Heading home soon

Today it is 59 degrees and raining in Duluth. This, after so glorious a morning that Maggie and I (see picture, with cookies) sat outside at 7 a.m. and squinted in the warm sunshine.

This is the Duluth I remember. Once it starts raining, it can rain for days.

Right now I am eating a turkey sandwich and trying to clear my head. I couldn't sleep all night; my brain was just stuffed full of information and stories. Who knows if any of it is useful; it's certainly all interesting.

I spent more than three hours talking with my former editor, and then another two or three hours with a former colleague who had worked at the paper much longer than I--he started in 1963 and just retired last year.

Lots of stories that I can't use, because I wasn't there, or I don't think they're relevant, but fascinating nonetheless. Suicides, and love affairs--real and imagined--and staking out Elvis Presley and editors fired and editors hired and one old rim rat who used to keep pornography in his desk drawer. "He was addicted to the stuff," my friend told me yesterday. "If he'd been around in the age of the Internet, I don't think he'd have survived."

I learnd about how one of the feminist young women boldly used the men's room when the tiny one-hole women's room was in use; I heard how the Proctor newspaper wrote an editorial calling them "news hens" (and I vaguely remember tshirts the women made; must check this), and I learned how the Duluth paper wrote an editorial about the young women reporters with the headline "Petticoat Press Corps Paddles Publisher." Which I absolutely must find.

Some usable, some entertaining, some disturbing, and when I lay down last night in Maggie's bed (she gave me her bedroom for the duration, and made chocolate chip cookies) my head thrummed and I could not, could not, could not sleep.