcast on WPCA-FM was Shall We Dance?, an inside look into a flamenco dance company performing in Los Angeles. Yes, there is a real Wilshire Ebell Theater in L.A. and yes, flamenco dance troupes have performed there, and yes, the theater is a very fine venue for dance of all kinds. The story characters? My inventions. El Duende? that deep, dark sadness in the gypsy soul? It’s real, exposed by flamenco guitarists for many decades. You can find Shall We Dance? in the ebook, Yes, More Break Time Stories and in the paperback, The Second Gathering of The Break Time Stories. It’s a story that has drawn a number of comments, such as “How do you know so much about this stuff? To which I reply, lots of exposure and some doing Spanish dance myself. Ole!

As always, I appreciate WPCA-FM’s sharing of my stories on the first Tuesday evening of each month at 7 p.m. It’s a rare privilege for a writer and I am grateful to Bob and LuAnn for putting my stories on the air. You can find all four of my paperbacks at Kenneth Larson in downtown Luck, WI and also at the Polk County Information Center in St.Croix Falls. Pure and Simple in Amery, WI and the St.Croix Health Clinics carry my Some Mangled Fairy Tales paperbacks. All of these books make great and inexpensive Christmas presents.

We have snow and lots of it after an unusually long Fall of unusually warm weather. Some days the high temperatures broke high temperature records. But now we are sliding into one of those December deep cold spells and I have had the wood stove warming almost all day. Fortunately, I have plenty of wood way out back. I use a plastic sled to slide the logs to the house. It’s exercise I need and I enjoy it, much to the dismay of my wife. There’s supposed to be more snow tonight, which means I’ll have to dust off the car before I join a former colleague for coffee and catching up. Kristin, a strong Christian family friend, will breeze in tomorrow morning, too.

I have a small wedding to perform this coming Monday for an older couple. The groom, whom I’ve known for 17 years, swore all those years that he’d never marry or consider romance again. However, he’s met his match. I’ll try not to giggle throughout the coming ceremony.

For Thanksgiving, Marina and I made a couple of pumpkin pies and roasted a small turkey. Daughter Britta and her husband, Mark, brought the rest of the meal. We enjoyed a pleasant and relaxed afternoon. And I hope the same for you.

Last night’s WPCA-FM broadcast of my stories featured Holding The Fort,  a tale found in The Second Gathering Of The Break Time Stories and as an ebook in Four More Break Time Stories. The setting: Fort Thomas, Arizona. The characters: the narrator and Oral, both of whom were Vietnam era Army drill instructors, and Oral’s young wife, Janet. The issues: small town racial attitudes between Whites and the Native Americans living on the reservation adjacent to Oral’s ranch. I’ve had one person who heard me read this story in public ask me to do a follow-up on what happened to Oral and Janet, so some people do track with this story’s characters. I take that as a good sign.

That brings up something for me as an author and that is, for me at least, while I may think a story is good, it takes other people saying so to validate my opinion. Until I had some public appreciation for my stories, I hesitated to put them in front of critics. For example, The St.Paul Pioneer Press’ Mary Ann Grossmann has seen only my latest book, the Six Short Stories volume, because I didn’t have the courage to send her the two Break Time Stories volumes, which also had printing problems in their first editions. I’ve had enough experience now to be confident about what I’ve done. In any event, the stories are out there, for better or worse, and my hope is that people will enjoy them.

No snow yet. It has been unseasonably warm with little moisture lately. Fire danger warnings are out. Cabin people that come here for the weekend don’t know about the restrictions and that makes things dangerous. They love to have an atmospheric campfire going and all it would take is a spark. I remember what it was like to evacuate the Laurel Canyon fire back in about 1958-1959. I was a kid, rattled by the desperate honking of the cars lined up behind my vapor locking car as we lurched down the hills to the Sunset Strip. It was no fun. Behind my home now lie acres of woods with dry leaves and just to the north of me lives an elderly couple with mobility issues that would have problems if they had to quickly evacuate their home. There is a possibility for rain this coming Saturday.

Daylight Savings Time ended last weekend and this is the first year that the change has affected me negatively. This year I find the change physically hard. Perhaps that’s just part of getting older.

This Sunday I’m taking the service at Wolf Creek United Methodist Church. They broadcast services on You Tube, so my mess-ups are out there for people of the world to see whenever they like.

Sunday afternoon I spoke a few words about the late Mary Ellen MacGlaughlin, co-director off Amery’s Northern Lakes Center for the Arts. To me, she had so many facets to her life that she was like a finely cut diamond. Which facet does one start with?

Mary Ellen loved teaching piano to kids and when LaMoine, her husband, fed up with battling bureaucracies in his job with a community development agency, saw how his wife could set her own schedule and that she was having a satisfying, enjoyable time, figured that could be a better life. The result: the Northern Lakes Center for the Arts, a teaching and performance space housed in a former church building that had become an auto parts store. I did a piece for the St.Paul Pioneer Press that appeared in January, 2014. In that piece, the focus was on the Center’s more than three decades in the black–an unusual record for an arts organization of any size. I didn’t give Mary Ellen enough credit. The two of them had a plan but it took both of them to work that plan.

The Center had several instruction spaces, as well as the central performance space that housed a chamber orchestra nicely but was intimate enough so that a big name like Gordon Bok declared that it was his favorite venue in the nation. The chamber orchestra was likely the only chamber orchestra in the country in a town of fewer than 3,000 people. Mary Ellen played cello in the orchestra, but the prelude to her cello playing was her selling tickets at the door box office–she knew most people that came through the door because she had been pounding the pavement soliciting donations to help support the Center–and handling the stage lighting. Later, Mary Ellen sold the ads for the Center’s newspaper. She and LaMoine would play a Mozart piece for four hands that Mozart and his sister had played, pulling it off as a demonstration of how Mary Ellen’s teaching could pay off. The orchestra included players of all ages, from kids to senior citizens.

The Center used its wall space to display work by quilters and visual artists. Writers could meet to share their works and read them to audiences, who also received a printed publication, “Soundings”,  that included their writing. Christmas concerts included audience participation singing and the Lou Jappe installed pipe organ, as well as seasonal readings. Shakespeare would have enjoyed seeing some of his works performed in the Center’s space, as well as plays by Moliere.

After mentioning so many facets of Mary Ellen’s contributions, not to mention her three successful daughters, several of LaMoine’s published love poems spelled out how he felt about his many-faceted wife.

Many facets. Step back and one finds a beautiful jewel. Because of who Mary Ellen was and how she was, and because some facet, and perhaps many, touched the lives of so many people, many of who gathered last Sunday, we can thank her and thank God for her time among us. Because of who she was and how she was, our little worlds have been better.