Oh, dear! After reading the Dec.

Thursday, January 10, 2002

Oh, dear! After reading the Dec. 31 edition of The Albert Lea Tribune, I see that our columnist, R. Cort Kirkwood, is in a snit again. He’s such a one for falling into snits, a practice perfectly acceptable, of course. RCK, though, tends when in a snit to call names. So ill bred of him, I think.

Really it can’t be more than a week or two earlier that he was defining any woman who had an abortion as being wed to a &uot;weak-kneed gelding,&uot; or something of the sort. Unfortunately not having that edition at hand I can’t be sure that those were RCK’s exact words. Close, though, although it is my conviction that any journalist should be absolutely accurate. That is a conviction that applies to syndicated columnists as well as the hometown variety.

The column of Dec. 31 is entitled &uot;Deeds, not stature, warrant admiration,&uot;. What RCK took exception to was that year before last Pope John Paul II tied with Bill Clinton as the most admired living man. Or rather that Bill Clinton tied with the pope.

It’s a point of view I can understand. I, myself, felt that the death of Princess Diana in August of 1997 shouldn’t have received so much more attention than the death of Mother Teresa, who died a few days later after having spent 68 years in India helping the sick and poverty-stricken.

That was just my personal opinion, to which I’m entitled. Unlike RCK I didn’t label those who disagreed with me as &uot;cretins.&uot; Nor did I say as he did, &uot;Perhaps all this exercise shows is that most modern Americans are too shallow to know which men and women are worthy of admiration.&uot;

There seems to me an unholy tendency of late for commentators in all professions to speak ex cathedra and to wax indignant when they find those who do not agree with them. More than willing to listen to those whose politics and theology do not match my own, I draw the line at being verbally abused by them.

The ice underfoot has kept me somewhat housebound the last several days, but I’m grateful for the sun. The days, too, are beginning to seem a little longer. We’re almost a third of the way through January and February is the last full month of winter.

In Minnesota, of course, winter can outride the calendar. Still, up until now there is less to complain about than in many years.

A professor, from New England, I once had said, though, that in his home town there was no spring. You simply went from winter ice into summer. He liked it, he said, because it seemed to him that nature was so happy that winter was over that it couldn’t help just bursting into bloom.

Ambition is a much praised virtue, but it’s in my mind that my lack of enthusiasm for winter may well stem from an overweening childish ambition. I was not a particularly amiable child, inclined to be a bit on the bossy side, but I had friends. After a snow storm they usually gathered in my back yard, panting to make a snowman.

Snowman? Have you ever heard of anything more plebeian, more lackluster? What good would a snowman do anyone? On the other hand an igloo say had a number of possibilities. We could even make an igloo with several rooms, one for each of us.

Well in all fairness to me, igloos aren’t all that easy. Little Eskimo boys start, I believe, in early childhood to develop the skill. They also have the advantage of starting under the direction of skilled igloo makers. If I gave my friends the impression that I knew how to make an igloo it was pure bravado.

We’d wind up every time with some indefinite lumps of snow, we, ourselves, half frozen, and some of us muttering that in the time it had taken we could have made a whole family of snowmen.

For me it was a kind of &uot;back to the drawing board,&uot; experience. I felt that if I could just once get the hang of it we could set up igloos with the best of them. Strangely enough even the most mutinous of my followers would be back the next day and ready to be persuaded that an igloo was a necessity. I think my inability to produce anything like an igloo gave me a somewhat negative feeling about winter in general. Despite of which I still like Minnesota.

It seems to be not disloyal to my adopted state to hope that our winter will be short and our spring long.

Love Cruikshank is an Albert Lea resident. Her column appears Thursdays.