Kwik E Mart comes to Denver!

As a kid, my parents always made sure that my sister and I were exposed to our cultural heritage. Trips to Old World Wisconsin, Boston's Freedom Trail, and the Civil War battlefields of Mississippi are among my favorite childhood memories.

Today I passed the torch on to my daughter as we visited the Kwik E Mart. Denver is lucky enough to have one of twelve 7-11 stores in the world to get the Kwik E Mart makeover. And while the Krusty-O's were sold out, we had plenty of fun rubbing elbows with Comic Book Store Guy, Homer, and Apu, and the Squishee wasn't half bad.


Let's do Denver - Broadway style!


Ooh! Can I have some Krusty-o's?


Nice to see you, Apu.


Mmm...hot dogs...


...mmm...donuts.


"Choo-choo-choose me?" "Noooooo!"


Brrrrrrr...buy 3 for the price of 3!


Stay away from the egg salad.

Mmm...Squishee...

Can I get mine all syrup?

Vote 4 Quimby!

Worst movie promo ever!

Thank you! Come again!

A shout in the street (Independence Day)

Last night as I lay in bed, I listened to the shrieks and giggles of several children in the street. Their voices mingled and rose as one into the summer sky. Like many of the children in my neighborhood, they spoke Spanish and hushed only when one of the adults with them lit off another round from their cache of fireworks.

I did not get up to watch the scene, but kept listening and smiled each time the light from one of their sidewalk-crawling fireworks lit up my ceiling, as it undoubtedly lit up the street.

Tough part of town

A squirrel sat near a dumpster at 10th & Lincoln this morning with a cigarette butt dangling from its mouth.

Apparently city squirrels grow up fast, forsaking eternal salvation for earthly pleasures.

The people in your neighborhood II

The heat finally wavered as the sun went down, so I headed out for a walk through Cheesman Park before it got too dark.

No sooner had I entered the park and started down its tree lined paths than a bum shouted at me from a bench. I had my headphones on and kept walking, but something caught my eye. His face was bloodied and his hands were drenched in blood. I do not know how this happened.

I stopped and pulled my earplugs out and he asked for a cell phone. His hands were drenched in blood. I told him I did not have one. (I lied.)

Within shouting distance you could hear children shrieking on the playground and beyond them the laughter from folks wrapping up their weekend picnics.

"Could you use a few bucks?" I asked. He laughed, as he should have. Then he nodded his head. Yes, he could use a few bucks. I gave him whatever I had in my wallet, which wasn't much, and continued on my way.

A moment later the sirens of a fire truck interrupted my music and I turned back. The City of Denver came out in full force. I watched as they patched him up. He was joking with the EMTs as they led him to the ambulance.

The people in your neighborhood

This afternoon I walked back from my lunch break on the 16th Street Mall where they were setting up for an evening concert. I happened to pass two police officers who animatedly discussed something or other.

Not far off, a saggy fellow of indeterminate middle age watched on. He wore a volunteer fire department cap. He looked as though he'd just dropped his ice cream.

I think he just wanted to go up to the officers and ask if they'd be his buddy.

Should we talk about the weather?

When we moved to Colorado from Wisconsin somewhat unexpectedly nearly three years ago, I turned to the literature of the West to help me understand just where it was we now called home. In the ensuing years I have read several Wallace Stegner novels, reread My Antonia and tried to delve into Katherine Ann Porter. Contemporary novels Augusta Locke by William Haywood Henderson and The Willow Field by William Kittredge, along with the wonderful Fort Collins journal Matter, have also helped me get my bearings.

One quote that resonated with this transplant in particular comes from Stegner, who bluntly informs us that when living in the West:

"You have to get over the color green; you have to quit associating beauty with gardens and lawns; you have to get used to an inhuman scale; you have to understand geological time."

For the most part I agree with his assessment, it is a far different environment in Denver and Colorado than the upper-Midwest I grew up in. Unfortunately I have not gotten over the green, not yet, and I do not expect to any time soon. And so, with Denver in bloom it seemed natural that I would pull my rarely used copy of Aldo Leopold's Sand County Almanac to read up on Wisconsin in March.

Writing in the 1940s, Leopold's March entry is a love letter to geese. He opens by telling us:

"One swallow does not make a summer, but one skein of geese, cleaving the murk of a March thaw, is the spring."

Though Leopold's writing is like home cooking for me, I couldn't help but wonder how much the state's climate and environment has changed since he wrote those words, and since our awakening to the effects of global warming.

Oddly enough, my former hometown rag, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel published a story this weekend that answered my question. The Journal Sentinel reports that Leopold's daughter, Nina Leopold Bradley, has taken up her father's mantle in chronicling the natural events of her father's old stomping grounds. The article reports:

But spring's advance has been so dramatic that if Leopold were alive today, he'd have to rewrite parts of his seminal book, "A Sand County Almanac."

Take, for example, the Canada geese. Leopold wrote that they "tumbled out of the sky like maple leaves" in March.

But records by his daughter show that migratory geese are returning home more than a month sooner - now arriving about Feb. 19.

The article can be read in its entirety here.

Obviously this is a grim prognosis. I am not comfortable preaching about the consequences of global warming - I need to get my own house in order - but I can say that when you encounter its effects in an individually familiar setting, the reality becomes all the more stark.

...

Whatever the future holds, today we witnessed a beautiful spring day in Denver. The view from here: