A nation may be moved by its statesmen and defended by its military but its usually remembered for its artists.” — John Steinbeck

Tom Waits turned 60 Monday, before the pending storm. He’s an artist. That was also the day of bombing of Pearl Harbor, the 68th anniversary where more than 2,200 sailors, marines and soldiers were killed that led eventually to the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I believe there were considerably more deaths there.

When I walk through the high school I always feel perked walking down the arts hall viewing the work of students. I still remember Mr. Woodamor, who came to Banfield School to teach art in either Ms. Morey’s class or Miss Frost’s class the next year, perhaps both. What a gift he was. He reminded me of Bishop Sheen. Many of you probably don’t remember Bishop Sheen either. There was a similarity.

There are still folks in town that remember Edith Morey. I stopped to see her last week at the nursing home out by Watt’s Cookin’. She looked better than the last time I saw her a couple years ago. She’s silent now and very alone. I used to sit in the library and talk to her when I first came back to town.

Michelle Obama recently said, “The arts are not something apart from our national life, the arts are the heart of our national life.”

Browsing the artcetera the other day in the Star Tribune, A Book of Silence was mentioned —“a learned, poetic, comprehensive examination of everything there is to know and think about the human experience with silence.” Sara Maitland, the author, finds herself in late middle age “with time and resources to explore her obsession with quietude.”

That sounds like something I would like to spend time with. It’s priced at $25, with 325 pages.

I find myself spending more time with silence than ever before. I still put a column together weekly and work part-time in the community, belong to a writing group, do some Tai Chi and try to develop an understanding of Franz Kafka.

Kafka tells a young man who often walked the streets of Prague with him that “the old home is always new, if one lives consciously, with a sharp awareness of one’s relations to others. And that is the greatest thing in life.”

In Kafka’s day, there wasn’t television, something I perceive to be the thief of Kafka’s quest. Of course I was there part of the time watching the Vikings get crushed until it got so ridiculous I adjourned to another room to read what I just shared.

The other day I stopped on a late morning walk to return an overdo book I never did read and noticed from a distance a collection of geese on the millpond. Getting closer I realized the geese were sitting on the thin clear ice facing the sun, perhaps tanning. A few were walking casually around the ice. Most were stationary.

I sat in one of the corner chairs in the library watching them out the window noticing other extended families of geese landing on the thin ice. It seemed to me they chose a different landing pattern.

As I was walking back home they continued to land all over the place except the area where the SPAM cruiser was usually docked.

A group was there too when I first arrived but for some reason the later geese fly ins preferred to land on the larger body of ice. They were occasionally squawking with one another. It was impossible to decipher what was being said. Perhaps “land here.”

In A Romantic Education, Patricia Hampl speaks on an earlier phase of the Bohemians telling us: “Perhaps during the long period when the language was almost lost, the Czechs learned without being told but from the implacable authority of oppression that, for them, the middle class was a life saver. It was the class that sustained nationality and language. That is, culture, through its writers and intellectuals. And culture turned out to be requisite for survival—it was survival.”

Lydia, our daughter, met Patricia Hampl at the “U” she tells me.