Stuff in the Basement

This has gone on far too long, but I've never really thought about it chronologically, so I hope you'll bear with me as the story un...

“Who knows the power of your anger?   For your wrath is as great as the fear that is due you.” Psalm 90:11 I’m going to go to m...

With no more than a month left in my college education, the national draft lottery now behind all of us--February 17 was chosen 187th--and a...

I didn't intend for this to be so long, but it's now running on its own fumes. I wanted merely to explain how it is to live here in ...

How ruby-red was the Siouxland world in which I was living back then? Red red, bloody red red. If any of my profs were Democrats, they certa...

In November of 1964, I was firmly under wing of my dad's politics. I don't remember Mom talking much politics. I don't know that...

Yesterday Senator Ron Johnson said his Democratic opponent, Mandela Barnes, believes there's something called "institutional racism...

Today my wife and I will go to a wedding rehearsal. Two kids I met just yesterday will exchange vows, and I’m conducting the ceremony. I’m...

  Okay, okay, that inscription might be a hair vainglorious, but you can't blame the citizens of Ripon, Wisconsin for staking a claim, b...

We spent a day with our grandson last Saturday, a kind of end-of-childhood thing, I guess, although I'm not the one to take a guess at t...

The bison on the Woodbury County Courthouse It's not his fault he's cracked. That's just time and maybe the fickle prairie seaso...

There were littler ones, babies even, hard as that is to consider. It looks to me as if the lineup in this proud old photo is  just the scho...

  They were, all of them, heroes of my childhood. I'm not sure that I thought so when I was in sixth grade, but I knew that there were t...

  “I lift up my eyes to the hills—where does my help come from?”  Psalm 121:1 I wasn’t sure where my daughter’s question came from, and I wa...