105: Minneapolis UnConvention

Yesterday: driving home, spotting someone dressed as the Grim Reaper, the American flag slung across their back, the pole carried as a rifle might be carried. I had forgotten the Republican Convention in town (though tonight, the police cars lined the St Paul exits in more flare than usual, the news on The Current that a significant protest was diffused, as you can see by the photo below).

Photo: David Jules, Star Tribune

Today: reading Walt Whitman by the Washington Avenue Bridge (which, by the way, has been closed to pedestrians on the outskirts, so no photograph of the tree with the shoes just yet, and strangely, a year and a month after the 35W bridge collapsed, and many years after I traversed its outer edges, peering down into the Mississippi below).


Today: The first class meeting of my Intro to Poetry class. Oh, the range! It was so warm in there, despite the goosebumps that rose on my walk in to campus this early afternoon. Oh, and I hate syllabus days; as a student, as an instructor. I just want to write and discuss poetry. As a student. As an instructor. And we did, in the second, sweaty half. And oh, how good it was. I think I glimpsed a very good semester ahead of me. (That, and the poetry workshop and all else that involves being an MFA candidate.)


The highlight of my day: my husband, one of the busiest and most work-addicted people I know, took time from his day to come to the art museum at two in the afternoon, tucked his car into a garage with an hourly rate, just to see me make a fool of myself as students wandered by. I cannot begin to tell you what that kind of support meant to me, how I love him for standing there, arms folded, taking a few photos with his camera phone, linking his arm in mine as we listened to the other readers, smiling and nodding as I later showed him my cubicle in the room that smells like a barn. He is a good man, that husband of mine.