Spring Feverish

We went to MN Monthly's Food & Wine Experience at Target Field last Sunday.  It was a beautiful, sunny March afternoon at the ballpark, tasting local wines and brews alongside samplings from well-known restaurants in town and thinking of the upcoming Twins season, followed Monday by six inches of frozen precipitation.  I say precipitation because in March we don't have snowstorms.  We have multi-precipitory events.  It started overnight with standard sleet, laying a slick base layer of ice under everything to come.  Then, throughout most of the day what was primarily falling is technically called Graupel.  It is a horror.  Half snow, half hail, it is essentially tiny hardened snow pellets that pebble the ice layer previously laid down.  After this it went dry for a couple hours while the temperature dropped, followed by the main event, four more inches of crisp powder over the top of the pebbled ice layer.  I'm currently looking at my tomato seeds and experiencing some spring fever.  Springtime in Minnesota is essentially a game of chicken.  It's looking really good for an early thaw and you're putting your coats and boots away for the season and the next morning you wake up to seven inches of snow on your car.  And just when you're ready to end it all and drive into the Mississippi, you come home after work to see the crocuses are finally peaking out of the boulevard garden.
Minnesota is a spectacular place to live.  We have the longest summer days but we pay for them with cold and snowy winters that will test anyone’s resolve.  Minnesota is physically a large enough state to have a geographic optimism gap, too:  The southern and western portions of the state rely mainly on farming the land, and coaxing nutrients out of it, to provide both income and sustenance.  The northern and eastern parts rely heavily on mining the land, and selling what they take out of it, to get their incomes.  In northern Minnesota they know that eventually they’ll wake up and all the iron will be gone.  All they’ll have left is some glacial soil too rusty and sandy to grow anything in.  In the south it’s different – they plant crops in their loamy soil every time the frost goes away, and even if they have a bad year, there will be some harvest, sparse or lush.

I am of northern descent.  While I am a mildly successful home gardener, I still originate from that fatalistic stock of Midwesterners who know how finite their fortunes are.  The first time my cousin took me out into the forty acres of woods behind my grandmother’s house she told me a story about the Windigo and snuck away to leave me to find my own way back to the house.  I was eight, and it was January.  It gets dark at four-thirty in January in northern Minnesota.  In short, I was raised knowing this land (or something in it or inherent to it) will eventually kill me.  Like the aforementioned cold and/or snow.
But that’s the price we pay for our ridiculous quality of life in the upper midwest.  Whenever we sit in an inner tube in the middle of a lake drinking a mimosa in sunglasses on the 4th of July weekend with only a half dozen other boats on the lake we have the obligatory moment when we have to imagine that same lake frozen damn near solid in January, covered in blowing snow dunes, and realize how fortunate we are that the winter keeps anything more nefarious than a tent caterpillar from being able to pupate and survive in this place.  This year in fact was the first since 1924 that the overall temperature between Christmas and New Year’s Eve averaged sub-zero Fahrenheit, and they think it may have some impact on our fight against some invasive insects, saving some berries in the garden and some boulevard trees.

So let's talk about cold.  Zero degrees Fahrenheit is cold.  And you may have experienced some extreme cold and think that you know about cold.  You do not.  At zero degrees Fahrenheit we have to bring our beers in from the porch or they’ll freeze.  Zero degrees Fahrenheit is nothing.  For a solid week in January, the temperature outdoors (in the world your god supposedly made for us), dips as low as -17F (-27C).  This is a temperature few humans know how to behave in.  It does however provide us with a convenient blast chiller adjacent to our kitchen - January is when the best pot pies and other multi-layered savory dishes are prepared, due to our porch being a walk-in freezer for a few weeks.

When it gets brutally cold in the winter many people think that once it gets to a certain point it’s as cold as it can get, or at least as cold as one can perceive.  Once it gets to -2F for instance, it can’t get any colder, and any colder it gets doesn’t register because the body can’t compute that kind of cold.  That is a fallacy.  At -2F you need some serious layering, but with long underpants, an undershirt, some jeans, and a wool sweater, with a fleece or wool vest under your outer coat, and with gloves under mittens, a good hat, and a scarf you should be okay as long as you move your body.  If you’re walking briskly for a few blocks you’ll be fine.  At -17F, it doesn’t matter how many layers you have on - if you’re outdoors for more than a minute or so and you’re not moving you will start to die.  I have felt this sensation waiting for the bus - where my legs, despite three layers of wool, start to go numb in the wind.  My fingers, despite being inside fur-lined leather gloves, will begin to ache if they’re not also in a second layer (coat pockets or mittens). I honestly don’t know how bears and other hibernating animals do it…

