Category Archives: Life Purpose

Pictures at an Exhibition (of My Life)

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I am drawn to bookstores and concert halls more than to art museums; to music and literature more than so-called fine art.

Still, given that one of my close friends is a longtime docent at the Minneapolis Institute of Art (MIA), I have learned over the years to appreciate paintings, especially, for their micro and macro characteristics — their ability to evoke personal, sometimes painful memories and to illuminate a perspective beyond my own.

Little Girl (1922) by Otto Dix
Free Falling into the Cosmos by Cara O’Connell

More than other visual art forms, paintings inspire me to interrogate my past and present — the skinny girl I was, the old woman I am becoming — and pose questions about a future that already is proving to be more enriching, difficult and diverse than the narrowly white, middle-class, comfortable environment in which I was raised. Paintings inspire me to learn, to stretch and grow. They help me ponder a life that reaches decades back and point me toward an indeterminate amount of time forward.

The Awakening

My mother hauled us kids around to museums and the theater when we were sometimes too young to appreciate or comprehend the experience. She figured the exposure would be good for us; plus, being a native of Chicago, she yearned always to escape our small town. I did a version of that awakening in 2007 with my younger son, Nate, when he turned 12, arranging with my docent friend, David Fortney, then in training for his role, to conduct a tour of the art institute for 12-year-old boys.

Imagine our surprise (not) when the tour began with a naked male statue, Doryphoros (Roman, 1st century BE), muscled and marbled but missing a left forearm. Other highlights of the tour included surprisingly small battle armor (how our species has grown!) and MIA’s post-World War II Tatra T87 from the Czech Republic, a luxury car designed in 1936 whose front end resembles the earliest Volkswagen Beetle.

These days, I notice how much more diverse the Minneapolis Institute of Art has become, from the offerings in its bookstore and the ages and ethnicities of its clientele to the artwork displayed in its hushed, white-walled galleries.

I was introduced to Indigenous artwork in a variety of media through my friend’s book tours, which MIA hosts monthly, of The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich (Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2021) and Horse by Geraldine Brooks (a favorite of mine this year).

On a MIA book tour for the novel Horse, docent David Fortney talks with participants about “Four Days and Four Nites, Ceremony” (2020) by Jim Denomie. An exhibition of Denomie’s work runs through March 24, 2024.

That long-ago museum tour for 12-year-olds left an impression on my son, now 28, because he joins me on these book tours, self-designed by each guide. Widely read in many genres and cultures, Nate has encouraged me to move beyond books about racism and the Black experience (White Fragility, So You Want to Talk About Race, How to Be an Antiracist) and instead read fiction by Blacks and other people of color. That has me currently working through the lyrical, unpunctuated prose and contemporary Black British references of the novel Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo (winner of the Booker Prize in 2019).

Honoring and naming a Dakota man who was hanged: One Who Stands on the Earth.
These plaques were displayed in a gallery of Native artwork at MIA in April 2023.

Lately, it is Indigenous lives and cultures that I want to explore, perhaps because I am from the town where 38 Dakota men were hanged, in the presence of their families, on December 26, 1862. When I was in school in Mankato during the 1960s and early 1970s, we learned nothing about the mass execution, lessened by three dozen pardons but ultimately approved — the order issued — by Abraham Lincoln, the president we herald as the “great emancipator.”

A Dog’s Life

My childhood family always had pets — dogs, specifically — and my husband and I continued the tradition with our own sons. Pixie, Gretchen, Skip, Lucy: Those beloved family members came to a humane and sad but dignified end until Griffin, the miniature schnauzer my husband adored and carried around on his shoulder as a puppy. My husband, David, called Griffin his grandchild (we still don’t have one), sometimes telling acquaintances at the dog park, “I’m surprised I don’t sit at home and knit him sweaters.”

