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Tonight’s WPCA-FM story broadcast was I Loved That Bike! At the time I recorded that story at WPCA-FM with Bob Zank at the controls, the story had yet to be published. You can find it now online in Some Short Stories and in print in the paperback Six Short Stories. One of my sons terms it “a horror story” but, really, it’s a story about an obsession. The guy just loved his motorcycle. There were two women that loved him, too and it’s the interplay that makes the story. And, no, I never lusted nor owned a cycle but I’ve known guys who did and I’ve known guys whose bikes cost them their lives.

I’m writing this while in the throes of moving to our new home in Osceola, Wisconsin. As we move and pack boxes, we are downsizing, something we could have done over a few years but somehow life gets in the way of those kinds of things. Marina says we are hoarders. Now, that’s a horror story! But everything we own has its story about our lives: when it came to us and how, where, how to value it and have we found it useful. So does anyone really need or might be interested in the several drafts of one of my novels? I doubt it. The wood stove liked it, though.

We have a deadline to be out of this home and it is feeling urgent. Tomorrow my son John comes to help me heft things that are too much for me to handle alone and son-in-law Mark will do the same the following day. And the day after that I have a funeral to do for Ted Smith, a former pastor and the closest thing I had to someone being a close friend. Like many men, I have few close friends. I miss that but it can’t be forced and now it’s a little late in life, which consists of a lot of “what’s this?” and “where’s that?” from now-blind wife of almost 60 years. That could have been me and I thank God for that, but I wish, also, that it had not been her, either.

Marina’s fall that tore loose muscles, tendons and ligaments in her rotor cuff prompted a decision we had been postponing and reluctant to make: we needed to be closer to help in the future. Further, if I had been the person incapacitated, Marina would have been hung. Where could she go? Assisted living facilities are full. A senior apartment complex in Osceola has a waiting list of more than 200 people. A nursing home and with a seeing Eye Dog? We don’t want that. Even further, I am not ready for living in one room.

So we bought a stand-alone townhouse in Gateway Meadows, a development (the kind we swore we’d never live in) on the eastern edge of Osceola, a town we know from having lived there for a dozen years. Marina had her counseling office there and walked to her office and to the Aquatic Center with both Gretel and Andy, her guide dogs. I served two terms as president of the Osceola Seniors at the time we built the civic building and had to  stand firm for our own space in the building. Our future home is unfinished as I write this (yes, it is NEW, which Marina thinks shows God’s sense of humor to give a new home, Marina’s first ever, to a woman living her last years of life) but is supposed to be ready by our closing on May 29th.

On top of the new house, our present home on the edge of Bone Lake, sold for the asking price in two days. Since then, we have been packing and packing and packing and packing and I’m sick and tired of packing stuff. Along with packing boxes, we have been downsizing. Since we can’t get into our place for another two weeks, I’ve been using a storage garage as a “staging” area for some things that may, eventually, find their way into our much smaller space. Our present house is deceptively large. Tonight, I began the task of taking things off the walls in my office. My office is well equipped and is the best home office I’ve ever had. I will miss it. One item that went into my scrapbook tote is a folder with pages of slots for business cards. Going through it took me back to memories and of people. The cards ranged from folks in Washington, D.C. with impressive official jobs to international organizations to more local business heads to graphic artists, photographers, videographers to. . . . Well, you get the idea. It reminded me that I ran hard. I got around. I always ran hard, no matter my calling. Even as a pastor, with less than full time pay, I was able to succeed in print with articles and monthly columns in two magazines, as well as pieces in other publications. Yes, I ran hard.

But today I’m feeling my years. I’m not running hard, just trying to move us from one place to another. I find I’m moving like an old man: short steps, slower steps, a bit halting as I move around the house. In Osceola today, I tried to lengthen my stride as I walked from the car in the parking lot to the grocery store door and to the gas station’s cash register. I had to be conscious about it. And I don’t like it.

Another damper was a brief conversation with Ted, a friend, now consigned to hospice care. I connected with him by phone at Regions Hospital in St.Paul. He is very weak. If we were to drive the 2 hours to Regions, we would have no more than five minutes before he would be too exhausted to continue. As a pastor, I’ve seen this scenario before. Our moving schedule will not permit a visit in St.Paul; perhaps he will be moved closer to us. Ted also served as a pastor and has understood the calling, so visiting over coffee periodically always has been enjoyable. Pastoring can be a lonely calling. You can’t have special friends in a congregation, even though there are people you relate to more naturally the others. Other pastors? I’ve found many with monstrous egos and great insecurity, which has been disappointing. That was not Ted. I’ve been asked to do Ted’s funeral. I’ll quote in it a line Ted used once: pointing to the casket, Ted said “He’s not here. He’s with the Lord.” It’s a great and simple summary of a Christian’s life.

Marina and I took a break on Saturday to join what turned out to be a mob of people celebrating the marriage of Troy and Jeunai Davidsavor. It was an outdoors event on the grounds of their home that featured several varieties of their BBQ’d chicken, a band, and a host of familiar and unfamiliar faces that reflected the variety of people known by the couple. It was a good to get away from packing boxes for a bit!

Oh, coming up on June 2nd, with apologies from the staff at WPCA-FM, my short story readings will resume at 6 p.m. on 91.3 FM. It turns out that station boss Bob Zank had fallen and broken a hip. In the uproar, LuAnn, who runs the station with Bob and is married to the guy and wound up doing unscheduled nursing, blew by inserting my story slot into the pre-programmed evening broadcasting. No apologies were needed; the omission is understandable and, as I’ve said often over the years WPCA has broadcast my stories, I am grateful to them for the opportunity few writers ever enjoy.

Part of this move is that our pontoon boat is going to the Camping and Education Foundation. That ends another chapter in my life. I’ll talk more about that in the next blog.

And did I mention the reading at River Stone Book Shop? We had the usual turnout for story readings at 6:30 Thursday nights: six people. That’s OK with me. I like reading my little tales and I’ve delivered “the whole load” to a single person, who happened to be the Librarian at the Chisago County Library in Lindstrom, Minnesota. My high turnout was 60 people at a fundraiser for St.Croix Festival Theater. Maybe I like reading the stories because I know the author?

After 13 years of living on Bone Lake and having turned a cabin into a home, Marina fell and ripped lots of things in her left rotor cuff. That forced a decision we had been trying to avoid for several years: if something like that were to happen to me, as a deaf-blind person Marina would be hung. There is no place to go these days. Assisted living is full. The senior apartments in downtown Osceola have a waiting list of more than 200 people. It might be possible to get into a nursing home but with a Seeing Eye Dog? And I’m not ready for one-room living. So we bought a free standing brand new town home in a development (the kind we swore we’d never live in) on the east end of Osceola. It’s within 10 minutes of Hannah, our youngest daughter, and half an hour closer to Britta, our eldest. Marina could be there with outside assistance that is closer than it is to our lake place.

Our daughters spotted a potential neighbor problem with the first place we looked at, so our chosen home is located between a home with gardens and rainwater collected in barrels for the gardens (a sign of the kind of people we are likely to like very much) and a young family on the other side. We met the Mom and she seems quite nice. Those discoveries lifted our spirits. The house is scheduled to be finished and ready for us the end of May. Our home has a closing date of June 22nd. It sold in two days for our asking price to a guy who wanted to get out of The Cities and who works from home. Bravo to our super real estate agent Sarah Cook!

I will miss the lake. I will miss cutting and splitting wood and hauling it to the house for the wood stove. I will miss niceties like Georgetown Township’s maintenance guy, Boyd Fritinger’s  thoughtful installing of a “Watch For Pedestrians” sign at the corner of our road and the County Road. That was done without being asked. Try that in a big town! I’ve had the privilege of chairing Georgetown’s election caucus which, to me, is the most basic building block of local government and of our great national experiment in self-governance. I will miss mowing both my own property and our shared lake property. Our home boasts an array of flowering bushes, bulbs, and perennials, as well as many maple, elm and oak trees.  Half a pond extends into our property and hearing the frogs is fun. Birds? We’ve had them in flocks. Marina’s first Seeing Eye Dog, Gretel, is buried in the back alongside Thomas, the cat, who “supervised” Andy’s feeding at close hand. Surprisingly, Andy didn’t mind his pal’s observing one bit. Oh, and Harold W. McCarthy is buried out back, too. His remains were just left in our Luck rental house, so we gave him a good Christian burial. You should see the eyes of people when I tell them I hd to evict Harold from the basement of the house. And it has been a place where Marina could walk safely because there has been little traffic on our dead-end road. The road has some  elevations so it has been a good place to walk but also get your heart rate up, too.

We know Osceola and there should be plenty of positives for us there. But it’s the last stop, or at least it better be because we have a very demanding move for everything in this house. It’s not just moving, it’s downsizing. It involves selling things, donating things, and tossing things. It’s not my idea of fun. But Marcie Marquardt is loaning us her enclosed trailer and the great people of Wolf Creek United Methodist Church have offered to join our children and grandchildren in caravanning stuff from Bone Lake to Osceola.

A brief reminder of two things: May 5th sees the change of my short story broadcasts from 7 p.m. to 6 p.m. on WPCA-FM (91.3). I’m reading a couple of stories and will sign books at River Stone Book Shop in downtown Osceola (205 N. Cascade, right near the stop light).

AND I’m tickled to tell you that Gretel and Andy, God’s Gift; The Lives of Two Seeing Eye Dogs, has been seeing lots of purchases and readers on line. Marina’s book is outselling all of my books and I’m delighted. Bring the readers!

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.