Now & Then . . . Or: Vive la difference!

BIG EEK writes: “As a former Canuck, I take great pride in the fact that it was a fellow Canadian, Dr. Naismith, who invented the game of basketball at a YMCA gym in one of the Springfields down here. (Bulletin Board interjects: Springfield, Massachusetts.)

“Now that the time for March Madness has arrived, I am squirreled away here at the nursing home trying to catch as many women’s games as I can.

“What about the men, you might ask? ‘Oh no,’ I say. ‘That’s a different game. I call it “Dunkers and Junkers.”’

“If I have a chance, I want to watch Caitlin Clark and Iowa against Nebraska or LSU. It is wonderful to watch the skill and courage of these women playing ‘Basketball’ the way Dr. Naismith envisioned it.

“Say, eh!”

Keeping your eyes open

ORGANIZATIONALLY CHALLENGED of Highland Park writes, most economically: “Subject: No caption needed.”

Fun facts to know and tell

AUNTIE PJ writes: “For those of the BB readers who remember Howard Hughes, Bemidji native Jane Russell, and the old commercials for bras that lift and separate, here is a fun bit of trivia:

“Howard Hughes was a man of many talents, including aerospace engineering and being a film producer and director. Jane Russell was a talented singer and actress. Hughes hired Russell for her film debut in ‘The Outlaw,’ a 1943 Western. Russell was quite a buxom lady, with 38-D’s, and Hughes saw there were problems with properly costuming her because of her ‘uniboob.’ Being an engineer, Hughes was able to design a bra that lifted and separated Russell’s bosoms. Per the official description, the bra had structural steel rods sewn into each cup, allowing the bosoms to be separated and pushed upward. Though Russell never wore the specially made bra in the film, it was later exhibited in a Hollywood museum.

“The design led Playtex to manufacture and sell a similar bra, with the tag line ‘lifts and separates.’”

Lost . . . and found!

Here’s LIZA THE LIBRARIAN (via Tia2d): “Oh, the adventures of a new library. When I started, they gave me a bag of labeled keys to everything in the building. Some of the keys were labeled ‘Mystery Key.’ What did they do? I don’t know! It seemed magical, so I kept them.

“A few weeks later, I found an old Ziploc bag with more keys. The bag had an aged note that read: ‘Keys, Important.’ None of the keys went to any of the doors or fixtures in the building that I could find. I told the staff that I would reward them with chocolate if they could determine where these keys came from. No one could figure it out.

“Last week, when I crashed the library computers, I decided that I needed to move the refrigerator to a different outlet. Wanna guess what I found behind the fridge? More keys! And again, we had no idea where they came from.

“It was truly mind-boggling, but also magical. There is nothing better than a good library mystery!

“Today, while searching for the missing weather radio, I opened an obscure cabinet and found a box of door knobs! Most of the mystery keys went to these knobs. Now the keys and door knobs have been reunited, and once again everything is right in libraryland.”

Hmmmmmmmm

RUSTY of St. Paul: “Subject: Time flies.

“A refrain I hear often from fellow retired people is: ‘How did we ever have time to get stuff done when we were working?’

“I get it — as, in my older age, I eat breakfast, read the papers, check my email, do some chores or work on a home project, eat two more meals, and next thing you know it’s bedtime.

“When I was younger and worked 45 hours a week and co-raised two of my wife’s kids (I think they are mine, too, but whenever she speaks of our children, she says ‘my kids’) and still had to fit in all the stuff needed to keep a house running, I got it done. I was tired, but not wiped out.

“I have read that time speeds up as we age. When we are very young, our brains are bombarded with images that we have to process and store, and this slows time down. As we age, we receive fewer images (or don’t need to process so many, as we already have received them), so time goes by more quickly.

“An illustration of this is: I just took my evening pills out of my weekly pill organizer and have only two days left out of my organized seven-day supply. But WAIT! I just filled my organizer for the week two days ago!”

Immutable Laws of the Universe

From BOB WOOLLEY: “In any sort of public forum, when a member of the audience begins a comment or question with ‘I’ll try to make this brief,’ they will not make it brief.”

Joy of Juxtaposition

CHERIE D: “Subject: A heartwarming coincidence.

