Staff & Contributors

Harry Drabik

Content By This Contributor:

Town Halls

Harry Drabik

A contemporary role for town halls is their place in grass roots politics. This is an old term but in some instances explains the drift of people going in and out during meetings.

The first flush of green

Harry Drabik

But, saying an ore boat looked like a log lit up on the water isn’t a particularly successful because nature provides so few examples of thousand foot long electric logs.

Counting Days

Harry Drabik

Seen at its start, looking forward fifty years seems an impossible long time with nothing ahead but time tick-beating monotonously into an unseen and unseeable future.

The Return of Scents

Harry Drabik

The waking of spring is a return of scent replacing the chill of winter air made bone dry by sub-zero wringing everything from it.

The sprung of spring is everywhere in the air and frost

Harry Drabik

Much as, and I truly do, I dislike the cool, wet, muddy weeks of a traditional North Shore spring its chilly side has the great advantage of retarding the twin nemesis (nemi?) of black fly and tick.

More thunked thought

Harry Drabik

Do the rights of a supremacist need as much protection as those of a pacifist? Do the aims of a supremacist represent the same danger as those of a pacifist?

Some thoughts I have thunk

Harry Drabik

*Why is it that people with little to contribute are often the most insistent to do so? Why do persons with nothing to say take so long to get the job done?

Suitable Subject

Harry Drabik

Going through household things (a task many of us have done or face in future) after mother’s death I found a small suit of clothes that set off sharp recollection.

Local Colours

Harry Drabik

But as spring-number-whatever-it-will-turn-out-to- be came and went I was reminded of footlockers and simpler times in my life that are not without some merit in review

Spring’s Sad Sweet Sugars

Harry Drabik

Each of us is her or his own sad sweet tale of springs past and futures our roots have yet to touch. My summer used not to begin until I packed what I’d need into a second hand footlocker and left for work.

The Neanderthal Metaphor

Harry Drabik

Metaphor or figure-of-speech is a sign of possible complexity of thought. Its use does not guarantee so much as a smidge of critical intelligence, but the odds favor a broadened scope of understanding

Bad Boys

Harry Drabik

Accompanied by a disappointed look, a reprimand was recently given me for not more often writing about “nicer” things. Accustomed to such remarks, I call them the “hanging wish.”

Out of our minds

Harry Drabik

My recent return to the Iron Range took me through terrain roughly called “south of Aurora” which prompted a recollection.

The end of an era

Harry Drabik

It was on the streets of Hoyt Lakes I mastered that bike and without, I can claim with some prideful recollection, too much need of mercurochrome to patch up my wounds.

Hail to the chef

Harry Drabik

There are nice parts about living well up the shore where I’m far away from the larger world (no offense to those living in it). I call it the scenery effect.

Don’t blame me

Harry Drabik

The bulk of what I gathered up was slyly tossed out. Its object of keeping me out of trouble done, the stuff could be thrown. When I was younger we’d gone on a car trip to California.

Winter Wonder Land

Harry Drabik

Like me, I’m sure you have friends or know people who were happy as wedding guest at the free bar when all the weeks of subzero were on us.

The cold hard ground

Harry Drabik

Those are some of the cold and hard realities of living here. It’s not that I really want to go somewhere else, but this winter and last have made me begin to wonder if there might not be a place a little less challenging.

Let’s play a game.

Harry Drabik

A place where the game of suspending judgment seems unlikely but it used in 3D full color versions is politics.

New Year Resolves

Harry Drabik

I’ve reached a stage in life where instead of needing to swear off some ill or excess habit, I can only fondly wish I were capable of performing those offenses and transgressions.

Dear Ol’ Dad

Harry Drabik

In metaphor, things take on wonderful voice. The opposite of wonder I recall from a poem where the wanna-poet used “sno” to replace “snow” to be more visually perfect with his clever rhymes using go, fro, slo, kno

The Season

Harry Drabik

The tradition and transformation of Saint Nicholas is almost as amazing as the Christmas season itself. Nicholas was a Greek bishop fairly early on in the history of Christianity.

Really Good Bad Idea

Harry Drabik

It should have and could have worked, but unless I wanted far more cost and effort than the project was worth, the only rational choice was STOP NOW. WALK AWAY AND DO NOT RETURN.

New Tradition

Harry Drabik

Do you know anyone who has spent their way to prosperity? I don’t, but I know a few who got to bankruptcy proceedings that way, which I don’t believe left them feeling at all prosperous

Increased Erotic Pleasure

Harry Drabik

I wonder how many readers are old enough to recall the time when the warm (a relative term similar to near and distant in cousin) weather in the northern states was also carnival/circus time. What you experienced would have depended on where you live

The old slow-down

Harry Drabik

We are well and truly into the old slow-down, when a tourist is scarce as a pin cherry blossom. Like leaves fallen and scattered, they have blown, leaving memories and assorted local shops with excess inventory to clear out in a Thanksgiving sale

Hunting Season

Harry Drabik

Sure as the first frosts and flurries, hunting season arrives with flashes of blaze orange on heads, in the woods, and filling the front seats of tightly packed pickup trucks

More Poly Ticks

Harry Drabik

Rural or urban, there are community-oriented folk. I like them. They give the best entertainment per time spent. It is utterly and absolutely inspiring listening to a community organizer spiel off the profound litany they picked up at jargon school.