Griffin was killed at age 6 in November 2018, hit by a car outside a rural house we were renting in my hometown to attend my stepmother’s funeral. The dog was killed instantly, from what we could discern, with no visible damage or blood on his body. “He died immediately, and we found him,” I tried to reassure my husband. To no avail.

David cried — shuddering, back-heaving sobs — as our older son dug a hole in the frozen dirt of our backyard. Then they wrapped Griffin in a sheet and laid him to rest in the cold ground while I watched from the kitchen window.

You can’t replace a “heart dog,” my sister Penny likes to say. But only a month later, I convinced David to adopt a puppy from Standing Rock in the Dakotas, via a neighbor who rehomes dogs from Indian reservations. Gabby is an athlete, a wary and sometimes standoffish girl who barks at any person, dog or school bus that dares to venture down our side street.

She looks like a smaller, tamer, better-fed version of a dog I saw pictured in the Raphael Begay photo Rez-Dog (2017) at MIA’s special exhibition “In Our Hands: Native Photography, 1890 to Now.”

“Rez Dog” (cropped) by Raphael Begay, 2017

“This is a post-butchering celebration and gathering with my family at my late grandmother’s home,” the artist wrote in the statement hanging alongside the photo. “There, I saw this dog dragging a sheep’s head that we left outside. . . . I look at it in the same light as how we treat our unsheltered relatives. There’s this sense of concern, empathy, but there is a lack of responsibility or commitment to help.”

Women’s (R)evolution

The last several times I have visited the Minneapolis Institute of Art, I have returned again and again to a portrait on the third floor of a stern, stylish woman sitting upright in a chair, her face turned to the artist — almost daring him to objectify her.

It stands in stark contrast to the reclining nudes and bare-breasted ogling of traditional, centuries old western European art, which grows tiresome for me in the way that its countervailing fascination with royal propriety and the ruling classes turns off my older son, Sam, a Democratic-Socialist.

“Christy White” (1958) by Alice Neel
“Temma in Orange Dress” (1975) by Leland Bell

The painting that speaks to me is Temma in Orange Dress (1975) by Leland Bell, one of several portraits of his daughter by the largely self-taught painter. I perceive it less as a father’s flattering gaze than a reflection of women’s emerging independence — two years after the U.S. Supreme Court passed Roe v. Wade in a 7–2 vote (inconceivable today) and at a time when women’s labor force participation rate exceeded 46 percent, more than 10 points higher than in 1965, a decade earlier.

Unlike the uncertainty and timidity of Christy White (1958) by the feminist portrait artist Alice Neel, which hangs nearby, Temma projects strength. To me, she reads as a career woman, who pursues her own identity and financial means.

When I showed “Temma” to my younger son, I told him the painting reflects my career-woman phase. “Oh, you mean the 40-year phase?” he shot back. And yet much as my sons have seen me, and I have wanted to see myself, as Temma — fierce and forceful, a woman to be reckoned with — at heart I am more “Christy White.” Fearful, insecure, wrestling to this day with whether I walked the right path in a society that forces women to make hard and heartrending choices.

“The Barn” (1954) by John Wilde
“Think Long, Think Wrong” (2021) by Avis Charley

I walked up to “The Barn,” a 1954 painting by Wisconsin artist John Wilde, to see the rendering of a naked woman breaking free, and then a guard pointed out the face of a man watching in the lower left-hand window, a child’s wagon on the ground nearby. Some time later, I came upon a color-soaked painting, “Think Long, Think Wrong” by Avis Charley, of a fashionably clothed Native woman waiting in the sunshine for a bus.

“I create images that I wish I would have seen growing up,” said the artist’s statement. This painting, she explained, “is about putting aside distractions and staying present.” Aside from the art itself, that’s the beauty of an art museum: It helps us reflect upon our lives and values in a calm, quiet place, and assemble disparate images into a cohesive whole.