“A few days ago, I spoke with a woman, Janelle, who was interested upon hearing I was born and raised in St. Paul. Her reason? She was curious if I knew about a murder in 1937, that of a young woman named Ruth Munson. I didn’t.

“Later I emailed my friend Fred, a retired St. Paul police officer who now works as historian for the police department. Not only did he know well about the Ruth Munson murder, he had just finished helping local author Roger Barr research the murder for his book about the incident, ‘Murder on the Hill.’ Via the research, Barr was able to reach a solution. The book is being published by the Minnesota Historical Society and will be available in April.

“I told Janelle right away, and she, as I did, pre-ordered a copy of the book. It was then that Janelle told me she was friends with an elderly member of Ruth Munson’s family and the book would be a godsend and offer closure for the family, who have never forgotten Ruth.

“What a heartwarming coincidence.”

Our living (and/or dying) language

Twitty of Como: “Subject: Our evolving language.

“I need to go back to school and relearn the English language.

“I’ve noticed the word ‘binary’ popping up in conversations more and more recently — in media, on social networks, and in general conversations — in a usage I’m not familiar with.

“When I worked in computer design many years ago, ‘binary’ meant, for numerical purposes, ‘base 2’ (as opposed to base 10 or base 8) as in ‘one and zero.’ It was the language of computers, so to speak. It didn’t represent a choice, as I recall — except, perhaps, between which of those two digits is going to trigger a particular computer command as designed by the programmer.

“But lately it’s being used in ways seemingly odd to me. Kwesi Adofo-Mensah, general manager of the local football team, in talking about the loss of Kirk Cousins to Atlanta, was quoted in the Pioneer Press: ‘This sport isn’t such that we can just say, on a binary basis, “I want that player.”‘

“Help me out here, please. What did he say? What purpose in that sentence does the word ‘binary’ have? Binary? I’m supposing he meant something along the lines of a ‘choice’ between Kirk or no Kirk. But I don’t know.”

BULLETIN BOARD SAYS: We don’t know, either — but your guess seems as good as any. Let’s just hope that, as a binary matter, Sam Darnold is better than any alternative — or will constitute half of a fine binary “quarterback room” with a first-round draft choice as yet unchosen.

The Permanent Motherly/Sonly Record

The Doryman of Prescott, Wisconsin: “Subject: Walk-off home run.

“Don’t get me wrong. I loved my mother. (You can almost taste the ‘but’ coming, can’tcha?)

“Her word was final. Her advice was narrow. She wanted her almost-only child to live a perfect, comfortable life. Go to college, she said; go to college, I did. It was her way of keeping me both out of Vietnam in the 1960s and away from working with my hands — ‘like your father always has had to do.’

“As it turns out, I would have made a much better (and happier) plumber, welder, or furniture maker than being a craftsman trapped in a salesman’s body.

“Her plan for me didn’t stop at career choices. It extended to life partners as well. Her prodding choice for that marriage, although loving, was premature, and eventually outgrown in six years. However, it did produce two of the best children and, thus, two of the best grandchildren imaginable. (Thanks, Mom.)

“I never realized until much later that mothers have batting averages.”

Live and learn

From Al B of Hartland: “Subject: I’ve learned . . .

“You’ve been married for a good spell of time if you can finish your spouse’s sentences before they’re started.

“There is no education in the second kick of a cow.

“You’re never too old to say ‘Horse’ or ‘Cows’ when you drive past them.

“Never keep a sledgehammer and a computer in the same room.

“The Chinese have an entire language made up of tattoo designs.”

The sign on the road to the cemetery said “Dead End”@@

Email from DONALD: “Subject: An optimistic outlook.

“This is another sign in our laundry room:

“‘I Intend

“‘To Live Forever.

“‘So far so good . . . ‘”

BAND NAME OF THE DAY: The Binaries

Your stories are welcome. The address is BB.onward@gmail.com.

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The night sky is a grab bag of constellations of all shapes and sizes, with civilizations all around the world adding their own spin to the patterns of the night sky. Almost 100 years ago, astronomers worldwide got together and decided on a standard set of 88 constellations to avoid confusion. Here in Minnesota and Wisconsin, we can see about three-quarters of them throughout the year. To view the ones we can’t usually see, we have to travel south to overcome the effects of the curvature of the Earth. Most names and best-known tales about constellations have roots in Greek and Roman mythology worldwide, especially in the Western hemisphere.

