Today and Every Day

Boozhoo, indinawemaaganidog! Aaniin! That is to say hello, all of my relatives! Welcome to another edition of An Irritable Métis. I started this post over a week ago to coincide with the recent holiday but travel (as in back-to-back trips out of town) and struggle to express myself the way I wanted to have conspired against me. “But aren’t you a writer?” you say. “Shouldn’t this be easy?” Sometimes it is, my friends, but, I assure you, those times are rare.

Instead I’ve spent a good percentage of my desk time plowing through the massive backlog of correspondence I have acquired over the last weeks and months, making some progress1, even as I imagine this must be what those people who plow the road up to Logan Pass might feel like. As in, so much plowing, so much more snow in front of me.2 So without further distraction I’m just going to launch into the chaotic brain dump that follows. I’m grateful you are here.

I landed in Minneapolis Thursday the 9th just before noon and drove directly to Pow Wow Grounds on the historic Franklin Avenue East. The day was sunny and warm and I got a little drowsy on my way there, with three hours remaining between arrival and when I could check into my hotel. I was feeling out of sorts; for starters, I’d been chased out of bed way too early from my room in Spokane, WA, to catch the flight in the first place and so far I hadn’t managed so much as a drop of coffee3. I don’t know how I managed it but I was dozing every time the flight attendants passed with coffee on offer and I missed them. So now I was in Minnesota in increasingly dire uncaffeinated straits. When I arrived in the vicinity of Pow Wow Grounds there was a lot of activity in the area so I had to park a couple blocks up from it, deeper into the neighborhood.

This is a vibrant part of town and I love visiting. I first learned of Pow Wow Grounds because it is kind of a minor sub-character in Louise Erdrich’s wonderful 2022 novel, The Sentence. This book is a ghost story and a bookstore story and a