Dick Mertens, Clemens, 3, and Joana, 11, visited Sunday. Dick came in for the parties in honor of retiring Concord Monitor editor, Mike Pride. Dick’s first job after college (Carleton) was at the Monitor. He perfected his journalistic practice there for 10-15 years. Then he was a freelance reporter in Macedonia for a few years. Now he is a grad student with the Committee On Social Thought at the University of Chicago. He married his Macedonian wife, Afrodita, about seven? years ago. Her first daughter is Joana. She is from a Romany family in Skopje, popularly known as Gypsies. Dick says there is a small Romany community in Chicago. He still writes frequently for the Christian Science Monitor and was filing a story on the floods in Iowa as soon as he arrived and found our house had wi fi. After we had dinner downtown at the Lucky Dog they wanted to see the studio. I gave Joana a small painting she liked and Dick bought a big one. They left the next morning, Dick planning to stop in New York state to interview the poet Hayden Carruth. He interviewed him about ten years ago. Dick was thrilled that on a trip down South last year?, while in Kentucky, he and Joana chanced into a meeting with Wendell Berry’s brother, John.
