Rick Holinger

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Ed Dlugopolski, artist, teacher, mentor, friend: A remembrance

Jan 12, 2025 | shawlocal.com | Rick Holinger

“How about some dessert?” the server asks. “Ice cream,” Ed answers. “Vanilla. Two scoops.”When it arrives, Ed spoons tiny bites into his mouth with the care a poet chooses le mot juste for his last line – or an accomplished artist finds the right hue for his next brushstroke. Ed Dlugopolski was more than 90 years old when he died last year.
Holinger: Warm, lava lamp thanksgivings for a year of volcanic shifts

Dec 8, 2024 | shawlocal.com | Rick Holinger

Hey, how was your Thanksgiving? Did you dream of golden-baked turkeys, champagne toasts and flaky pumpkin pie crusts, but instead wound up with fiery, stoked political debates and vicious, woke recriminations? Walt Whitman’s poem “Song of Myself” celebrates simply being alive when gazing at a spear – a leaf – of summer grass. I get it, but my feelings of thanks giving push that minimalist craving a bit.
Floods, droughts, hurricanes, tornadoes and other disasters coming to a town near yours

Oct 19, 2024 | shawlocal.com | Rick Holinger

I make coffee this morning for Nancy, visiting from Austria. She was best friends with my wife in middle school. Later, as a foreign exchange student, Nancy married an Austrian and has lived there ever since. When I hand her the John Muir mug, she’s just gotten off the phone with her husband. Constant rains have raised Tulln’s rivers and broken the dam trying to hold back the reservoir. Their basement is filling with water.
Holinger: The midnight of ‘68′s Democratic Convention outshined by ‘24′s dawning

Aug 31, 2024 | shawlocal.com | Rick Holinger

Our family lived two blocks from the dark, early morning slaughter in Lincoln Park. During the 1968 Democratic National Convention, Chicago policemen surrounded hippies, yippies, Students for a Democratic Society members, clergy members, authors William Burroughs, Jean Genet, Allen Ginsberg and other Vietnam War protestors, before moving in. Wooden clubs crushed unprotected heads. Tear gas stung eyes, burned skin and inflamed lungs.
Holinger: The wonders to behold when getting older

Jul 18, 2024 | shawlocal.com | Rick Holinger

I’m back in the North Woods. I look out the window above this desk made of three pine boards and see a forest of long-needle white pines, short-needle firs, brawny red pines and a few scraggly maples street fighting their way up. Looking south, I find the sun rising over an azure lake brushed with white mist. Near shore, a feeding largemouth bass sends out a ring of wavelets. I hear overhead the high-pitched squeak of an immature eagle. Yesterday, I took a short walk.
Holinger: The end of the world or just a good excuse to get busy?

Jul 4, 2024 | shawlocal.com | Rick Holinger

I am sitting in the Geneva Public Library trying to work. That is, sending my stories, poems and essays to literary journals whose editors will boomerang them back with amiable rejections. Problem is, every 30 seconds someone on the other side of a stack of books digs his hand into a large bag of chips, pretzels or popcorn. The rattle, or maybe more of a cacophonous crunch, is slowly driving me to blow-up stage.
Hollinger: Independence Day - Intuited, determined or both?

Jun 20, 2024 | shawlocal.com | Rick Holinger

A few weeks ago, leaving a big-box store with a cart full of groceries, I tried to click open my 2009 black Prius with my key fob. When it didn’t respond, I tried the door handle. Still locked. Fearful my one key no longer worked and my groceries would melt while waiting for road assistance, I looked over the parking lot like a miracle would appear, and it did, in the sight of this car’s doppelganger parked nose to nose to it.
Fawning over tree stumps, deconstructing Mona Lisa dams and honoring crosses blossoming like trillium

May 30, 2024 | shawlocal.com | Rick Holinger

I write this in the North Woods early on the morning of Memorial Day, 2024. Ten minutes ago, my daughter interrupted me—thank goodness. “Dad, the fawn and doe are in the creek.”Three days ago, strolling along a grassy, two-rut path, taking photos of white trillium thick as dandelions on suburban lawns, I saw what I thought was a tree stump. Looking closer, I found a curled-up fawn, ears twitching, tiny stomach rising and falling as if panting.
Hollinger: Let’s make our post offices as hospitable as hospitals-big and small

May 23, 2024 | shawlocal.com | Rick Holinger

I required more than a stamp, so I walked up to the window of my small-town post office where I was told the color of something I needed from across the room. Only the color, not “cardboard envelope, top row, right side of the metal bin in the corner.”After minutes of searching, I might have brought back the wrong container or asked for better directions. Or both.
Shrinkflation: The slow loss of what we love - and sometimes need

Mar 28, 2024 | shawlocal.com | Rick Holinger

Everyone’s heard it. “Shrinkflation.” Companies put less product into a container and then charge the same price, or put the same amount into a container appearing larger and charge more. “Less chips, more air in the bag. Frito-Lay has confirmed that bags of Doritos are now smaller. The publication Quartz estimates the change, down to 9.25 ounces in a bag from 9.75 ounces, is about the equivalent of five fewer chips” (savannahnow.com/opinion). Chips are one thing. Toilet paper is another.