At least once a month, I like to feature a particular constellation. Most of the time, I put the spotlight, or should I say the night light, on one of the major constellations like Orion, Gemini, or Ursa Major, the Big Bear, but I also want you to get to know some of the less familiar deep track constellations.

Despite the less-than-friendly climate, bright stars and constellations will reward you on most clear winter nights. The best of them are in what’s called the winter oval or the winter hexagon. My name for it is “Orion and His Gang” because the constellations that surround the great hunter with his star-studded belt are nearly as dazzling as Orion himself.  The major players are Gemini the Twins, Auriga the Chariot Driver, Taurus the Bull, and Canis Major and Minor, the big and little dogs of the winter heavens.

(Mike Lynch)

One of the minor players in Orion’s gang is literally underfoot of the great celestial hunter, Lepus the Rabbit. As you can see in the diagram, it’s a real stretch to make this disjointed collection of faint stars into a heavenly hare. If you’re ever out stargazing with me and you can honestly tell me you see a bunny below Orion’s feet in the southwestern sky, I want to party with you!

You can see about one or two of the faint stars that make up Lepus in urban- or suburban-lit skies, but to really see it, you have to be out in the countryside, and even then, it’s a stretch of your eyesight and especially your imagination to see the celestial rabbit. One thing is for sure, though, whoever came up with the name Lepus (pronounced Leepus) for the heavenly rabbit had a sense of humor.

In mythology, Lepus the Rabbit is a fun little story. It reminds me of the classic Bugs Bunny-Elmer Fudd cartoons. Just like Elmer, Orion was a pretty good hunter. Orion could hunt down any beast on his island, no matter how large or ferocious they were. But, just like Elmer Fudd, one beast constantly eluded the mighty hermit hunter and took great pleasure in harassing him. It’s Orion’s version of Bugs Bunny, Lepus the Rabbit.

Not only was Lepus a normal pesky rabbit that ravaged Orion’s Garden, he would constantly taunt and tease Orion during his hunting adventures, jumping on his head or biting the mighty hunter in the butt just as he was about to launch a spear at a wild boar. Lepus also liked to leave little round souvenirs on the floors and countertops of Orion’s kitchen. He grew to hate the nasty little hare, but like Bugs Bunny, Lepus was too clever and fast to get caught, but Orion was determined!

Orion never realized his dream of eliminating Lepus because Zeus, the king of the gods of Mount Olympus, did in Orion himself. Zeus found out that Orion was fooling around with his daughter Artemis, the goddess of the moon. Actually, it was Artemis who pursued Orion as she deserted her task of guiding the moon across the night sky. Her duty was to guide a team of flying horses that towed a giant flatbed chariot with the moon strapped onto it. She kept seeing this nocturnal hunk of a hunter pursuing his prey night after night and had to meet him. So, on a nightly basis, she halted her horses in mid-flight to have her clandestine meeting with Orion. Artemis enjoyed her nightly hunting adventures; they were having quite a time!

Zeus disapproved of his daughter fooling around with this mortal roughneck hunter and put out a hit on Orion. He sent a giant scorpion who attacked Orion during his daytime slumber. There was a tumultuous battle between the combatants, but the giant scorpion fatally bit Artemis’s lover.

When Artemis discovered her dead boyfriend, she lifted his body into the heavens and magically transfigured it into the constellation we see in the winter heavens. She wanted to be able to see him every night as she guided the moon across the sky. She also placed his hunting dogs, Canis Major and Canis Minor, up there with him, along with that pesky rabbit Lepus tormenting him even in death!

Solar eclipse is just over two weeks away

It’ll be quite a show on Monday, April 8. We won’t have a total eclipse in Minnesota or Wisconsin, but less than a day’s drive away, you can be in the path of totality. Extreme southern Illinois and southeast Missouri will be the closest places to witness totality, an experience you’ll never forget! Go for it! The next total eclipse in the lower 48 states in the U.S. won’t be until 2045

Mike Lynch is an amateur astronomer and retired broadcast meteorologist for WCCO Radio in Minneapolis/St. Paul. He is the author of “Stars: a Month by Month Tour of the Constellations,” published by Adventure Publications and available at bookstores and adventurepublications.net. Mike is available for private star parties. You can contact him at mikewlynch@comcast.net.

