Stuff

Text by Claire Baiz

While I discuss the relative merits of a tile sample, my husband tilts his head and gazes, puppy-like, past my shoulder. I get it. He wants to go outside. Well, Buddy, not until I get some cogent feedback.

Text by Claire Baiz

“Can you at least wait until I die?”

My mother was only half joking.

I wasn’t about to succumb to guilt. Most people move away from home when they’re kids—I’m almost sixty. “Tell you what, Mom,” I sighed. “Why don’t we wait until after I die?”

Helena’s Precious Dinosaur

Text by Claire Baiz

“Yes. I was there.” Frieda Fligelman forced a smile. She said it again, softer the second time. “Now, let’s talk about something else.”

I was eighteen, she was eighty-five. Fligelman was treating me to lunch upstairs at the historic Montana Club, a block off Helena’s Last Chance Gulch. She refused to say what she witnessed in Wenceslas Square in Prague, Czechoslovakia, in October 1918.

Though we met several more times, I never pried. Was there a lost love in Prague? Perhaps, after fifty-seven years, she was still overcome by World War I, the

Text by Claire Baiz

It’s been less than twenty-four hours since Josh Parocai got out of the Cascade County Detention Center, and he’s sweating it out with a heavy implement dealer, a retired lawyer, a senior airman, and the Director of Development at the University of Great Falls.

Half of them have their shirts off. For a few, it ain’t pretty.

By 12:30, sixteen players have joined Parocai on the basketball court at the Great Falls Rec Center, 801 2nd Avenue North. There are four black guys, at least two Native Americans, a handsome dark skinned blue-eyed guy, a spectrum of Christians and Agnostics, a second-generation American Muslim, and a woman. Their ages range from 20 to 66.

“It’s the best pickup game in town,” says Kylie Diedrich, a former UGF Lady Argo. Diedrich is just another player—except, in a game of shirts and skins, you can be pretty sure which team she’s on.

Text by Claire Baiz

I couldn’t bear to carry our Encyclopedia Britannica to the dumpster. I made my husband do it.

We waited for a sunny Saturday to shlep four cardboard boxes to a flat spot beside our stinky, shoulder-high garbage bin. Every few hours, I peeked through a hole in our fence to see if they were still there.

Tom and I are downsizing. We figured it was a longshot, that someone would troll our alley for obsolete leather-bound reference books. We were desperate.