Twin Cities Daily Planet (https://www.tcdailyplanet.net/author/emilio-degrazia/page/5/)
I suppose most boys have to overcome something terrifying in order to have the conversion experience that makes real men of them. Though Achilles dressed up as a girl and Odysseus pretended to be blind in an effort to stay out of the Trojan war, both these classic draft dodgers became feckless killers on their way to achieving hero status. If medieval knights have to slay drag Continue Reading
My teenage son warned me in advance. “You won’t like it, Dad. It’s really interesting, but there’s a lot of action in it.” By “action” we both knew he meant violence.
It probably doesn’t matter that I’ve forgotten her name. She was on loan from a university in Beijing, a soft-spoken woman who had left a young child behind in order to take learning wherever in the world it was going. She had experiences unimaginable to me, was old enough to have survived the Cultural Revolution, had read widely and thoughtfully. Continue Reading
If the first September chill foreshadows the winter coming on, it also backshadows me into my childhood. The movies in that childhood were what we call black and white, though the best of them were artfully composed to display the subtle interplay of grayish shadows and shades. Since I was fated to be born in 1941, the Pearl Harbor year, those movies color how I still see my history. Continue Reading
It seemed odd to be sitting on Nellie Dreiss’ front porch, with nothing better on my mind than the massive maple across the street that probably was no taller than I was fifty years ago. My tree-gazing had me wondering: What moist rich loam was hidden deep inside the ground where the tree’s roots spent decades doing their quiet work? Continue Reading
Whenever the Twins play the Tigers I zip my lips.
Detroit isn’t really my home town. I was born in Dearborn just a few blocks from the limits of Detroit, but the boy in me still quivers when I see that gothic “D” on a white Tiger uniform. The quiver is for a Detroit I remember as a kid – -the downtown skyscrapers, Belle Isle, the spacious parks, the Woodward and Michigan Ave Continue Reading
It’s hard not to welcome in a new baseball season with each new spring. Someone like Joe Mauer, homegrown like a ruddy potato in our own back yard, seems so much like a rare innocent teenager we almost feel sorry for the trouble his $78 million will bring his way. Continue Reading
I think I now have a name for it–for our era, the brave new world we’ve made for ourselves. The clue came when I asked a neighbor kid, a college senior, about a blockbuster movie he had just seen.
“It was great,” he said.
I nagged him to tell me more. “What made it great?”
“The special effects.”
I nagged again. “Anything else?”
Not even the chosen few really know: Every morning I put my left sock on first. Always my left. All the other basketball nuts who play in the Noon Ball pickup games at the YMCA know I have trouble going to my left. That’s never kept me from putting into practice the All-American “practice makes perfect” philosophy. Continue Reading
Imagine not finding one under the tree. So put yourself in my place when I take it upon myself to lead my wife to the garage. Then try to understand the glee that possesses me as I throw back the sheet. “I bought one for the whole family,” I announce. “We are now proud owners of our own Blonk.” Continue Reading