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Earlier I’d begun to imagine the lake on my side, a protective demigod, the queen herself, adorned with thunder, stepping between me and those who’d have my skin. So much for all that. Deceived in what I felt, and scared, and it seemed very hard that I would find the Slates, locate the precise hidey-hole Lark and I had sheltered in so long ago, only to have it occupied by enemies and have the lake turn every bit as hostile as they were. — from “I Cheerfully Refuse”

“This is the first time I felt sad to finish a book. I had such a good time writing it,” Leif Enger says of his new novel, “I Cheerfully Refuse,” a hard-to-define story that’s part sea adventure, part thriller, with a little magic along the way. It’s a love letter to bookstores, to reading, and to hope in a dark world, told in the lush prose we expect from the author of “Peace Like a River,” his 2001 debut novel that some readers consider their favorite book.

(Courtesy of the publisher)

Set in the near future in a broken America, the novel’s protagonist is Rainy, a big bear of a guy, a bass guitar player who lives with his wife, Lark, on the shore of Lake Superior, which Enger depicts in the book as a sentient being:

“It’s called a lake because it is not salt, but this corpus is a fearsome sea and if you live in its reach you should know at all times what it’s up to… The lake was dark and flat. It was a blackboard to the end of sight, and any story might be written on its surface.”

Lark owns a shabby bookstore in this time when physical and social infrastructure is crumbling in the United States. Reading has become mostly obsolete because the education system has broken down. There’s a lot of surveillance from government and the ruling class and some people volunteer for work through the ironically named Employers Are Heroes Act for a bit of bread and a place to sleep. Communication is difficult because wars or obsolescence have knocked out GPS. Consumer goods are hard to find and bits and pieces of abandoned motors and all kinds of other items are sold at a makeshift market. Food is scarce. Most creepy is that climate change has warmed the great lake and its long-dead bodies are bobbing to the surface.

At the beginning of the story, sweet and gentle Lark finds what she has been searching for since she was 12 —  a rare advance reading copy of of “I Cheerfully Refuse,” a precious book by mid-20th-century cult author Molly Thorn. It is vaguely illicit to have such a thing, so Lark keeps it under the counter.

“Thorn’s book is almost but not quite a memoir,” Enger said in a conversation from his Duluth home. “It provides a touchstone, looking back and forward into the 21st century to say things about past and future. That was a useful idea. Molly is refusing ignorance and despair. I think Rainy understands that cheerful refusal is more effective than any other kind; facing the thing with a smile on your face gives you extra power.”

Fueling the novel’s evil is Werryck, who first appears as a visitor to Lark’s bookstore. A possible shape-shifter, this guy is so scary Enger admits to “a shiver up my spine” as he was writing the character.

Leif Enger (Robin Enger)

“I made Werryck purposely terrifying,” Enger said. “There is something about the whole idea of reading itself being a kind of subversive activity that people in power want to suppress that was fun to write. It’s the joy of risk and elevation just from interacting with literature — high, low and in between — that gives us so much pleasure. When Werryck walks into Lark’s bookstore something dreadful and unholy enters the sanctuary.”

One day Rainy returns home to find Lark’s dead body amidst her ruined shop and realizes someone wants to hurt or kill him. This is when the story becomes a sea adventure as Rainy escapes in his boat and heads across Lake Superior to find an island where he and Lark had a wonderful time, hoping to meet his wife’s spectral spirit. Along the way he is joined by a smart, tough 10-year-old girl named Sol, who’s learned to live in a dangerous society.

The story turns into a thriller as Rainy and Sol are captured (not a spoiler) by Werryck’s men and taken prisoner on a huge ship where medical experiments are done. Rainy is asked to play his bass every night for Werryck the way David played his harp for King Saul in the Old Testament.

“Saul is disturbed in his mind and so is Werryck,” Enger explains. “It’s an interesting dynamic, a man captive summoned to ease the troubled mind of his captor.”

There is ugliness and abuse in these scenes aboard the dark ship.

“The book picks up a sense of urgency and dread here,” Enger says. “That was part of allowing it to be as dark as it wanted to be. I really wanted to imagine the (eventual) hope to have real meaning and currency”.