We’ve gotten spoiled in recent years with mild winters, and I can only assume it’s because all eyes were on our Super Bowl this year that real, honest to god, frost-your-nuts winter has returned to us.  But I recall winters from my youth where it wouldn’t get above 0F for five or six days at a time.  I remember a Christmas in my mother’s hometown of Eveleth when everyone was at a Christmas Eve church service, and I was at the house alone and I went out for a smoke in -30F (that’s -35C for our worldly friends), and I was so addicted that I put on three separate pairs of gloves so I could stay out there and smoke a whole cigarette.  I should probably take this opportunity to apologize to my aunts, since I’m pretty sure one of them came back to find their gloves reeking of cigarette smoke that Christmas.

I honestly have been amazed in the nadir of winter crossing I-94 into downtown on the bus and I know it's -15F outside because I just waited in that cold for the bus to come (my beard is probably just getting thawed by now), and it's dark, but there's still a heavy stream of headlights coming out of the Lowry Hill Tunnel and tail lights going in, and life continues unimpeded by this ridiculous obstacle of cold that's been set before us at six or seven in the morning.  Minnesotans seem impervious to the cold that winter throws at us.  This is just where we live, and we'll work through the winter in order to see the Twins win a bunch of games next summer only to choke in August yet again, because that's what we do, goddamnit!  Even if we're not baseball fans, but just gardeners with weak tomato yields, this is still our ritual - crippling cold, then guarded optimism, then mild disappointment.  It's the Minnesota way.
So let's talk about snow.  If you live in Minnesota you can expect to push a stranger's car out of a snowbank approximately once per winter.  If you're doing winter right, you'll only be on the receiving end of that charity once every six or so years.  I'm going on seven winters myself, and feeling pretty good about it (I can't believe this was already seven years ago!)...  This year wasn't too bad until after the holidays, but some Monday in January we had our first real Roads Are Useless snowfall in a few winters, reminding us that winter can end us whenever it feels the whim, and I found myself driving home through ten inches of fresh powder.  I followed a trio of plows out Olson Memorial Highway, but as soon as I turned on Penn Ave I knew it was going to take some luck to get all the way home.  The car right in front of me kept skidding off to the right, but pulled back into the traffic ruts every time.  It took a while, but we got up to my neighborhood.
When I finally turned on 35th Ave, there was a white car at the alley hung perpendicularly across the entire drivable road.  The driver got out and put floor mats under the back tires (of course it was rear-wheel drive), and after she got back in they were still going nowhere.  So I turned off my car and got out, and two other neighbors coming from the other direction came over to help, and we gave her a shove backwards into the alley so she could then angle out with our help into a parallel spot against the curb.
When I got back into my car and drove past her I nearly got hung up myself turning from 35th to go the half-block to my house, but luckily the Malibu has a high enough undercarriage that it soldiered through the snow mess left by evacuating neighbors.  And I was back out after it finally stopped snowing at 11pm because it is way better to shovel and then go to bed than to have to shovel before you go to work.  I dug both cars out, shoveled the walk, and slept like a baby - for five hours until my alarm went off.  In most cities this would begin round two of the "Snow Might Kill You" show, but in MSP?  There was a snow emergency declared, which meant the entire Mpls fleet of plows was out overnight from 9pm to 9am plowing major arterial streets, which is great for my commute downtown.  By the time my wife and I came home after work at least half (the even side) of all non-snow emergency streets were also plowed to the curb.  And by the next morning?  Life moves on - the third day they plow the other (odd numbered) side of lesser streets, and then everything should be able to go back to normal.  And this just happens, several times per winter, whenever more than six inches of snow falls, the city says "parking is weird for three days," and then you just keep going about your business.  But going about you business starts to seem bleak after six months.  That's how the snow demoralizes you.  Prince was not kidding around - it actually snows pretty often in April.  I've seen it snow here as early as mid-October (ask any Minnesotan about the Halloween Blizzard, we all have a story), and I've seen it snow as late as May 5.  And it's not like it snows and goes away either - between those calendar extremes you can sometimes have to navigate through this.  So when those crocuses show up, or when I can get the tomatoes started in the basement, it feels like a remarkable victory against the forces of the Windigo, and I get to spend a few glorious days living in the mind of a Southern Minnesotan, with my eyes on the harvest rather than the eternal frost.

