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Today is Friday the 13th. The Stress Management Center and Phobia Institute in Asheville, NC, reported that an estimated 17 to 21 million people in the United States are affected by a fear of this day. Some people are so paralyzed by fear that they avoid their normal routines in doing business on this day. “It’s been estimated that $800 to $900 million is lost in business on this day..”   Source: John Roach.

According to Wikipedia, the actual origin of the superstition appears to be a tale in Norse mythology. Friday is named for Frigga, the free-spirited goddess of love and fertility. When Norse and Germanic tribes converted to Christianity, Frigga was banished in shame to a mountaintop and labeled a witch. It was believed that every Friday, the spiteful goddess convened a meeting with eleven other witches, plus the devil – a gathering of thirteen – and plotted ill turns of fate for the coming week.

For many centuries in Scandinavia, Friday was known as “Witches’ Sabbath.” source: Charles Panati, Panati’s Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things.

“A man will sometimes devote all his life to the development of one part of his body – The Wishbone.”  Robert Frost  (1874-1963)

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Comments Off on January 13, 2023

In April of 1977,  I went on a retreat at the Cenacle Retreat House in Wayzata, Minnesota. Sister Ten-Tie Saniel presented “Effective Living” a seminar based on John Boyle’s “Omega Seminar”. The sisters taught us the importance of affirmations, “stating a future goal in the present tense”.  The reason that this works is because your sub-conscious mind cannot tell the difference between reality and fantasy. 

I have formed the habit of repeating these six affirmations every morning. It has made a big difference in my life.  The six basic affirmations are:

1. I am loved; therefore, I like myself, unconditionally as I was created. (Repeat five times)

2. I never devalue myself with destructive self-criticism. (Envision yourself doing something that you are very proud of)

3. I see love in others and have warm regard for all persons at all times. (Envision yourself doing something nice for somebody else)

4. I am easily able to relax and with every affirmation I become physically and mentally healthier. (Envision yourself doing something relaxing)

5. I am completely self-determined, inner directed by the spirit of love and allow others the same privilege. (Repeat five times)

6. I accept total responsibility for the consequences of my actions and reactions. (Repeat five times)   

You can add up to 5 more “goal specific” affirmations.  Something like: “I especially love and enjoy weighing 170 pounds.  

“Life is easier than you’d think; all that is necessary is to accept the impossible, do without the indispensable, and bear the intolerable.”  Kathleen Norris

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Comments Off on January 6, 2023

The year 2022 is coming to a close.  “Father Time” is a theme for many cartoonists at the New Year.  In 1966, my mother’s mother, Grandma Laura,  gave me three old pocket watches.  One had belonged to her father, Fredrick Anderson.  It is a Waltham watch, silver with a gold stag inlayed on the back.  Another watch is a key wind.  It appears to be the oldest of the three.  It also is silver with a picture of a dog engraved on the back.  It belonged to her father-in-law, Meinert Larson.  The note 1890 is written on the document that Gram gave me along with the watches.  The third watch was a gold watch that had belonged to her second husband, Ingebret Ramlo.  I was very honored that she had entrusted these heirlooms to me. 

I purchased a fourth watch and had the four mounted in an antique frame that hung on the living room wall in our first apartment at 7439 Lyndale Avenue South in Richfield.  We lived in a lower-level apartment, since the rent was cheaper.  

One Sunday evening we came back from a weekend in Upsala to discover that someone had broken into our apartment and stolen some items, including the watch collection.  I was sick.  The culprits were caught, and all of the stolen goods were recovered except the watches.  On the drive home from work one night, I spotted the same boys searching for something in a ditch along Lyndale Avenue. I stopped to confront them, but they spotted me heading their way and they ran.

These boys came from good homes and they hired a good lawyer.  I attended the trial and was disgusted when they got off with the charge of “lurking and lying in wait”.  I was told after the trial that if I were to make a trip to downtown Minneapolis, to the defendant’s lawyer’s office, that I might find a bag on the lawyer’s desk that might contain some “items of interest”.   I had no choice but to play along. I did get the watches back without the antique picture frame. 