Darkness and hope

It isn’t surprising that Enger, 63, wrote a book set on Lake Superior. It’s been in his life a long time.

“I think my family fell under the lake’s spell many years ago when we would sail out of Bayfield where we had a 30-foot sailboat for 15 years,” Enger says. “It was old and had a heavy keel (to accommodate) Superior’s winds. It was a lovely way to spend a summer sailing around the Apostle Islands. I knew at some point I was going to have to write about the lake and being on the lake. In my book, Superior feels the way it feels in life: incredibly unforgettable, incredibly alluring.”

It took Enger years to write this novel, which he began in the early days of the pandemic in 2020.

“Remember the world then?” he asks. “It felt claustrophobic. I wanted to write something kind of nautical. I’ve always been fond of nautical adventure — Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘Moby Dick.’ I needed a story that would allow a bit of dystopia, a very dark world but one that would pull me through to hope on the other side. Rainy’s voice was very accessible. Early in the dark, in my office, Rainy was waiting to reveal his story.”

Although “I Cheerfully Refuse” has been described as speculative fiction or magical realism, Enger doesn’t think the book is a total departure from his previous books. For instance, there’s a bit of mystery in “Virgil Wander,” when a man is seen standing on or in the water, his back turned, doing nothing. And there may or not be miracles in “Peace Like a River.”

“There is a through line from my first book to this one,” Enger says. “I suppose it’s a departure in that it takes place in the future and I haven’t attempted that before. You don’t want to repeat yourself.”

Enger says what runs through all his books is his narrators’ shared characteristics.

“They tend to be kind of wide-eyed, pretty open-hearted and hopeful,” he explains. “The world in the pandemic of 2020 did not look at all hopeful. There was a lot of upset in the cities, protests about (the murder of) George Floyd and the clueless response from people in power. I needed to write an imagined world where the old rules didn’t apply, but with ways to exist and be joyful.”

Some readers have criticized Enger for not explaining enough about the novel’s dystopian world.

“I chose to set the story in a particular moment in time, a few decades in the future,” he says. “I didn’t worry about explaining. So many books get written that do a beautiful job of that. I just wanted to tell one guy’s story. He doesn’t know any other world. It’s a time in which everything is owned by a few, servitude is common, churches are run by warlords. That is the future that seemed the most likely if you read the news.”

It started with a baseball player

Enger grew up in Osakis, near Alexandria. In the late 1980s, he and his older brother Lin collaborated on writing a series of crime novels featuring a former major league baseball player. Published under the pen name L.L. Enger, the series did well enough but took too much of the authors’ time. But both agreed the experience helped them become better writers. Lin went on to teach English at Minnesota State University Moorhead. His debut novel, “Undiscovered Country,” was published in 2008, the same year as Leif’s “So Brave, Young, and Handsome.”

Leif was a reporter for Minnesota Public Radio for 16 years before writing “Peace Like a River,” which was so successful he was able to quit his job and write full time.

When that widely praised novel was published, Leif and his wife, Robin, were living in an old farmhouse on a 56-acre spread in Aitkin County where they raised their sons John and Reed, known by his middle name Ty. John followed in his father’s footsteps, working at MPR and publishing his debut novel, “Radium,” in 2022.

The family lived on the farm for 21 years, but after the boys married and left, Leif and Robin looked for a change.

“We began to feel isolated,” Enger recalled. “We lived 90 miles from Duluth and drove there often. We bought an old house with more space than the previous one with an attic where Robin can spread out her quilting.” The house is six or seven blocks from Lake Superior, which they can glimpse from their top floor when the trees are bare.

When the conversation returned to “I Cheerfully Refuse,” Enger muses that authors can help offset current feelings of national despair: “Just the act of writing. That’s an act of hope.”

If you go

Enger’s Twin Cities metro-area events for “I Cheerfully Refuse” (Grove Press, $28):

6 p.m. Wednesday, April 3, Barnes & Noble, 3230 Galleria, Edina

6 p.m. Wednesday, April 24, Next Chapter Booksellers, 38 S. Selling Ave., St. Paul

7 p.m. Thursday, April 25, Excelsior Bay Boks, Excelsior

2 p.m. Sunday, May 5, Lowell Inn, 102 Second St. N., Stillwater, in conversation with Minnesota writer Benjamin Percy

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