Infinite Potential

I love having an autumn birthday.  A birthday is a great time for self-assessment.  And autumn is a great metaphor for inevitable decay.  Getting intimate with my own mortality at a time of year when my entire habitat is shutting down to hibernate and go numb has made me the existentialist powerhouse I am today.  Yes I did just take a couple of 8-hour courses in CPR & first aid, so yes it’s on the front burner, but even aside from that, how does one live in the Northland and not think often of death?  I don’t mean that in a morbid way, but every October I watch my garden wither, and well, I’m used to it.  And I know in the spring when new plants come they won’t be the same plants, but they will offer the same fruit by the 4^th of July.  It’s not sad when they finish producing, it just means I need to get out the canning kettle.  We are tilting away from the sun, and it’s about to get cold for a while.

Sometimes on a September morning on the bus, if the sky to the east over the river has the right light and the right mixture of low Stratus and high Cirrus clouds, I begin to think about infinity.  When I look at the clouds and think of the enormity of things, I am sometimes over-awed.  I have to look away because it is just too vast to comprehend.  I look down at the skyline of the city I love, and the small scale makes sense.  I can see the building where I work from the bus, and this is a comfort.  I am headed toward a warm tower where I have created my own world.  The clouds above are not gigantic quivering pools in the infinite sky, but just a backdrop.  They are decoration behind the tangible play that is my life.  The building where I work is 792 feet tall.  I work in the basement (or concourse), about 16 feet below street level.  The parking ramp goes down three more levels, so I would guess all told that adds another sixty feet at most to the overall height.  When I walk through the dock from the tower to my office, I see these giant concrete columns, and they enclose steel beams.  Beams that are around nine-hundred feet long.  That’s .17 miles.  That’s a long piece of steel.  But I can make sense of it.  I’ve been to both ends of it.  I work at the bottom, and I’ve eaten (and served) holiday brunches at the top.  It’s a long elevator ride, but I can fit it in my head.  When I see a jet contrail against an orange sky, that’s sometimes 36,000 feet in the air.  That’s almost seven miles.  Think of something seven miles away from you on the surface of the earth, and try to imagine seeing it from where you are.  Imagine everything that exists between you and it isn’t there – that’s just space.  Seven miles is a longer distance than you think it is.  To put it differently, it takes roughly 45 seconds to get from the basement to the 50^th floor, but imagine that times forty-five to get to 36K ft.  That’s a really long elevator ride.  Thirty-three and a half minutes of express elevator.  On top of this mindfuck, there are clouds that you can see up to eight times further away than that.  Not to mention the satellites blinking cheerfully as they traverse the night sky.  They are barely clinging to Earth’s gravity.  I sometimes think I’ll understand the scale of the universe better once I die.  Once I’m not trying to fathom eternity, but rather am a part of it, it may all be clearer to me.

Neil Armstrong recently died.  He is the fourth moon-walker to leave us, of twelve.  His peers were all born in the 1930’s, and soon there will be no one left alive who went to the moon.  That’s weird – it’s like old Tolkien-esque fantasy books, where there’s this mythical land that’s been mapped and explored, but no one alive has seen it, and no one can recall how to get to it.

It made me think about our collective lore a little.  What is lore?  It’s wisdom passed down generationally, or the fundamental narrative of a people, no?  A people, of course, is the collective description of a person.  It is like a school of fish or a murder of crows. More than that though, it is a tribe or a nation – it is a group of persons who all share a similar origin story.  The words, ideas, and solutions to problems may be different, debatable, or even diametrically opposed, but the frameworks in which the texts are built are the same.

Name a common exclamation of frustration when someone can’t accomplish something because of a technological shortfall.  I’d bet that by “Family Feud” rules, the phrase “we can put a man on the (God-damned) moon, but we can’t _____!” would be on the board.  The moon, and the fact that our peers have been there, is such an inherent part of our culture that I can’t even imagine someone coming back and saying, “Wait – can we put a man on the moon?”  A man on the moon is the concrete model of an abstract American Ingenuity that still exists, and still drives us to strive.  It’s the original MTV logo, for Christ’s sake.

