I wish I could sing or play an instrument, because I’d like to make a recording of the alternate lyrics I made up for the classic Dionne Warwick song “Don’t Make Me Over,” written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David. I may have been inspired by the version of “Old Town Road” about Saint Paul’s […]
I spent half of a recent Saturday outside helping some friends do yard work in what most would call a working class to low-income neighborhood of Saint Paul. It’s a pretty diverse place, too, with U.S.-born black, indigenous, and white people living side-by-side with immigrant families from many countries. My friends’ duplex apartment is on […]
When you door-knock for your favorite City Council member, you recognize what it’s like to be a pedestrian on our residential streets. I’ve done it a couple of times on a weekend day in the past month or so. As a gardener, I notice the plants in people’s yards and find they tell me quite […]
One of the things you get to see when you walk instead of drive is tile entryways to commercial (and sometimes residential) buildings. I’ve been collecting photos of tile for a while, mostly from somewhere other than the Twin Cities. Some of the designs are decorative only, as in the first row of images. Semi-floral, […]
Too often it is framed as either/or. In a world where climate change is bearing down on us, why not both?
Today I took the A Line rapid-transit bus south on Snelling, meaning to get off at University and catch the Green Line train. But I wasn’t paying attention and missed the stop at University. That meant I had to ride the bus all the way down to Marshall Avenue (which is about twice as far […]