I’m in trouble. Through no fault of my own, I might add. I took today off for no particular reason. Becky usually has Mondays off and I think she might have been a little irritated that I was impinging on her time alone in the house. She’s also not very open minded about how I like to spend my free time. I’m pretty good at doing nothing. I like doing nothing. When the day began I told her I’d reached the point of no return on the book I was reading and intended to finish it before I did anything else. Then I spent some time doing research to try to understand some of the literary allusions in the book. Then I took a nap. She wasn’t very sympathetic to my need for a nap. But I like to nap and it’s my day off.

When I woke up we decided to go Christmas tree shopping. I am not a huge fan of Christmas tree shopping and without little kids around, it really doesn’t hold much charm for me. In most cases I would pick the first tree that I saw that wasn’t completely deformed. Becky tends to want to closely examine every tree in the lot. At least once. I tend to get impatient. These kinds of outings are a recipe for strife in this marriage. Blessedly Beck picked a tree very quickly, there really weren’t many to choose from in this lot and they were all the same price so that eliminated one aspect of the decision making process. We made the purchase and hauled our little jack pine out to the car. It fit in the back of the station wagon with just a little bit of the top sticking out. Beck started to adjust the position of the tree to see if it would fit all the way in. “Let’s just leave the back open,” I suggested and she wondered if it would fly open. I had a long piece of twine and decided to tie the tailgate down. I started tying a knot to the tailgate, and pulled it down to get a better look at what I was doing. I pulled it down at the same time she was sticking her head into the car to arrange something. I wacked her on the head with the tailgate. There was no blood and no loss of consciousness but it had to really hurt. Things have been rather icy around here this evening. She’s accused me of trying to kill her.

Bill  Benson,  Dorothy  Hoffman and I were living on Bloomington Avenue in the summer of 1973.  Bill and I  had spent the previous summer in Idaho. I came back to Minneapolis in the fall and he’d stayed in Idaho, working in the mines through the winter. Dorothy and I had driven out to pick him up and we drove back from the Olympic Peninsula in a 1956 Studebaker Hawk with no reverse. I think I was between jobs and Bill was guiding high school students in  the wilderness of the Arrowhead.  Bill was always fit and I was in the best shape of my life having spent the previous summer working in the Forest Service. These are all their own stories, and this is the story of what happened one day when Bill was back in town from one of his trips.

One morning as we sat around the kitchen table wondering what to do with all this time and energy. We decided, as we often did, to go shoot some hoops. Elliot Park is on the corner of Franklin and Elliot and it was the closest court to our house. The court is on the Northwest corner where most of the traffic was. We drove over in the Studebaker Hawk.

We may have stretched a little before we started the ritual. I shoot until I miss, you shoot until you miss. An unspoken rule of shooting. I’ve actually never heard it spoken, but the convention is there. Sometimes if you miss a clever banker on the backside or such, you can take another crack at it just to see if you can get it to drop, without exceeding the bounds of the polite. Bill had injured his achilles tendon on his last trip, and unknown to me, had told Dorothy it was going to rupture.

We hadn’t been there long enough for a one on one game to break out when two Indian gentlemen showed up and asked if they could shoot with us. Well of course, it’s a public court isn’t it. One of them was older, probably in his thirties (how are perspectives change) and the other a teenager. The kid was about my size and the other guy was slightly bigger than Bill. Yes, we were sizing them up and they us.

It didn’t take long before the inevitable, “Wanna play some two on two?”

“Half court make-it take-it to eleven?”

“Let’s play to fifteen.”

“Sure.” Introductions were made and we signaled them to take it out first. Now bill and I had played a lot of 2 on 2 together the previous summer and we were looking forward to testing our game on the big city courts. And I think these guys wanted to show us what the Indian brand of big city basketball was like. It soon became apparent that Bill and I had these guys on several levels, I think they might have been a little taken aback by how hard we came at them. They started to foul and play very rough, even by our standards. Fouls on every play. Hard ones. Now, I have what’s referred to as the Keller temper and I’m sure Bill saw that I was getting a little excited.

Our ball. Bill called me to the top of the key and whispered, “Let’s show these guys we can kick their asses anyway.” Bill was, inch for inch, the best basketball player I’ve ever played with, all 5’6″ of him, and those were the days when there were games that I got every defensive rebound. We put on an “and one” clinic, and our opponents weren’t backing down an inch. It was some of the most fun that I’ve ever had on a basketball court.