So we went to the moon.  So what?  Well, for one thing, it is one of the oldest recurring characters in our discourse.  If you want to wax poetic about it, it has gazed down upon every moment of our history, yet it has always been out of our reach.  The very concept of flying through space to reach it is kind of absurd.  Can you blame the ancients for anthropomorphizing it as a god?

The peak of Everest is one thing.  You’re still standing on the planet where you originated.  The bottom of the ocean is one thing.  You couldn’t live there, and there are a lot of hostile conditions between you and home, but you’re still standing (submarining) on the planet where you originated.  When you stand on the moon the hostile conditions between you and home are literally nothing.  There is an actual lifeless void between you and the place that made you.  And you’re outside of its gravitational pull.

It is weird for me to think of all the moon-walkers being gone because it’s not like in my family when my mom says, “Grandpa came from Vermont,” and none of my cousins have been there.  There is a road between Vermont and me, and if I wanted to go there, all I’d need is a long weekend.  If no one remains who has been to the moon though, we actually do lose some real experience, via collective memory, that we can’t get back.  That road closes, and the moon passes into our history.  But I’ve seen enough 1960’s TV to know that the moon has always been our future, not our past.  The popculturephile in me cries out against this relegation of the moon to some musty academic “seen it,” but a certain voice in the back of my head tells me it doesn’t really matter.  On a larger scale, we can lose the voices that came back from the moon, but we can never lose the knowledge gained from the moon trips, or any other space explorations. 

Speaking of enormous distances, remember the Pale Blue Dot?  Dr. Carl Sagan’s single pixel of light is an actual photograph of our entire world in its greater context.  That is what I think of sometimes in the morning on the bus.  Because I am in that photograph.  And if you were born before 1990, so are you.  I was likely riding my bike with my friend Jon to Krinke’s Korner Grocery in New Brighton, or building one of a dozen or so tree forts in the forests of Arden Hills.  But I’m on that tiny blue speck living my life in that photo, just like the boy hustling in the streets of Santo Domingo is in that photo.  Just like the girl fishing a Norwegian fjord is in that photo, and like the old man hunting in the jungles of the Congo is in that photo.  And if you zoom out on that photo, there is no way to tell what time of year it is on Earth.  For the record, it was taken between March and June of 1990, so springtime in the northern hemisphere.  On half of that blue dot the days were getting longer.  On the other half, they were tilting away from the sun, and it was about to get cold for a while.

Ode à la Grand Marais

When I was twenty-two, my best friend Jon and his girlfriend Jill invited me to join them for a weekend festival in Grand Marais on the North Shore of Lake Superior.  It was something of a family tradition for Jill, and apparently that year was the first summer the honors had been opened up to non-family members.  I was flattered, and didn’t have anything else going on that weekend, so I said I’d be there, on a lark.  I haven’t missed the Fisherman’s Picnic since.  The first few years I was there I learned the history of the group – who the regulars were and how the stateside kids had gone up and met the Canadians and they had all hiked up the rivers and jumped from bluffs and played in rapids together and other harrowing feats.  Near-death experiences in the formative years nourish life-long bonds; this I know as someone who was once seventeen.  I know how romantically dangerous a street dance on a Saturday night can be, juxtaposed against afternoons leaping forty feet into an icy brook with complete confidence.
But by the time I showed up, we were older, if not necessarily wiser.  When I started going up we were walking back to the campground from town as cautionary tales – with our cigarettes, and our liters of vodka and the innocent DQ Mr. Misties we poured the Karkov into.  We were higher than the kites we flew all afternoon Saturday on the beach, but we didn’t care, because it was the most fun we’d have in one weekend all year.  To be a hedonist among puritans, just once a year, is an experience I highly recommend.  It will discombobulate you, but luckily that word sounds a little dirty, so you’re already on the right track.We went on for several years, kayaking in the harbor, Bingo-ing at the legion hall, and climbing on the rocks overlooking the bay.  One weekend per year, we got to get all our crazy out at the end of summer and come back to the city to be serious for the oncoming winter.  That is, until Jill’s parents bought a house in town.  We all claimed to have figurative roots in the town, now suddenly they had put down literal ones.  And it's an adorable little cottage a block from the main drag, with an extra bedroom.  Then something different happened.  Jill, who had long since broken amicably from my best man, married the guy she was destined for.  And they had twins.  Twins!
Ages on, most of us still make the pilgrimage every August, though now things have changed slightly, and not in any way I could have predicted. My friends and I still go up north every summer, and those with kids bring them along.  We all have mellowed, though we’ve done so at different paces.  Some of us have children, others don’t.  Some of us still camp, others don’t.  Most of us still hike out to the bonfire one of the nights, and get just a little bit silly.
I was the first at the campsite this year, and that’s never happened before (I didn’t even make it up first the year that I paid for it).  My initial priority was getting my tent up and checking out the rainbow over the bay to the East.  When my campmate arrived, he & I enjoyed a couple beers and some homemade brittle and waited for the familied friends to get in touch.  After they did, we were anchored in the town with them and in the festival for the weekend.  I don’t have children, but I know quite a few of them, and it is a humbling moment the first time you turn to the baby you think you know and realize you’re talking to a fully formed human child, capable of running, and laughing, and skipping stones, and you have stories that predate her.  She did not exist when most of your life took place.  She is a Descendant.
When you have so many years of history in a place it is tempting to claim it as your own.  When you can no longer differentiate the years you were down by the lake from the years you were up on the hill – and no one thing happened in any specific summer or another – you don’t just have a history, you have a mythology.  Yet while it’s tempting to claim it as your festival, it is so much bigger than you.  It is the one who shaped you, not the other way around.  It went on for decades before you arrived, and it will go on just as merrily if you never come back.  But you are that little girl.  You are a product, a Descendant, of it, and you owe a little piece of who you are to it.  Here’s to you, Grand Marais… may you shape and mold many good friends to come.

