Adventures Out the Door

Here are the few things that have been happening around my door and city.

I came home the other day, drove into the garage, came up on the elevator with my mind on sending an e-mail to friend. I walked across my apartment to the computer, looked out the window and couldn't believe my eyes. In about three minutes, five fire trucks had arrived.

There were no sirens when the fire trucks came. They stayed parked outside for awhile, and then the ones in the intersection above left. A few minutes later the others left.  For awhile I thought perhaps someone had fallen into the river or someone had tried to take a boat on the river and had great difficulty. However, there was no movement to the river. So, it's a mystery to me what this was all about.

Another view came the railroad tracks.

The drag line moved along the tracks digging up something and putting it into the train cars. Since I wasn't here last year at this time, I don't know if this an annual need or if the hard winter caused more debris to drop down the bluffs and needed to be cleaned up.

But the most important adventure occurred on Saturday night. It was the time for the President's Lecture, and this year she invited Michelle Norris, who some of you may recognize as a reporter from NPR. During the 2008 election time, she and Steve Inskeep did a powerful series on the role of race in the election and in our larger society. After that, she started to do forums all over the country. During a visit home -- which happens for her to be Minneapolis -- she stumbled onto stories from her family that she had never heard before. She realized these stories tell us powerful things about our culture. (By the way this is my interpretation. Norris is an eloquent speaker and she says this much better.) For example, she knew her neighborhood in Minneapolis was always integrated, but she didn't understand until she was an adult that the neighborhood was integrated because her parents integrated it! There are other stories that tell us about the times in our country through the stories from her family and these stories are very powerful. Her book is Grace of Silence: A Memoir. I surely urge anyone who reads my blog to get this book and read it.

 

Today the noon phone calls began again alerting us to the flood news. The second crest is on its way. Today I also had another phone adventure. I had to call LOT and change my return flight from Poland from July to August. I suddenly realized I was about one sentence into the conversation when my brain alerted me to the fact the agent had said, "Dzien dobry" and I had even noticed, just went head with my conversation. When we were finally done, I closed with "Dziekuje bardzo." The agent paused for a moment and then said, "Dziekuje." At least from the Polish I've learned in eastern Poland, that is not quite the right response!