I submitted “Extra! Extra!” (see earlier post on this blog) to Country Extra magazine, which was soliciting personal, small-town stories featuring acts of kindness. The magazine’s editors shortened the piece considerably and printed it in the November/December issue. I received my copy in the mail last week, along with my free, full-size dinner triangle. Read more…
Look at it. The front page of your daily newspaper, down at the bottom. Winking at you!
Every morning when I open my copy of the local newspaper, The Forum, I can’t help but think of Jackie O’Shea’s line from “Waking Ned Devine.” Because at the bottom right of page one, Monday-Saturday, there it is just winking at me – a print ad. It’s no winning lotto number, to be sure, but in the end Jackie and I are referring to the same thing: fortune.
To Calgary and back, and my signature Olympic moment came in Circle, Mont.
Rock isn’t dead. It’s old and wrinkled, sure, but alive and well and still playing at Moondance Jam. Really. Saw it with my own eyes.
Father’s Day, 2004
“Thanks for being here.”
My father, Martin C. Fredricks III, said this to me many times, usually at family gatherings. Just as often, though, he said it to people he’d just met, at one of my brother’s NDSU football games, for example, even if they had their own child playing. It always seemed an odd thing to say to people with their own reasons for being somewhere.
“Mart probably fell into the toilet, and Dad’s making a list of ways to get him out.”
It happened many years ago when the family was out to eat at a fast food place. Before heading for home, Dad took me into the bathroom. When we didn’t return for a long, long time, my Mother wondered aloud what could be keeping us. That’s when my sister came out with the zinger.
Originally published in the NDSU student newspaper, The Spectrum, in 1988 under the headline, “Student Body Election causes turmoil within the Greek system.”