A Few Observations on Weather

Talk about your second takes.  Banana Blossom reopened.  I know, that’s old news, it happened months ago, but it’s great news to me because I still haven’t dropped in yet, and I am so excited to try this place.  I thought I had missed my chance.  They were open for a couple years with me driving by at least five times a week and thinking I really wanna try the food there.  Then it was hit by a tornado.  Not just grazed, either, but really slammed into like a hockey puck to the larynx.  It was over.  I lost my chance.  And chances don’t come along everyday on the north side.  When I moved into this neighborhood seven years ago there was a fantastic Caribbean joint a block from my house.  They had the best food, a spectacular happy hour, and plans for a delightful & sunny patio.  They got a glowing review from Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl back when she was with the City Pages.  Even with all of this going for them they took on too much debt and closed within the year.  I’ve read the statistics - 60% of restaurants fail in the first three years, and by five years the failure rate jumps to 75%.  I’ve worked in the industry for over a decade (I even waited on Dara once, when I briefly worked at Tryg’s), and I knew how the cards were stacked.  I knew I had completely missed my window of opportunity to try Banana Blossom’s fare, and that they were not coming back.  Yet somehow they did come back after the tornado!  Last fall the new glass went into their large front windows, and now they’ve been reopened for some time, and their food looks spectacular in photos!  I shall not continue to squander this blessing.  I shall support these ridiculously lucky NoMi entrepreneurs, and go there this week, I promise.

The end of May was the anniversary of that North Minneapolis tornado.  MPR made a huge deal about it.  I was on the bus on my way to work the next week, and noticed they had taken another house on the block on the northwest corner of Broadway & Penn Aves.  Now there is the old fast food place that’s boarded up, and one house still standing.  That is all.

I honestly don’t know if anyone is living, or considering living, in this house (it’s doubtful, but there’s no plywood over the doors or windows, so it’s not unthinkable), but still it occurred to me how odd it would be to wake up one morning and be the only house left on your block.  What do you do, with no fences, no hedges, no gates or delineations whatsoever, when you have a WHOLE CITY BLOCK to yourself?  On a major crossroads?  It’s not like this house is down by the park or tucked away along the creek or anything – it is smack in the geographical center of the poorest neighborhood in the city, and it’s alone on an EMPTY block.  The building I wanted my start-up business in used to be there, but has since been torn down (a result of the tornado).  St. Anne’s Catholic Community is right across 26^th  Ave, too, so it’s not like no one is ever walking around here.

