Staff & Contributors

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.

Memorials

Harry Drabik

The concept or reality of sacrifice would have been more personal and real had my father served. But even in “total war,” as was the Second, only about 10 percent of the population serves.

There are two kinds

Harry Drabik

I much prefer the attitude of “Live and let live” to one of confrontation and contention, but being too “Live and let live”-y can get us into trouble if we’re too damn nice to ask why we’re digging all the person-sized holes we’ve been asked to dig

Condi

Harry Drabik

Do you get the impression I find this pretty damned silly? I can grasp how high-spirited students might not understand the difference between actual indictment and an accusation.

I’ve killed Bambi

Harry Drabik

Some might prefer to call it lively weather, but I prefer the simplicity of good weather said in hopes it might someday (as my parents wished of me) rise to expectations.

View over the big lake

Harry Drabik

Unable to tell what it was, I got out Father’s old binoculars. I’d used them on the cutter for confirmation. In this case they were basic to figuring out what the shape was that rode so distinctly in a slow-moving

Spigot Season

Harry Drabik

In past years I looked forward to spigot season. Lugging 40-plus gallons of sap from widely dispersed maples into a boiler needing round-the-clock watching might give a gallon of syrup if you’ve also observed other steps to get there.

Combat

Harry Drabik

There are different ways to view the pieces, but I see the combat stage set for Afghanistan and Iraq back when Carter was in office. Remember him? Like most of us and the West in general, Carter had no concept of what was in store when Iran’s Western

The Razor Blade of Life

Harry Drabik

Flummoxed because I’d stopped on gravel to avoid this sort of thing, I was doubly stumped when after a 70-foot sleigh ride the Avalanche stopped with sudden scrunch of gravel and abrupt halt.

A day is simply not enough

Harry Drabik

In nature, organization is real enough but not always convincingly so (especially in the minds of fools). In ways that would seem to the orderly-minded a bit messy.

Drat this weather

Harry Drabik

It is tempting, very tempting, to go on about this particularly nice winter. But like talk of medical ailment, what can one accomplish by talking about it? I have a hip that howls and a bladder that enjoys midnight strolls.

Frozen Corn

Harry Drabik

A possible explanation was that the seed and plant selling companies were located far south and had no notion of northern winter extending into an annual gestation of nine months that produces a sudden gout of black fly, tick, and mosquito

Awfully Nice

Harry Drabik

I think our cultural habit of looking to nature for perspective and balance is part of what makes Minnesotans nice.

Things not connected

Harry Drabik

Not long ago I heard one of my neighbors mention her son (in his mid-teens) reaching success as a surrogate parent for having taken care of a pretend infant.

Didn’t see it coming

Harry Drabik

If you’re like me you didn’t see it coming. I could in fact say I had no idea the state of Kansas was under attack from something other than tornados or the corn weevil.

Harry doesn’t want to live here any more.

Harry Drabik

It’s not that I am sincere, but even a faked effort requires a deal of kneeling to appear genuine and convincing.

Life on the rock

Harry Drabik

Near daily I pass Five Mile Rock east of Grand Marais. To show its size I took a few shots, but decided against their use. In telephoto the rock looks too large while in normal view it’s hardly noticeable against the expanse of lake.

More Deviltry

Harry Drabik

You’d not be alone wondering why I so often return to the theme of church/state separation. Why don’t I write about pretty, happy things like seagulls wheeling above sparkling ice floes?

Great Satan

Harry Drabik

Is there any devil in you? I think most of us don’t have to reach too far to find a side of ourselves bearing some devilish potential. There are some who wish it wasn’t the case that I took so often to playing devil’s advocate.

The darndest things

Harry Drabik

It is not easy to parse these things out. I am quite often stymied at tangles of issues. I’ve frankly no firm grasp just how a new Y M Christian A in Grand Marais escapes separation of church and state concerns when built on public land with collecte

Slip-Slide Through Winter

Harry Drabik

In the years when I was better able to get out and enjoy the snow my view of winter was without complaint.

North Shore Notes

Harry Drabik

Holiday Images