Stay Cool, You Don’t Need Air-Conditioning

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At night during the summer, my husband sets up a big metal box fan — yellow, decades old, with three speeds powered by three dusty blades — and blows it out the west-facing window in his upstairs den. Then he sucks in the cooler evening air from outdoors by closing every window in the house except three in the bedrooms and one in the living room (to please the dog who commandeers the couch).

This is our old-fashioned, climate-friendly version of air-conditioning, along with ceiling fans in the kitchen, the main bedroom and my home office, a north-facing spare bedroom where I sleep on hot nights because of the bed’s access to the open window. When we first moved to this old house in 2013, we occasionally used a portable air-conditioning unit in the front bedroom, but it was noisy and blocked the light during the day and kept waking me at night every time it clunked off and on. So, we hauled the dripping unit out to the boulevard, where someone quickly claimed it.

For them it was a find, like the perfectly good snow shovels I lugged home from an alley last spring. For me — raised in a household with open windows and floor fans, back when air-conditioning was a nonessential for the middle class — the portable unit symbolized the hedonistic tendencies of our self-absorbed culture. Doing without it was one small way to side with Mother Nature in a battle she inevitably will win.

Billboard at the corner of Grand and Fairview avenues in St. Paul

Where comfort counts

Air-conditioning is a luxury that the vast majority of Americans now judge to be a necessity, and far more of us, especially in Minnesota, could live without it. As a person who tolerates the heat fairly well, in part because I have trained myself to do it, I would welcome not having to shiver in every bus, grocery store, movie theater and office building — enduring this artificial, overcooled air because some HVAC company tells me it is civilized. A symbol of prosperity and progress.

That progress, unfortunately, is costing the planet — fueling the very climate crisis from which air-conditioning helps us hide.

Ninety percent of households in the United States have air-conditioning, compared with 60 percent in China, 16 percent in Mexico and 5 percent in India; versions of those data, from 2016, were cited again this July in news alerts about the record-breaking heat worldwide.

Indeed, air conditioning represents one of the most insidious challenges of climate change, and one of the most difficult technological problems to fix. The more the world warms, the more we’ll need cooling — not merely for comfort, but for health and survival in large parts of the world.

James Temple, MIT Technology Review, September 1, 2020

Summer in the city

On a cool Sunday afternoon, a comfortable 74 degrees, it’s easy to forget how daunting July 2023 has been. More than 90 million Americans were under heat alerts earlier this week, according to PBS NewsHour. The month itself was the hottest on human record.

I read about farmers trying to keep their animals cool in rural Minnesota; about a man who died at a bus stop in Phoenix, Arizona, where temperatures climbed to over 110 degrees for 27 days in a row; about wildfires blazing in Mediterranean countries. Closer to home, I smelled acrid air in my own yard from Canadian wildfires hundreds of miles north and saw more watering bags going around the thin-trunked saplings that the city planted on boulevards to replace sturdier trees lost to Emerald Ash Borer.

But still, I went outside during our recent record heat wave. I like the heat. I’m a lifelong Minnesotan. We wait for months, from late October until mid-April, for warm weather. Even on the afternoon when it was 96 degrees, with an excessive heat warning, I stood by my decision not to cave on air-conditioning, to cave in to the popular notion that we couldn’t live without it.

Front-page news in the Minneapolis-based Star Tribune on July 28, 2023

Years earlier, when we were selling the family home in Northfield, I wouldn’t budge when the Realtor said the house would move more quickly — and fetch a higher price — if we installed central air. My family had lived comfortably in the house for 20 years. “There’s always one hot week in July when we hang out in the basement,” I told her. “Otherwise, we have plenty of cross breezes and ceiling fans. Find buyers who are green.”

And that’s the point. Minnesotans readily adapt to changing seasons. We think nothing of living differently in the winter: reading more, wearing layers of clothing, making stews and soups, staying home at night with Netflix. Similarly, we can find novel and healthful ways to stay cool, if we resist or cannot afford the immediate relief of air conditioning.