Stuff

Harry Drabik

I’m sure you have patterns or predilections. We all do. One of mine (that drove my parents to anxiety) was a regular habit of “adopting” (sorry, but that’s the most useful term I can think of) additional parents in the form of interesting older coupl

Funeral

Harry Drabik

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve gained more experience in the funeral line. Before I reached my mid-teens, a wake/funeral scared the beejeebers out of me.

November is for sautéed chicken & escargot.

Harry Drabik

There is far more nuttiness loose than we are able to use. It is a bumper crop, and did it not so frequently turn ardent and lethal in its convictions, it could be seen as an appealingly human trait

Naked Politics

Harry Drabik

Not long ago someone reminded me of the not so long ago days when boys lined up for swim class wearing nothing but an expression. Standards have changed considerably, with the public being much more skittish (or is it fearful?) about group nudity.

Church Food

Harry Drabik

A spiritual diet may not put on the pounds, but consumed to excess it has a known history of making people fat-headed or obese with fanaticism.

Three out of four

Harry Drabik

I can’t say whether it is ironic or a simple example of natural justice that going south is not a natural option for me.

Who took my percolator?

Harry Drabik

If you expect or require a car key does that put you in a fossil generation with all the hope of the Dodo bird? Maybe so, but I feel sorrow for any young person of today having to ask a parental person for the code.

Seventeen and seventy

Harry Drabik

I had a birthday recently. By the title you can rightly guess the day’s number. Whether or not I celebrated the day depends on your idea of celebration. If celebrate means recognize, then I celebrated the day as well as anyone could.

Oh Baby Oil

Harry Drabik

If, however, baby oil calmed children, I’d think a business supplying it in volume to teachers, etc. would thrive. Imagine the educational advantages of non-traumatic tranquilizing of the young in classroom lots.

How I learned to kiss

Harry Drabik

They took front and rear seats. Sue-Sue and I were fit (to save money) in the trunk. With no room to move, I didn’t. She made up for my stillness.

I Vow to Thee

Harry Drabik

Nothing will ever convince me the bagpipes were not made by a willful teenager bent on punishing stubborn parents who surprised everyone by liking the sound and then forcing the poor kid to play and play until today we’re at Amazing Grace.

Ain’t Never Easy

Harry Drabik

The quirks of rural life are hard to define in a fair manner. The divisions (they are as clear as the vehicles people drive to church) fall cleanly along lines of property, which everyone has to some extent but seldom with equal degrees of management

Community

Harry Drabik

Attitudes about community can be inclusive or they can be divisive by drawing insider-outsider lines. Part of the issue from a local perspective is seasonality of income or earning opportunity.

Of Vultures and Voles

Harry Drabik

The more depressing side of politicking is, in my perhaps too optimistic view, the number of people unwilling to speak up and out. A great many of the public are quite adamantly sane about not wanting the trouble and confusion of political life

I’ve no answer

Harry Drabik

If you ask people for their honest opinions, you’ll sometimes get far more than you ever expected. I, for one, had NO idea there were so many dark and devious conspiracies in the nation and on the planet.

When’s the last time you considered clones?

Harry Drabik

You would be correct to wonder how the title line connects to a reflection on religious faith. Most who know me would (I suspect) gladly and heartily say I’m not what they and many others think of as religious.

After the Fourth

Harry Drabik

I can’t say if it’s personality, habit, or some mix of both, but it seems as if a good part of me was destined to live the tradition of a fairy tale character.

Winter and the Fourth of July

Harry Drabik

The old-timers up here (all of them walked barefoot to school going uphill both directions all winter) had not a few quips about northern summers and winters.

Winter Survival & History & Stuff

Harry Drabik

Winter planting in wet winter (a.k.a. gardening in June) calls for special cultivation techniques.

An Uncommonly Bright Idea

Harry Drabik

Compared to world events and religious prejudice masquerading as justice, a little thing like a cold, wet, non-summer becomes a lot more tolerable.

Where did it come from?

Harry Drabik

I was not prepared for the result and am not yet reconciled to it. Going from Polish to German wasn’t too huge a step. They are neighboring countries, after all.

Worm Tales

Harry Drabik

Lacking perspective, a worm can only plug on in hope. Its long history of racial survival doesn’t have a memory of paved parking lots as unfriendly to earth burrowers as boiling water is to shrimp.

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