Now back from Minneapolis and St. Paul, where I saw Macbeth, saw the Dead Sea Scrolls, saw the St. John's College bible manuscript, visited Louise Erdrich's bookstore, met with a fellow North Dakotan who wants to help us realize our dream of a Theodore Roosevelt Center at Dickinson State University, visited the Eric Sevareid Library at the University of Minnesota, walked a good deal, bought books, and gifts for my dear friend Sheila Schafer.

How fortunate for us North Dakotans that just 8 hours away by car and 90 minutes by flight is one of the nation's great cities. It is such a pleasure to walk the campus of the University of Minnesota, to walk across the Washington Avenue bridge, which I walked across at 7:45 a.m. five days a week for two full years when I studied Latin on the East Bank and lived on the West Bank--always outside, never within the bridge shelter. And then when you are standing precisely where John Berryman threw himself off that bridge, thinking about the hypnotic power of poetry and rivers, and the lives of the great thinkers, writers, poets, artists, and students who have spent part of their lives at the University of Minnesota, to look to the west and see the skyscrapers of Minneapolis looming over the prairie.

I was thrilled to spend time with my favorite professor of all time, the man, in Jefferson's words, "who set the destiny of my life." And to realize that though he has mellowed a little, he is still as brilliant in my soul thirty years later as he was when I was a callow youth.

I'm tired but full--the best way to return from a journey.

csj