Holy Week. As our lives become more secular and separated, the name doesn’t seem to have as much meaning as it once did. Not long ago all of Saint Paul shut down on Good Friday to celebrate the holiday that is central to Christian faith. The passing of this holiday into another optional day off for those who can afford it may be disturbing to people who value the old ways, but a little perspective shows that the time itself was always defined by others even before we learned how important it is to get along in a diverse world.
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Category Archives: People & Culture
All about the standing-upright chimps that really love to talk about themselves.
Census
The chairs were arranged around a central point at the coffee house. In each of them sat a person more likely to keep their nose in a cup of steaming coffee in a kind of ritualistic way, as if to ward off the late March chill, than anything else. If they knew each other, they’d be more likely to be chatty and bubbly, even this early in the morning, so it was obvious from the whole arrangement that something was up. I couldn’t help but listen in when someone rose to speak.
When materials were handed out and the speechifying started, it became obvious. These were Census workers, learning the details of their new trade.
Magnificat
This Sunday, 21 March, is the 325th Birthday of Johann Sebastian Bach. If that seems like a long time ago, it was. Long enough, in fact, to take a very lively and real person and turn his work into a kind of holy writ and the man himself into a deity. But this personality who can speak to us through so many centuries was, like so many legends, even more than his myth – he is an example. His birthday is as good a time as any to understand the simple gifts he keeps giving us.
St. Patrick’s Day
This piece is a repeat from two years ago – I don’t have anything to add. The re-run gives me more time to enjoy the day. Sláinte!
Good people go to Heaven, but the Celts went everywhere. There isn’t a corner of the globe where you can’t find us if you look hard enough. Nations as far flung as Canada and Australia are largely Celtic in origin, and the majority of those Celts came from Ireland.
Our people have wandered the earth like almost no other, and for one day we all return home with the help of a hyphen. Many of us become Irish-Americans or Irish-Canadians on Saint Patrick’s day when any other day American or Canadian would be enough. We drink up well in pubs, cheer on the bagpipers, and think back to what our ancestors must have gone through to get us where we are.
Smell of Spring
Spring has come to Saint Paul – or so we’d like to think. One day above 60F doesn’t make a Spring, but it certainly has the snow melting, the water flowing, and the potential for a serious Mississippi flood rising. It’s awfully early to call it for real, given the lack of a vivid green budding smell in the air, but a nose full of memories knows what is on the way. Damp and slightly rotten has a smell of life all its own to those who let the stories flow.
Barataria - The work of Erik Hare 