Where's wisdom coming from?

The heater pushes air in blasts that feel like opening the oven door when it is set at about 400 degrees. Open it and that blast feels so good in a cold house. Close the door and the blast is over. A second later you’re just as cold as you started out to be. That’s my heater. It turns on and off. It’s called (quite cleverly) a Fahrenheat. I hear that they’ve invented new heaters and new names for them. They are quiet. They say the heat is even. Some look like little radiators and are on wheels. I may ask for one for Christmas.

The cumulative effect of the Fahrenheat is a warm room, though. I can’t deny it. And I like the blast of heat.

My other heater is not so cleverly named. Tall and black, it sits out in the cabin. I’ll turn it on before I leave for work. It’s supposed to be warmer today than yesterday. Yesterday it got in the high fifties. I was driving my client on a spate of errands when I noticed this. His car has a dashboard that makes that announcement – like the black heater in the cabin. I don’t know why this isn’t welcome news.

A box at the side of my computer says that it’s 57 degrees and partly cloudy. I do not believe it. Is this the average from yesterday? The notice sits below an ever-changing box that has pictures in it. A grassy hill, the tail of a whale. Below it, there’s this record of what I did 20, 21, and 22 hours ago on the internet. Below that there is a “To Do” box that I can enter things into and above the whole line-up a place where I can type notes that looks like a little notebook. I don’t know how it got there or how to get rid of it.

I do appreciate the read-out of the time. It’s 6:04 and the sky has just lightened enough that I can see my trees against it.

As evidence that the room has warmed up to an acceptable temperature, the little white Fahrenheat is quiet. When it is on, it churns and chugs. It rattles. The heating coils glow orange.

I dream about the new and cling to the familiar. Makes you wonder where the new comes from.

Read about some research the other day. It was about jam. How would the sales of jam differ if you had six choices or two dozen. I was gratified to know that far more people bought jam when there were only six choices. As soon as six grew to twenty four, the choice was overwhelming.

Read about Minnesota writer and poet Bill Holm the other day too. He died what is called “an untimely death” over the winter, and was about to be celebrated.

Milkweed Editions publisher Daniel Slager said, Bill thought the “best of literature was for anyone who could read.”

“I think of that as something fundamentally Minnesotan, democratic with a small ‘d,’ this understanding of people. It’s a very decent, humane legacy…”

“Holm never had a television set or computer in his home, and Slager thinks that “wirelessness” gave depth to Holm’s writing. “Bill was really hostile to wiring. That’s all over his work. There’s a fine line between being misanthropic and being critically intelligent. More often than not, Bill was on the right side of that line.

“That’s where his wisdom was, coming from a long tradition that goes back to Thoreau, Emerson, Thomas Paine, Whitman, wonderful artists with language but profoundly critical of mainstream thinking and values. To me, it feels like Bill might be the last of the line.”

Where’s wisdom coming from?

A bright light blinks behind the trees. I watch it several minutes to determine if it is a plane or a star. Determining star, I smile. The sky is a light slate blue above and a coral wash below.

Quotes on Bill Holm from ‘Chain’ Reaction, St. Paul Pioneer Press, Mary Anne Grossmann, 11/1/09, 6E.