While doing my annual house cleaning, I brought out the watches.  I located the key and wound up the watch that belonged to Great Grandpa Meinert and laid it on my dresser top.  As of this morning it is keeping perfect time.  A watch made by the American Watch Company in Waltham, MA,  still going strong after 132 years.

May 2023 be a good year for you and your loved ones.

“It’s good sportsmanship to not pick up lost golf balls while they are still rolling.”  Mark Twain       

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Comments Off on December 30, 2022

Two days until Christmas. I have all of my shopping done and now I simply have to pace myself on the cookies and candy.

Children love Christmas, as well they should. As with most families, some years, Christmas gifts were easy to come by and some years the budget would not allow for much. The Christmas of 1956 was a memorable one for me. My mother had to move from our home in St. Louis Park due to Dad’s inability to handle booze. Ma’s mother, Grandma Laura Ramlo, drove her 1952 Chevy from Upsala to 1620 Colorado Avenue South in St. Louis Park, put Dad in the back seat and drove him to the VA Hospital in south Minneapolis. She told them, “He is a veteran, he is a drunk and he is your problem, not mine”.  Then she took us all back to Upsala to live in the apartment above the Ramlo Grocery in Upsala.

I am not sure what the reason was for our ending up living in an apartment in Little Falls in December. It had something to do with getting financial aid. That Christmas, Santa brought us six big Tonka Toy 18 wheel trucks. There was a cattle truck, an oil tanker, a freight truck and three more. This was a perfect gift for a family with five boys. I was 13 years old and brother Bill was 10. We played with them non-stop. I am not sure what my sister Kathie got that year.

For many years I had the impression that they were from some sort of social agency that served the poor. It turned out that “Santa” was Dewey Johnson, a classmate of my mother’s from Upsala High School class of ’37. Dewey’s cousin was one of the founders of Tonka Toys. Dewey had already passed on before I learned the “rest of the story”, so I never did have a chance to thank him.

Perhaps you know of a family that has come upon hard times and they could use a “Secret Santa”.  

“Peace on Earth, Good Will to Men”.   Angel    

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Comments Off on December 23, 2022

This true store was first told by Gary Gilson.  Gary is a Twin Cities writing coach who teaches journalism at Colorado College.  He can be reached at www.writebetterwithgary.com  

“I knew a New Yorker named Phil who worked in Manhattan’s Diamond District, along 47^th Street between 5^th and 6^th Avenues. He traveled to and from work by subway from his home in the Bronx every weekday for years.

One day, in the week before Christmas, Phil entered the subway car on his way home and, as a veteran rider, immediately sensed something was off: only one passenger in the car, a drunken, disheveled man, ranting and cursing and flailing his arms against the world.

Phil felt tension in the air.  Then he noticed a group of passengers huddled at one end of the car, cringing in fear.  Phil went right over to the man, sat down, put his arm around the man’s shoulders and began to sing “I’m dreaming of a white Christmas…”

The man slowly calmed down, and soon he was singing along with Phil, “where the treetops glisten, and children listen…”

And then, just as slowly, the passengers at the end of the car started drifting toward Phil and the man, gathered around them and joined in singing, “with every Christmas card I write..”

And they all kept belting out holiday songs as the train barreled northward toward the Bronx.

These people had never known each other before, and now they were singing and laughing and hugging, if only for this brief moment in time.  They were so connected that some riders chose to stay on the train past their stops.

The troubled man brightened; he seemed to be feeling part of something larger than himself. And all it took was an arm around the shoulders, a familiar song, a gathering of humanity and, above all, a man named Phil.”   

Thank you to Gary Gilson for allowing me to share this Christmas story.  Merry Christmas.

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Comments Off on December 16, 2022

Christmas is only two weeks from Sunday. I think that I have it covered, but I still have a couple of gifts to buy. I used to wait until Christmas Eve, but I have improved in that regard. I trust that your plans are all coming together.