Take a moment to imagine yourself at home.  Now imagine waking up one morning to find you could peer across the street in every direction without obstruction.  Weird, right?  One recent Sunday I found myself on the 50^th floor where I work, and from 750 feet above street level you can definitely see the stripe of no trees slash diagonally across North, from Broadway & Penn to Lyndale & 42^nd.  I always found it difficult to locate my house from up there, now it’s right next to the white stripe, half way up, a few blocks off the left side.

No, we haven’t completely recovered.  A year later there are still houses with bright blue tarps on their roofs.  Many of these houses will probably never again support human life.  Many have already been taken by the bulldozers and the excavators, but of those that remain, few will stand in another year.  My favorite anchor on Penn & Broadway is trying to recoup & rebuild across the street from their now demolished building, on the empty block – I assume just because they have half a century’s worth of ties to the neighborhood.

I was at ALDI the other day buying some groceries, and there was a woman in front of me in line with the words “Project Bitch” tattooed just above her waistline, in a cursive tramp stamp.  I thought it was an apt metaphor for our shared neighborhood.  It IS a project.  It is a project that we’ve been working on for years, and one that is consistently frustrated by profiling, or stereotyping, or tornadoes.  It is something of a bitch, and there is still a narrative on the north side of a person with their fists up, a person who resents the scrutiny.  We take care of our own here; it’s just what we do.  We don’t need local TV news to pat us on the back for it.

So now everybody’s impressed with how many things have returned to normal on the north side.  Really?  It’s been A YEAR.  Many homes weathered the winter snows (thankfully sparse this year, but still…) WITHOUT ROOFS INTACT.  That is not normal.  Nor, in any other neighborhood, would you dream of saying, “wow, they’ve come so far” if that were the case for any fraction of the housing stock.  A year later they are still bulldozing tornado homes.  That’s how many were affected.  And the sad thing is most of them had only minor damage.  They just didn’t have any tenants or non-bank related interested parties to fix the minor damage, so exposed to the elements for a year it has become major damage.  If you want to know how far we’ve come in a year, come park at Penn & Broadway and get out of your car.  Take a moment to turn 360 degrees and really take in the cityscape.  You’ll wonder how many DAYS it’s been since the storm.

So feel free to congratulate us on the progress we’ve made, but don’t pretend there aren’t still empty lots full of crabgrass that no one wants to own.  We live in a vacuum that can only be filled by investment.  We need people to want to live where we live in order to recover, and right now on the north side of Minneapolis that prospect seems like something of a pipe dream.  All I can say is how much I love my neighborhood, and how much you’d love it, if only we could get some commerce up in here, and if only we could get some positive press.  I’m still waiting to see a billboard that says, “North Side: Come weather the storm with us, and rebuild something today.”

Thanks, Pop.

I recently saw this post on the Newscut Blog by Bob Collins.  It got me to thinking.  I have seen pictures of my dad when he was younger than I am now.  In fact, I once made a lamp for him and my mother made from slides from when they were first married.  It didn’t occur to me then, but now I am a couple years older than he was in those old photos.  I’ve heard stories from when he was younger than me.  The only problem with this is, the things people tell stories about are the exceptional things:  great accomplishments, life-altering journeys, epiphanies, and the like.  I don’t feel my personal story-worthy life events even compare with what I knew about my dad when I turned 19 and moved into my first apartment.  He was an Infallible Elder to me then.   All of the wonderful, relatable things I know about him, the things that have made us peers, I’ve learned since then.  I’ve learned that we’re a lot more alike than I ever assumed growing up.  I remember going to a Twins game with him and my friend Jill at the HHH Metrodome and having Jill tell me afterwards how weird it was to see the two of us sitting together, both leaning forward, arms on our knees, fingers interlocked, our weight on the balls of our feet, in the exact same pose as one another without intending it.  It was made more noticeable by the fact that white guys with beards tend to look alike, but at age 23 I was already becoming my father.

You think by the time you move out of your parents’ house that you know everything there is to know about these people who raised you.  I know I did.  After all, I’d spent every day of my life either with them or in relation to them.  What I hadn’t considered was that they hadn’t spent their every day in relation to me.  They had a whole life together before I came along.  A life when they made some of the same choices and mistakes that I have since made, because there are certain lessons that cannot be taught, but must be learned.

