It Snowed and Snowed and Snowed

Snownomi

We've a little screened dining porch off our kitchen. Here's the way it looked this morning before daylight.

The weather forecasters up here like to be dramatic and they are often throwing out gruesome scares about tornadoes, flooding rains, fierce winds and mega snowstorms that never happen. Like Chicken Little, we don't pay much attention to them anymore!
by Charlie Leck

The weatherman started warning us sometime yesterday that a big one -- maybe resembling the blizzard of 1888 or the giant snow of Halloween in 1991 -- was on it's way. A few of my friends like to make fun of the forecasters (doomsdayers, they call them); yet, once in awhile they've got to get it right. They nailed this one.

I awakened long before daylight broke here and peered out the windows and had to open a door for the dog, who was desperate to get outside. The winds howled and blew cold snow inside and against my face and bathrobe. To the left you can see how the Christmas decorations on our front stoop looked when I pried open the door.

The dog was howling to get back in within 30 seconds.

I can hear, in my mind, readers in South Carolina, Georgia, Florida and other southern states, wondering what the hell I'm still doing in Minnesota at my age and stage in life. Only sometimes I wonder that, too. This is one of those mornings.

There's hours and hours of work to do to clear the sidewalks and the long driveway out to the road and then the roads and trails around the farm. It's back-breaking work and exasperating with the way the winds are right now. Clear the snow away and then watch the wind blow it back in.

It's 19 degrees out there right now and the forecast is for a low of 7 degrees below zero tonight.

As I write this little and terribly unimportant blog, this is the way it looks on the deck outside my treetop study. The wind is really picking up. Anne is outside, trying to get the chains on one of the big tractors so she can start blowing snow off the roads. I'm useless to her right now. A week or so ago, my right hip just sort of gave up. I had the left one replaced approximately 6 years ago. I knew that the right one was going, but I didn't expect it to turn from minor to major so very quickly. One thing I can't image doing this morning is shoveling and plowing snow. I can barely sit down here at my desk without the pain savaging me. I moving toward the replacement surgery in January. I can't wait.

I've been on the phone, trying to get one of our workman over here to help out. He didn't sound enthused but said he's on his way. On his part, it's an act of employment preservation. He's got to do the work that I would normally do. I'll give him a bonus and make a smile come to his face.

A good friend is flying in this morning from Brazil. He's in the air right now. I wonder if the plane will be able to land or if it will need to divert. Welcome home to Minnesota! We're to have dinner with him tomorrow night. It's been set up I'm sure, so he can show off his tanned and darkened complexion.

In the meantime, I'll just think in envy of my brother down there in Florida and many of my golfing friends who've moved into their winter quarters in Florida, Arizona and Southern California. I've resisted such a winter residence because it seemed to me that the adventure of a Minnesota winter was not to be missed. This morning I'm beginning to wonder if I might not be crazy. A round of golf in Florida this morning sounds like a mighty fine way to spend a winter day.

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Whopper of the Year

Wouldn’t you suspect that our own Michele Bachmann has a shot at winning the competition for the Liar of the Year in 2010?
by Charlie Leck

Hey, all you Minnesotans and Michele Bachman fans all over America, keep your fingers crossed because the Congresswoman is in the running for PolitiFact’s 2010 Lie of the Year. My heart’s a-thumpin’ and my corpuscles are a-jumpin’ as I await the results. The St. Petersburg Times (and it web subsidiary, TampaBay.com) makes this big announcement annually. There is a readers’ choice winner and an overall winner who told the lie “that played the biggest role in the national discourse in the past year.”

Go take a look at the candidates this year and, please, vote for our own Michele Bachman for that readers’ choice award.

For the overall win, I think Charlie Rangel is probably running in first place with his comment after being found guilty by the House of Representatives of ethical violations of its code: “I’m glad for the wording of it because clearly the wording exonerates me.”

Yet, maybe Michele has a chance for her comments about the expense of President Obama’s trip to India – comments she continued to make time and time again even after it was pointed out to her that the numbers were gross exaggerations.

Congresswoman Bachman said, “The President of the United States will be taking a trip over to India that is expected to cost the taxpayers $200 million a day.”

Here’s an account of Representative Bachman’s lie along with an explanation of the truth.

I voted for our Congresswoman. I’m hoping you will, too.

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The Republican Party or the Tea Party

Here in Minnesota we find the Republican Party, at the moment, acting like the Tea Party or, perhaps, like a lynch mob.
by Charlie Leck

The local public radio station reports that the Minnesota Republican Party is punishing three of its grand heroes from the olden days. What a bunch of jerks!

In a 59-55 vote last Saturday the GOP’s State Central Committee banned 18 tried-and-true Republicans “from party activities” (including the 2010 Republican National Convention) for supporting the Independence Party candidate for governor in the just passed election. Among the dozen and a half are three near-legends of the Party – former governors Arne Carlson and Al Quie and former U.S. Senator David Durenberger.