In 1958 I was the youngest member of the Black Knights Car Club in Upsala, Minnesota. One of the older members borrowed his dad’s 1950 Ford and we ended up in a drag race with another member. I was riding shotgun. The Ford slid off of the gravel road into the left side ditch and hit a bridge. I can still remember the horn blaring, the rear tires spinning and the sound of the windshield breaking. I had put my arm up to protect my face and the force of the impact broke my wrist. I was a sophomore at Upsala High and that fall I had to stand on the sidelines instead of playing football. The sling that held the cast for my broken wrist did provide a perfect place to hide the “tools” that I shoplifted later on.

The car club had plans to drop a V8 engine into a 1936 Chevy Coupe that the club had acquired from the leader of the gang, Duane, (AKA “Punk”). We needed tools. The old Chevy was stored in a garage that was behind the house that my mother rented on Borgstrom Street in Upsala. When the Morrison County Sheriff showed up at our front door with a search warrant, Ma fainted dead away. They were going to charge her with “fencing” since we had hidden some stolen goods in the barn next to the garage. The club house for the Black Knights Car Club was an old chicken coop next to the barn that we had cleaned out. The garage was still there in 2010, surrounded by trees growing out from the foundation. It has since been torn down.

The entire gang was brought to trial in the Morrison County court house in Little Falls and we each received a sentence of six months of probation. “Punk” was held in the county jail for almost two months without bail. I do believe that some of us “gang members” were the only ones to visit him. Our school superintendent, Mr. Whoolery, was named as our probation officer.  All of the “gang” went on to become productive members of society and none of my four younger brothers ever got into trouble.  My bad example had its merits. 

Tomorrow you will have an opportunity to enjoy a very special Christmas concert at Ritsche Auditorium on the campus of St. Cloud State University.  The St. Cloud Symphony Orchestra will be performing “Holiday Potpourri” at 3pm.   You can purchase your tickets at www.stcloudsymphony.com or at the door. I hope to see you there.

“Ring the bells that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light get in.”  Leonard Cohen

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Comments Off on December 9, 2022

It looks like the ice on the pond is not going to be very safe for a while.  Do not go out there unless you are with a buddy and be sure to check the ice often.  When I was a wild youth in Upsala, we used to drag race our cars across the ice on Cedar Lake west of Upsala. To my knowledge, no one ever went through the ice. We got away with a lot of stupid things as kids.  One winter we made a game of standing on the hood of an old DeSoto, using it as a giant snowboard as we were towed in the ditch behind a car.  Dumb and dumber.

After a heavy snow we would make a party out of driving into the Burtrum Hills with our old cars and just try to get stuck.  These were not SUVs, we had a 1954 and a 1952 Chevy. We simply packed a lot crazy boys in the cars with snow shovels in the trunk and went for it.  My sister and one of my classmates both ended up in casts after a toboggan run down a steep hill in the Burtrum Hills.

Try to not let your young children read these Friday notes.

You may want to come to St. Joseph tonight for the annual tree lighting at the corner of College Avenue and Minnesota Street.   Great River Chorale is presenting “Amid the Winter’s Snow”, tonight at St. Mary’s Cathedral in downtown St. Cloud and Sunday at 4pm at Bethlehem Lutheran Church.  Tickets can be purchased at www.greatriverchorale.org  or at the door.  I hope to see you there on Sunday.

“It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that things are difficult.”   Seneca

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Comments Off on December 2, 2022

My mother’s mother, Laura Ramlo, and her husband Bert, owned a grocery store in Upsala, Minnesota. Most of us called her Grandma Ramlo instead of Grandma Laura and some just called her Gram. They lived behind the store in small quarters. The bedroom didn’t even have doors. There were entrances from both the dining room and the living room with heavy drapes hanging from poles. They heated the living space with a fuel oil burner that was in the dining room and it had to be filled often. The store was heated with a wood burning stove. The wood and the fuel oil were stored in the attached warehouse. That was convenient.

