Unscheduled Comment

It's not my normal schedule to write, but I wanted to share something I just experienced. I spent the last two nights at my dad's out in the suburbs. The first night was planned, the second I ended up staying because otherwise I would have returned home after curfew.

This morning I debated between driving or biking back. I ended up deciding to bike, not only because of the turmoil in our area, but I also heard a potential for hail in the forecast. At my dad's house I could leave the car in a garage.

It was close to lunch time when I arrived in Minneapolis so I thought I'd pull up to a restaurant we tried for take-out last month that was on the way. It was boarded up, the beginning of Lake Street, where much of the turmoil has been this past week. Because I was already on the street, I decided to continue biking down it. If there was too much glass I'd pick a new route. Michael had biked down Lake Street on Saturday. "How did you bike down it with all the glass?" I asked him after, "Weren't you concerned you'd get a flat?" He said there were lots of people out with brooms. "Where were they putting the glass? Were there dumpsters?"

"They just dumped it into burning buildings," he said.

So I had this surreal experience of biking down a street full of boarded up buildings. And I want to be clear, I turned south before the worst of it, I did not approach the worst of it, yet what amazed me is I've never seen Lake Street so clean. There was no glass. There was no trash. Usually I would have to be more careful about biking. There were people scattered along with brooms and trash bags, but it seemed most of the street clean up had already been done.

Eventually I got to buildings that were burned/devastated, something that couldn't be cleaned up by people with their gloved hands. But all along the way I held both images in my heart, the destruction and the caring hands that followed behind.