Our state’s Republican Party is now under the control of an interesting guy named Tony Sutton. Sutton is claiming loudly that the Independent Party candidate tore a victory from the Republicans, and Tom Emmer, and gave it to the Democrats (Mark Dayton). If that’s true, well okay! However, I sat in a couple of meetings with crowds of big-time, big-supporting members of the Democratic Party who also said they were leaning toward voting for the Independent Party candidate.

My old man always told me that it was important to vote your conscience. Don’t follow any party blindly. When your party goes and backs an idiot, you’ve got to step back and think seriously about not supporting him. That’s what happened when the Republicans endorsed Tom Emmer. On the day they did that, when I heard about it in a radio news report, I called a dear friend here in my town, who knows Emmer well (as I do), and expressed my utter disbelief.

“He’ll never get elected,” my friend said, “so don’t worry about it.”

Well, Tom Emmer came within a half-percentage point of victory. Thank goodness for those who bolted the Republican Party, refusing to vote for such a dumb duck. Among them were plenty of friends of mine. A few of them, like George and Sally Pillsbury, extraordinary citizens of our community with plenty of smarts, stood bravely up and declared their inability to support such a guy. George is one of the 18 who was censured by the party last weekend.

If the Republican Party had any guts, it would censure people like U.S. Representative Michel Bachmann for being such an idiot and send her on over to the Tea Party where her followers really hang out.

I worked closely with Arne Carlson in my younger days. He started out in politics as a Democrat. As a matter of fact, he was on Hubert Humphrey’s staff for a time. Arne’s feet have never been welded into any political party’s framework. He’s an open and free thinker and he couldn’t imagine Tom Emmer actually being the governor of our state.

My old man also liked to say that “one shouldn’t cut off one’s nose to spite one’s face.”

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Wasting Your Time

I did you a great favor! I am not going to waste your time.
by Charlie Leck

Sometimes you just have to know when to tear it up and throw it away! I did that with this morning’s blog. And, it was a great favor I did for you.

You know, it wasn’t that tearing-it-from-the pad-and-crumpling-it-up kind of motion. Remember when we did that so many years ago? No, it was the simpler and less satisfying motion of sliding the mouse up to the little x-mark at the top right corner of the word processing application and clicking on it. A question flashes before one’s eyes on the monitor screen: Save current document? Yes? No? A simple click on the no-button, and the crap one was producing is gone forever – exactly to where it ought to go.

You should be proud of me for not wasting your time.

I was going to whip on the Republican Party a bit this morning. I mean really put a woopin’ on ‘em! What’s the use? They’re holding the trump cards right now and they’re going to win the big pile of chips that are out there in the middle of the table – they get to keep the tax cuts for the very richest people in the nation. I have a feeling that it will be a while before we can again look upon a winning hand.

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America is Leaking Badly

Around the world, nations are shaking their collective heads at an America that can’t seem to catch a break these days and the old ship of state is full of holes and cracks!
by Charlie Leck

Now the title at hand here is very interesting. Does that mean that America isn’t doing a very good job of leaking? Or would that be expressed as America is Leaking Poorly?

For three or four days I’ve been trying to write something significant – or, if not significant, humorous – about the great Wikileaks phenomenon. I worked through a couple of drafts and ended up hitting the ubiquitous delete button on both of them.

Then I read the Tom Friedman column on the subject, The Big American Leak [4 Dec 2010], and asked myself why I was bothering. (Did I ever tell you that Friedman is a Minnesota boy? Yup, he is from right here in Saint Louis Park, an inner-ring suburb of Minneapolis. It’s an interesting community that produced an extraordinary amount of national talent, including, but not limited to, Al Franken and the Cohen Brothers. There’s a story about St. Louis Park and why it produced so many bright, talented people, but I’ll leak that story another time.)

(And also parenthetically, did I ever tell you about one of Kurt Vonnegut’s coolest fictional characters, Kilgore Trout? If you haven’t read Breakfast of Champions, you’ve missed one of the very best novels in American fiction. Continuing on parenthetically, Trout emphatically referred to mirrors as leaks. It’s because he believed they leaked to us images of an exactly parallel universe that lay on the other side of the mirror. So, when we look into a mirror, what we see, looking back at us, is our exact duplicate being in this coexisting world. When Trout heard someone at the bar excuse himself by saying he was “going to take a leak,” old Kilgore thought the fellow meant he was going to steal a mirror. So goes your literature lesson for this morning.)

When I looked into the leak this morning, I was not terribly pleased with the extraterrestrial idiot who looked back at me. Both frightened and bored by the fellow, I promptly told him I needed to go take a leak. I’ve not looked back since.

Where was I? Oh, yes! Thomas L. Friedman, the St. Louis Park boy, had some interesting things to say about the WikiLeaks cables. In a nutshell, the thesis of his column can be summarized like this: “America is leaking power.” Think of leverage as another word for power; for later he says:

“Geopolitics is all about leverage. We cannot make ourselves safe abroad unless we change our behavior at home.”

What he’s getting at is that America cannot really bite the hand that feeds it. We depend too much on Middle East oil and Asian industry and wealth.