Gram was famous for her Thanksgiving dinners which were more like a feast. Owning a grocery store made it easy for her to offer all three: turkey, beef and pork, some years. Grandpa Bert would complain about her “raiding the stock” but not too hard. My job was to fill the crystal water glasses with water from the cistern pump in the kitchen. The kids would sit at card tables in the living room. We would always sing the “doxology” and express our thanks for the goodness in our lives and the food on the table. Every year, Gram would offer her apologies for the food, even though it was awesome. “I don’t know why I keep doing this, I just can’t cook anymore.” Not true Gram.

I trust that you had a wonderful Thanksgiving feast yesterday.

“If more if us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.” J.R.R. Tolkien author of The Hobbit.

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Comments Off on November 26, 2022

In 1998 Dad moved from his high rise apartment in downtown St. Paul to my house in Upsala. He had been a city fellow for most of his adult life, but he was raised in Upsala. I was working in Minneapolis as a sales manager with the Xerox agency Albinson and I was gone most of the week. It wasn’t much of an inconvenience to have him there. His passion was cooking, however I told him in no uncertain terms that I hated the smell of fried foods and I did not eat leftovers.

In July of 1999 Albinson and Xerox parted their ways and they no longer needed a sales manager. I spent the summer painting old buildings and garages in the Upsala area and started working for Minnesota Public Radio in October of that year. If I did not leave a post-it note on the counter in the morning that said “NO SUPPER”, there would be a home cooked meal on the table when I arrived home. The food was awesome. The baked potatoes were done in a very special way. He boiled them for 10 minutes first and then baked them for one hour at 400 degrees.

As Dad struggled with old age and cancer, sometimes the quality of the supper was not up to his usual standards. Also, many times the smell of burnt food or worse, burnt plastic, from the tea pot handle, would greet me as I came in the back door. He liked to take naps and he burned three tea pots, with plastic handles, in the last six months. It got so that the only time I did not leave out the post-it note, “NO SUPPER”, was on Fridays.

On Friday November 18, 2004, I came home and he greeted me with “I have to go to the hospital, but you can eat first. Your supper is in the oven” I responded “No way, we will go now!”  I put on the oven mitts and grabbed the baked potatoes and dish of meatballs from the oven and shoved them in the frig and we drove to the VA in Minneapolis.

That was Dad’s “Last supper”, he never did come home. That weekend I ate the leftover meatball supper. It was a very tasty meal.

“There is something in every one of you that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in yourself.”  Howard Thurman

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Comments Off on November 18, 2022

Today is Veterans Day. It was first known as Armistice Day, a day commemorating the cessation of hostilities on the Western Front in Europe, at eleven o’clock am on the eleventh day of the eleventh month in the year 1918. In many parts of the world, people observe a two minute moment of silence at 11 am as a sign of respect for the roughly 20 million people who died in the “war to end all wars”. I plan to visit the grave site of my father and my uncle at the Gethsemane Church Cemetery in Upsala. I used to visit a couple of vets who lived in Mother of Mercy in Albany. Aymer Nelson passed away in 2017 at age 104. Aymer took part in the landing at Normandy Beach on D Day and he fought in the Battle of the Bulge. Bob Holmen Sr was on a destroyer in the Pacific. I miss them both.

My dad, Bill Osberg, served in the Pacific theatre on the USS Vammen. He was a radar operator, spending many hours in a small room on a “tin can” while the fighting raged around him. In one of his journals he wrote: “The two months at Okinawa were hell.”

We owe a great deal of thanks to all of those men and women who fought to protect this country. War is hell, but the warriors are to be honored. When you meet a man or women in uniform, simply offer them your hand and say, “Thank you for serving”.

If you would like to learn about the five awesome paintings created by Charles Kapsner that honor all veterans, simply go to www.vetsart.org   The paintings hang in the Committal Hall at the Minnesota

State Veterans Cemetery located off of Highway 371 north of Little Falls.   You can call 320-616-2527 to find out what the hours of operation are. 

“Success is how high you bounce when you hit bottom.” George S. Patton

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Comments Off on November 11, 2022