When I was 20 I moved to California, and my dad helped me get there.  When you spend two and a half days in a truck cab with someone, sleeping in rest stops with all your possessions just behind the back wall, there’s no way to not learn a few new things about them.  On that trip I learned about Dad's college weekend road trips, but also that he had a lot more wisdom to impart than just how to use a band saw (although this has proven helpful too).  That trip is also why, when Mom tells me that Dad is driving solo from my sister’s house in Seattle to my parents’ home in Tucson, I don’t worry.  I still want my mother to check in when I know she’s on the road.  Dad I know I don’t need to worry about on crazy feats of endurance travel.  I’ve seen the man do it.

After I bought a house back in Mpls, Dad came north to help me paint it.  I recall coming home one day to find he had climbed up the ladder to the porch roof with the six-foot A-frame ladder over his shoulder.  He had then propped the A-frame against the side of the house on the pitched roof to hang onto my louvered attic vent with one hand and use the other hand to paint the peak of the gable of my house (I assume he did this while I was at work because he knew I’d talk him out of it if I were home).  That is something I would never do.  Not for anyone.  I don’t necessarily have a fear of heights, I just don’t trust my own sense of balance that much.  If he ever asked, though, I’d do it for Dad.  Because I know he’d do the same for me, and has.  I won’t go into specifics, because I don’t want to give him ideas, but there are countless things that I’d never dream of doing ordinarily that I wouldn’t hesitate to do for my father.  When someone has your back like that, you have to reciprocate.  The man taught me how to be me, for god’s sake.  You can’t ever hope to repay that – all you can do is pay it forward.  Thanks, Dad.  I love you.  Happy Father’s Day.

Stormy Weather

On Sunday, May 22nd, I was at home watching a thunderstorm roll in from the southwest. I had all the windows open to air out the house (our house has deep eaves, so I wasn’t worried about the rain). When the power went off I started closing windows for the oncoming storm. Then the sirens started. I went out the (open) back door to the deck into a noise unlike anything I have heard in my yard before. When I looked eastward, toward the front yard, I could see a cloud of debris beyond the neighbor’s houses moving from south to north, brown and chunky in the yellow-green light of the afternoon. They have said that by the time the warning was issued and the sirens went off the funnel cloud was already on the ground. I went back inside, and downstairs.
Over the last three and a half weeks I have seen things in my neighborhood that I haven’t seen in six years of living in my home. I have seen people who may have lived next to one another for years without exchanging hellos, but now are out working together getting a limb off of a porch, or clearing shingles out of a driveway so the construction crew can get through, or nailing a tarp over a gaping hole in a roof.
It’s almost a cliché to point out the Coming Together and Neighbors Helping Neighbors aspect of it all, but it truly is something of a surprise. The day of the storm my favorite neighborhood liquor store was hit pretty hard. The conventional thought is “liquor store – can’t be a good thing for the neighborhood,” but this place really was an asset. They had wine tastings, they were always out front putting annuals in the giant flower pots on the sidewalk, they almost never had panhandlers around; they were just a locally run small business with a fifty-plus year history on West Broadway – a fixture of the north side. The storm came on a Sunday, when liquor stores aren’t open. No one was there when the windows blew out. They were looted. That is sadly what I expected to hear more of, but as far as I’ve heard it was an isolated incident. I’ve heard stories about renters caught up in bureaucratic snafus with the city inspections division, which do not surprise me in the least (don’t get me started on the city of Minneapolis inspections division – if you’re interested, see the comment from Kevin Moberg after the Newscut link below). But I am embarrassed to admit that, even after six years of saying hi to my neighbors and lending them yard tools and such (even the one or two whom I didn’t care for), it surprised me to see the level of cooperation this neighborhood has risen to.
In the day or two directly after the storm, there were people who just sat in their vans in vacant parking lots on corners, waiting for someone to need a ride somewhere. There was one guy who got kicked out by the city for his volunteer efforts. There were shops that, as soon as they had plywood over the still-exposed broken glass in their windows, immediately spray-painted “We’re open!” all over the outside of said plywood and threw their doors open to the people of the neighborhood. Monday morning Lisa and I went to the Lowry Café for some breakfast, and our waitress said they were the only building on that corner with electricity. People were coming in all morning to charge cell phones and blackberries, without being made to purchase anything. Now that’s neighborhood.
I grew up in an insular suburban community. We all would have pooled our resources to help Mrs. Pearson, or the Sawyers, if they needed it, so I’m familiar with neighborly bonds. What is weird is that in that community we all already knew each other. In north Minneapolis, some dude could walk up from the alley and tell me he’s lived here for ages, and needs some help getting debris out of the way down the block, and I’d grab a saw. I wouldn’t ask who he is. I wouldn’t question his motives. Because I’ve been on the receiving end of this Good Samaritanism, and I am more than happy to pay it forward.
I have nothing against suburbs - I loved growing up in them. And I love visiting my friends on the south side of town, or across the river, or outstate. I love living in a state where everyone is happy to help one another no matter where they come from or what their background may be, but I will say that I really love my neighborhood, and my neighbors. We on the North Side are a resilient people, more resilient than may be obvious to most of the Metro Populace, and I am proud of my neighborhood for having set a high bar as the standard for communities working together in the Twin Cities. God bless, and god speed your recovery, friends.

