Steve Fernlund and The Long Way Home

A good title for this week’s column might be bookends.  I spend too much time in this space writing about my aging process—mental lapses, fading eyesight, and subpar hearing. At least the Bohunk still laughs about it, and my ego gets fed. Why bookends?  I happened upon a book included in my 90-day trial of Kindle Unlimited: “The Fifties” by David Halberstam, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, published in 1993. The blurb said, “The fifties were a defining decade for America, complete with sweeping cultural change and political upheaval.” I came into this world in the 1950s.  Seven decades have passed since I made that appearance, so it seems appropriate to comment on Halberstam’s description of the turbulent time of change in the decade of my birth and the unstable time of change today. The similarities are striking, and if you believe in progress, the similarities are sometimes depressing.  Despite profound, positive changes, we don’t seem to have learned much from the past. The boo

Becky and I haven’t done much together for the last few years, either traveling or socializing. We’ve been married for half a century and still love doing things together, but life conspired against that for a few years. Last weekend, we took an overnight trip together. Usually, Becky makes a shopping trip to Duluth alone, driving both ways on the same day.  This trip meant scratching her shopping itch and getting together with family to send grandson Connor and his girlfriend Taylor off to Detroit Lakes. They leave March 1 to work at a seasonal supper club there. So why, in our golden years, were we leaving one or the other of us at home?  We had three rescue dogs.  A chihuahua mix named Benny belonged to an elderly gentleman in Memphis who lived alone. Benny entered a rescue near our house in Illinois after the old man died. He was a one-person dog, and he quickly bonded with Becky. We adopted him, he adopted her, and he adopted separation anxiety.  Benny suffered from kidney disease