I sent my husband, who is less heat-tolerant than I am, to see Oppenheimer one evening this past week at our historic local movie theater. The next day, he wandered through the cool galleries at the Minneapolis Institute of Art.

There is a long history of industry-funded “deflection campaigns” aimed to divert attention from big polluters and place the burden on individuals.

Michael E. Mann, Time magazine, September 12, 2019

I chose to embrace the weather, as I do during the winter: biking to my errands with an extra side of water and sunscreen; reading on the porch at night and watching vehicles sealed up like tombs against the heat. Moving more slowly, giving myself permission to push away from the computer and relax, to call a friend. Like a snow day in July.

This heat wave, now over, was of our own making: our driving, our air-conditioning, our consumerism, our conveniences. Personal habit change won’t solve the climate crisis, it is said. But right here, today, surveying what little I can control: I see it as the only choice we have.

Take a Book, Share a Book: Make a world of difference

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A transplant to the city after raising my sons in a small town, I measure the quality of my urban neighborhood in ways that a Zillow description likely would overlook. Shoveled sidewalks in the winter. Tended flower and vegetable gardens during the summer. Friendly people, of course, and Little Free Libraries.

The dinosaur decorations and reachable door handle make this box accessible for children.

The half-dozen free-book boxes that I encounter on my milelong walk to work speak to me of neighbors who not only like to read — a value instilled by both my parents — but who are generous and want to share ideas.

Owning and maintaining a Little Free Library is a rewarding hobby for parents who want to see others enjoy the books their children have outgrown or aging former English majors and empty nesters like me who have reached the point in life where our reading years are numbered. Why not pass along the many books I have collected over the years and ones that I will never read again?

In that spirit, here are rules — or tried-and-true suggestions — for launching your own public book box.

Rule 1: Make your book box official

“Little Free Library” has become a generic, all-inclusive term for any wooden or plastic box attached to a stand that holds giveaway books on a public sidewalk. In fact, just as we say Jell-O when referring to gelatin or Kleenex when we mean any brand of facial tissue, Little Free Library is a trademarked term, dating back to 2013. It also is a nonprofit organization and a brand that sports its own tagline: Take a Book. Share a Book.

I was put off, initially, by the expense of ordering a ready-made box or a build-your-own Little Free Library kit from the website; costs start at $260 for a box of unfinished wood and an additional $80 to $180 for the ground post. Instead my husband, a handy guy who likes to build things, constructed our book box out of salvaged lumber and a cottage window we were replacing in our house.

I didn’t realize that purchasing a structure from the Little Free Library organization would have netted a range of benefits — including access to a 13,000-person private Facebook group for Little Free Library Stewards and the option to buy deeply discounted books to keep the mix of offerings fresh and appealing. More important, the purchase would have enabled me to support a global organization, based in Hudson, Wisconsin, whose mission includes “championing diverse books,” “removing barriers to book access” and supplying stocked Little Free Library boxes to “high-need areas,” including Native communities.

Registering your homemade book box as a Little Free Library gives you a range of benefits and helps support literacy worldwide.

The board of directors models the diversity that the organization promotes and includes literacy experts, academics, and nonprofit and business leaders — book lovers, all.

Clearly, my $400 to $500 investment in official Little Free Library materials would have been money well spent. Turns out it wasn’t too late. After poking around the website, I figured out how to register my homemade box with the organization, which will put me on the Little Free Library map and get me a numbered “charter” sign for what I will soon, officially, be able to call my Little Free Library.

Soon to be an officially chartered Little Free Library, the book box that my husband built (painted to match our house) has become known in our neighborhood for its well-organized and diverse array of books.

Rule 2: Keep it up

I use metal bookends to keep the books upright in my library, and I straighten the books every day, sometimes rearranging them — a la the endcap displays at either end of grocery store aisles — to draw people’s attention to a good read that apparently has been overlooked. (Who wouldn’t benefit from Anne Lamott’s Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith, for example, especially if they’ve already read Traveling Mercies?)

