The Don't name a library after me please I'm still writing.

I had a long talk with my friend George Latimer,

the former mayor of St Paul last Monday that went on for 54 minutes which is a long time for a

dying man but Mayor Latimer is still quite feisty at the age of 88. He's been in and out of hospice a few times so his intentions are not clear and he was very funny which is how I

want to be when I'm dying should this ever occur I still think of him as mayor though he left office in

1990 because he's memorable. He won office despite being short and Lebanese which some voters misread as

lesbian and he's a native of Schenectady which is not in Minnesota nor even near it but

he could talk like a, speaking with great conviction while taking both sides of a question

so as not to disrespect those who disagree, and elaborating on the complexities so thoroughly that you forgot

what he had said. And St Paul was in rough shape at the time, and why would you impose the

Mayorship on a friend? So we elected an out-of-towner. In St. Paul, you're not a full citizen unless your grandmother was born there.

From the Mayorship, he descended into a spiral of deanships and professorships, board memberships, various eminent vacancies.

And ten years ago, St. Paul's downtown library was named the George Latimer Library,

which led many people to assume he was dead.

He called me last week, to tell me in his own words that he was not.

We agreed that the world we knew is slipping away.

We were troubled by the Minnesota Republican Convention

the previous week at which their apparent presidential nominee said that he had won the state

by a landslide, I quote, in 2020.

And the Republicans applauded,

even though he'd lost the state by roughly 230,000 votes, a margin that is hard to ignore.

In his speech, he said, no matter how hateful and corrupt the communists and criminals we are fighting

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