The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

I'd not even been in my new place an entire day before I received a postcard from Kafka. 
I'd just gotten back from returning the rental truck when there was a knock at my apartment door. 
I made my way through the confusion of boxes and gave the peephole a quick look.

There was a middle-aged mailman slouching out in the hall.

"Where were you when I was hefting all my books upstairs?" I greeted him. "Better late than never, I guess. I could use some help dragging my futon around that corner, into the bedroom. I'd really appreciate they extra muscle."

He rolled up in the late afternoon twilight of January.  He was not expecting to see her, not here at what had been her parent's house, but there she was at the front windows, tall and lanky, looking out as though waiting for someone, for him perhaps, he could only dream.  

I am reminded lately of your perfume.  Not the scent you wore during London, but before then, before New York.  I remember it came in a short clear bottle and that it was a golden color which, as you can see, does little to narrow the field of the thousands of perfumes available today.  Of course I'm fully aware, as you taught me, that if I were to find it and the salesclerk sprayed it on one of those paper swatches, or on her wrist, or mine, it would not emit the same scent that arose from your wrist, or the back of your ear, or the curve of your neck.

He came for the cool, lazy running of the water and the fog drifting over it, for the loamy shoreline and the iridescence of spring mangrove.  The serenade of a lone mockingbird to an unseen mate - that was a bonus.  The others had come for a little R&R before redeploying, simple as that, but he had come for something more.  He sat alone on the foot bridge, legs dangling, listening to the morning stillness and breathing in the forest air, but in this most peaceful of settings, his jaw clenched and his chest was tight as ever.

One muggy Minnesota morning during the summer straddling the scrawny divide between my fanciful childhood and jaded adolescence, my best friend Robby and I found religion. It'd been hiding, not surprisingly, inside the whitewashed pine chapel of Lake Bronson Galilee Lutheran Bible Camp.

What does it mean that I have to sit and think for several minutes, and eventually have to count on my fingers, to figure out exactly how old I am?

I don't know what it means, but I know it's appalling, the fact that I have to do it, and the number I eventually end up with.

When she was in second grade, my girlfriend was informed by her teacher that E.B. White was a woman.