“Think how different our conversations with Saudi Arabia would be if we were in the process of converting to electric cars powered by nuclear, wind, domestic natural gas and solar power? We could tell them that if we detect one more dollar of Saudi money going to the Taliban then they can protect themselves from Iran.

“Think how different our conversations with China would be if we had had a different savings rate the past 30 years and China was not holding $900 billion in U.S. Treasury securities – but was still dependent on the U.S. economy and technology. We would not be begging them to revalue their currency…”

What America is leaking, says the St. Louis Park kid, is not oil or money, but leverage! He’s right, you know; but you had to be there to understand.

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Message from Brittany

A lovely email arrived yesterday from Brittany and cheered me. It also made me yearn for the beauty of the French countryside and the civilized ways of the French.
by Charlie Leck

Cold has gripped Minnesota. It’s arrival in these harsh winter months is usually a challenge for me to which I rise and find in the encounter some awesome kind of beauty and thrill. Then a message and some lovely photos arrived from Brittany and the cold here seemed harsher as I thought of beautiful France. Though it lies north of us, when you look at those longitudinal and latitudinal lines that circle the global map, the mysteries of the earth keep it, compared to Minnesota, reasonable, mild and lush there throughout the year.

The peninsular coast of Brittany is spectacular and, sometimes, breath-taking, but I like most the inland towns and villages in the province. It’s a lovely part of the world and a drive through it brings constant gasps and surprising delights. It’s the home of the extraordinary Mont St. Michel to which I’ve paid a few visits and which I find peaceful and charming each time I go there – even when there are thousands of tourists filling the streets and making their way to the top of this natural wonder and sacred, Christian place. I'll never forget the day when I took my sister, a deeply devout Roman Catholic, there to see the place. The old girl, who normally struggled to walk, found her legs and climbed the big, long hill and took in every shop and delight along the way up to the grand church.

I’ll not write here a travel promotion. That isn’t my intention. It’s more the peacefulness and casual nature of Brittany that I want to picture for you. In Rennes there are two peaceful museums that I can bring back to mind. Le Musee de Bretagne et le Musee des Beaux Arts are both enchanting and inspirational places to visit. One is a cultural museum that explains the history and evolution of Brittany through artful displays of costumes, furniture, porcelain and art. The other is a museum of fine art that shows off a fine collection of paintings by greats such as Rubens, Picasso and George de la Tour. Rennes is also home to the grand Cathédrale Saint-Pierre. It is one of the most important pieces of architecture in all of France and it is a beautiful place to visit.

The war was fought over this land in the 40s and many Americans and Brits lost their lives in this region. You sense that as an American and feels the spirits of the downed soldiers when you travel here. The great cathedral of Rennes was heavily damaged in those years and you can find other scars both along the coast and inland.

However, it is difficult to find anything but delicious and stimulating food in Brittany. Every little town boasts of delightfully good places to eat. If you have the luxury to be able to travel slowly in a place like this, you can find nearly every town enchanting and many of them have restaurants, museums and chateaux worthy of the time you spend in them.

The photo in the heading of this blog was sent by Laurence to show me where they’ve settled in on an assignment for a time. Laurence and her husband, my young cousin, Patrice, are painters. Patti has established an enormous reputation for himself and his work is spectacular and considered important. He does a great deal of art restoration work in the grand chateaux of France and also creates new pieces for the redecoration and remodeling of these homes (such as the one he and Laurence are doing here, in the home pictured above. (The photo here shows Patrice and Laurence at work.)

And, as always, their three beautiful and adventurous children are with them. They’ve all traveled widely, to thrilling places like Morocco and Egypt and India – and, yes, of course, to Minnesota just this summer (talk about thrilling places). The kids, from 8to 13, are “World-Schooled” as Laurence calls it. They are carefully taught by momma and papa in the arts, languages, history and sciences. They take their training seriously and work hard at it, but they also know how to breathe-in the very beauty that constantly surrounds them and they are playful, cheerful and filled with humor. I count them as a very special and inspirational family.

While they were here, I wanted to introduce them to all of America and to every friend I have. I wanted to constantly boast about them and point to them as examples of that to which humans can rise. The children romped about the land like explorers who had to visit every corner of the property and every building to learn what happens in this place and why it is so important to us. Most visitors to our home come and go and say the polite and expected thing about their visit here, but this French family dug in and learned about our place. I believe they visited every animal that lived here – the cats, sheep, horses, llamas, dog and mule. They identified birds and listened at night to the hooting of the owls and the chattering of the raccoons in the woods.

I made visits to museums, parks, restaurants, shops and lakeside beaches with them and learned so very much about so many things – but mostly about enjoying life itself – while they stayed here with us.

When they departed our piece of the world and moved off to Montana – and then to Washington and California – they left a feeling of emptiness behind them. Their joie de vivre had been enchanting and even penetrating. They were so French! Yet they are American, too, and proud of that. The children were given citizenship here while they visited in Montana and they proudly sent back messages of great glee about it. Really, they are citizens of the world and how I admire them and miss them.

Their little message came from Brittany this morning and it made my day. Indeed!

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