Then Bill got me the ball in the high post and started breaking to the left, outside of where the three point line would be if there had been such a thing. I’d seen him make thirty in a row off the glass from that position and he had enough space to get a shot up. I immediately returned the ball to him. As he went into triple threat position I got the kid on my hip and spun down the lane, in case he decided to pass up the shot. He collapsed to the ground. I guess it was the traffic noise that kept me from hearing the pop. The three of us were crouching over him, the way it always happens. He knew immediately his achilles had rolled up his leg. The building anomosity from the game was gone. It was as if it was never there. “What can we do to help?” Help me carry him to the car. “I’m really sorry man.”

“You didn’t do anything.”

We loaded him in the Studebaker Hawk, exchanged our goodbyes like we’d known each other for years, accepted there wishes of good luck and I drove Bill the emergency room. I made a lot of trips to the emergency room in the seventies.

First of all, let me say that the Gophers won. The highlight of the game was when one of the student managers who was a little more provocatively dressed than the rest was crouching behind the huddle during time out displayed some body parts in a manner often associated with plumbers. Butt crack city, in front of about a thousand people.

The new Minnesota State Senate Majority Leader is a guy who I often played basketball with at the old Downtown Y. He thought he was much better than he was and tended to hog the ball and shoot too much. I was forced to school him a few times. Keith Elliison’s predecessor in the House occasionally played down there too when he was back in the district. He had to be in his 50’s then and was tough as nails.

The new County Attorney, Mike Freeman, has twin daughters who starred at my alma mater, Carleton College. While they were there the Knights were ranked in the top five in the D3 rankings.

Keith Ellison my new Congressman.

He’s taking over for the retiring Martin Olav Sabo, who I believe has been in Congress since Lincoln was president.

In other news: Tonight the Minnesota Golden Gophers Women’s Basketball Team opens the regular season agains Northern Iowa at the Barn. They’ve got seven Freshmen on the roster after five players quit the program last year. I gave up my season tickets not because of the defections but because of the money. But this looks like a very exciting team with lots of raw talent. I’ll probably end up going to every game anyway.

is a Muslim.

First ever in Congress. How about that?

I voted for him.

Yes folks it’s time again for that annual Fall Harvest Celebration
Formerly Known as the H-Word!

And we all know what that means! It’s time to harvest your favorite large orange gourd and apply your creative talents to converting it to a lamp. Contrary to popular opinion a Jack-O-Lantern is not what the King of Pop was when his hair caught fire, but a glowing vegetable symbolizing the culmination of the growing season and high school football playoffs. Of course I’ve always thought it should be a potato, which is why the Spuds colors are black and orange. But I digress.

Since we want to make sure that no vegetables are harmed (other than a few pulp trees) and that no one brings in roasted pumpkin seeds as a treat, we are challenging to a digital/paper Jack-O-Lantern coloring contest. Feel free to customize your gourd digitally or in the time honored analogue fashion with scissors and marker fumes.

Prizes will have some value. The decisions of the judges will be arbitrary, illogical and final. Bribes will only be accepted in advance and only in the form of chocolate. Please remember the importance of maintaining corporate appropriateness.

Have fun.

Since one of your empoyees accepted a check without
apparently checking any ID on 7/28 you have been harrassing
my daughter to recover the money from the check that you
accepted from the criminal that stole her purse. She has
recieved communication from you and from a bill collector
and she has supplied all of the documentation requested to
verify that the check in question was indeed stolen. Now she
is being harrassed by the Minneapolis Police Department
(actually some vendor in Red Wing posing as the Minneapolis
Police Department) who are threatening to send her to jail.
Never mind that no effort whatsoever was made by the police
to investigate the car break-in that resulted in her purse
being stolen, nor any effort to recover her property.

Since we have in good faith already supplied all the
documentation that you have requested and you forwarded
the case to the police anyway, my question is who at Sears
should I send my bill for the time that I’ve spent trying to
resolve this issue? My professional hourly rate is $150. At this
point, I’ve got about 3 hours into it, so we’re about even.
Payment due on the reciept of invoice.

Thank you.

Bob Keller