In which I digress

My kitchen is small, but not too small for baking. And my oven, uninsulated door and wildly varying temperatures aside, isn't impossible to work with -- but I haven't been baking, which means I haven't been writing, which means there are things I want to say that I haven't said.

Like about my dad, who finished chemo the week before Easter, and how we went to a cutting in Rapid City late this winter and how he stayed up way too late and made me promise not to tell mom, fed me steak and tried to sign me up for the stater class even though I'd only ridden a cutting horse once, out behind the barn last summer.

Or how I saw Salman Rushdie engrossed by his blackberry outside the Cosmos Club in Washington DC where, should you ever have the inclination, you can order pre-Prohibition-inspired cocktails at the restaurant owned by the North Dakota Farmers Union, and if you're braver than I am, or if you really love bacon, you'll try Bone. It's where I learned, over dinner, that one of the men involved with the Jerusalem artichoke debacle had ties to my alma matter in Orange City.

I've wanted to say how I've started running again and how it's hard, but good and slowly making me feel like myself again. How I'm researching a story about Roswell Garst who told Nikita Krushchev in a letter in the middle of the Cold War that only a man with small ideas eats a cherry in two bites and that unless Garst's recommendations on agriculture be taken seriously and in their entirety, he'd rather they not be taken at all. And isn't that just perfect? It takes a fearless man to say that -- or at least a confident man who knows his own business. I don't know a lot more than that about him yet, but already I like him -- and am reminded that people are just people and while we can admire them, it's ridiculous to be awed or cowed or however you want to say it.

And so, you see, I have things to say and I'll ask your pardon if, for now, they meander away from the kitchen, though I still have plenty to say about that, too.