Because my library looks tended and cared for and ripe for exploration, it has become a true library, a neighborhood resource, a place where people stop by not only to find a good read but to donate good books: Behold the Dreamers by Imbolo Mbue and Small Great Things by Jodi Picoult were two recent contributions that I previously had enjoyed.

Messy shelves do not invite browsing.

I dog-walk through my neighborhood every morning, often deliberately coaxing my willful beasts down the blocks where I know Little Free Libraries stand. I’ve lost count of the number of times I have strolled past boxes that look appealing — their design mimics the architecture of the house or they’re painted a cheerful array of colors — only to find empty shelves, a disorganized mass of magazines or a shelf stocked two-deep with books so I can’t possibly see the contents while holding dog leashes.

So, I move on. Any library that is poorly stocked or is a public trash can for materials the owners otherwise would toss is not worth repeat visits.

Rule 3: Curate your selection

I have taken religious tracts (My Utmost for His Highest and Investing in God’s Business: The “How-to” of Smart Christian Giving) to book boxes at the Episcopal, Catholic and United Church of Christ churches in my neighborhood. I reluctantly recycled a Bible that was falling apart — holding off for a day to be sure it wasn’t a knee-jerk reaction to the forced churchgoing of my childhood, where I was always bored and eventually came to wonder (and then resent) why both God and the ministers were male.

A neighbor once teased me about “censorship” after I posted on Facebook about recycling a Women’s Health magazine (“My Little Free Library, my rules”) showing an impossibly thin young woman and the headline: “Bikini Body Now.” It isn’t censorship, I shot back, it’s called curating — and, in fact, such discernment is essential to maintaining some measure of quality in the materials you showcase outside your home.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is little-free-lib_1.jpg
This donation got tossed into my recycling bin. I spent too many years struggling with media-driven rules about women’s bodies to inflict this on a neighborhood girl.

I’ve rejected and recycled waterlogged novels, books with the covers held together by rubber bands, advanced uncorrected proofs, a dated state bicycle map, a Lutheran hymnal, romance novels, cookbooks from the ’90s and academic texts. A Little Free Library cannot be a dumping ground, especially if you want your neighbors to see your box as worthy of the literature and thought-provoking nonfiction — like Caste by Isabel Wilkerson, novels by Russell Banks and Jane Smiley, The Art of the Wasted Day by Patricia Hampl — that they have read and are paying forward.

A retired high school English teacher down the block makes that clear with this handwritten sign on her book box: Please respect the spirit of this Little Free Library and only put books in here that you have enjoyed and you believe someone else would, too. Do NOT put in books that you merely are trying to get rid of.

Rule 4: Commit to the investment

My younger son recently brought over a bag of books that he no longer wants; those are stacked in a corner of the living room, waiting for winter to pass and more walkers to be outside so we can refresh our book box selection. I recently brought home another copy of The Late Homecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir by Kao Kalia Yang that I grabbed from a table of free books at the university where I work.

That now sits on a kitchen shelf my husband and I have devoted to books-in-waiting for the Little Free Library. Goodwill stores have proven to be a worthwhile place to shop for $2 hardcovers and paperbacks for a buck.

Literacy is literally everywhere: This unregistered book box (not officially a Little Free Library) is at my favorite dog park, Battle Creek, in the Twin Cities.

During the pandemic, people have been raiding some of the book boxes in my neighborhood — “Little Free Library Shenanigans” was a recent headline on Nextdoor.com — and likely trying to sell the books at used bookstores. The problem is pervasive enough that it merited a story on the Little Free Library website, where Half-Price Books has declared it will never knowingly buy books filched from a free library.

Once my charter membership is official, and I become a “steward” of the Little Free Library ethos of generosity, I can order book labels or a rubber stamp that says, “Always a Gift; Never for Sale.”

That speaks to the true purpose of a public library and to the trust — in our neighbors, in all of humankind — that we Little Free Library stewards aim to instill in our communities.