Blessing Count 2010

Lisa and I worked both days this blizzarific weekend at The Hotel in Downtown Minneapolis. Saturday morning we got up and I had to give myself a little extra time to clear off the car before we left. We decided to park in the heated garage under The Hotel to avoid what we’d already heard would be a snowstorm of biblical proportions. It was crazy downtown. Everything was closed. The people in The Hotel had nowhere else to eat. We were busier than we’ve been on a weekend in months. By 2:00 P.M. when we were done with work, the airport had closed. The people who were supposed to check out ended up having to stay another night before flying home, so there were no extra rooms for employees. We thought about leaving the car in the garage (since we don’t have one at the house) and busing home and back downtown the next morning, but by that point the buses had stopped running. We didn’t have a choice. We had to drive home.
Everything went well at first. The thoroughfares were passable. Not clear, but flat-ish, and about ten feet wide between canyon walls of plow deposits. The problem came when we turned off of Penn Avenue to travel the one block to our house. The snow was just a bit higher than the undercarriage of my Geo Prism, and we couldn’t go. A car was trying to pass around the protruding rear end of the Geo, so I had to run a half-block to the house and grab two shovels. When I returned they tried to help me dig out of the bank, but the car wasn’t going anywhere. Out of sheer luck a guy drove up with a plow on his pickup truck. He opened his window and hung his stubbled face out, cigarette hanging unattended from his mouth, and asked if we could roll back far enough for him to clear us a parking space on the curb of 34th. Seriously, if he hadn’t come along at that moment we would likely have been digging out for hours into the night. He looked a little like a young Billy Joel, if Billy Joel drove a plow for a living. That was the first Christmas miracle.
The next morning we came out to the car to drive back to the hotel for day two of Blizzaricious. We turned around without incident (since Billy had cleared the whole intersection the day before), and got up to the light to turn back onto Penn. The problem was this: Penn Ave is a snow emergency route – it’s the first to be plowed. 34th is not – it’s low priority. So turning from 34th to Penn involves barreling through the plow contrail left the night before and ice-hardened into a car stopping rampart. We hadn’t had the foresight to stow shovels in the car before we left, so we sat, hung halfway between the street we lived on and the street that would take us to work, while I poked at the snowpack under the car with my windshield scraper and cursed. Our neighbor, a man we had met on the street but not really exchanged more than a moment’s pleasantries with, happened to be waiting at the corner for a bus that I assume was never coming. He came over and helped us push off of the plowridge, to universal delight. We weren’t sure if buses had been reinstated at that point, but offered him a ride downtown anyway. He doesn’t speak English super fluently, but we shared some laughs on the drive nonetheless. That was the second Christmas miracle.
By the time we were done with work at 1:00 on Sunday life was almost back to normal. The snow was manageable, the streets were clear, and the populace was self-absorbed again. People had dealt with the adversity and moved on and were either gearing up for the workweek or heading home to finally relax, but I won't forget that twice over the stormy days we were rescued by an unlikely Samaritan. To mystery plow man, thank you, and you may in fact be right – I may be crazy. To our neighbor, come up the block, friend, and we shall feed you. I’d love to hear more about where you have come from, and how much we have in common, while we share some dinner together. Skol.

My God Can Beat Up Your God

I am an atheist. As such, it is easy for me to worship in America, as I can do so pretty much anywhere I please. I worship in the North Woods whenever the Aurora Borealis show their face. I worship in the great Southwestern Desert when I experience true silence in the face of the enormity of the landscape. In the Northwest I worship with oceanic mist splashing up on my face from the rocks below. Sometimes I worship in my own backyard when I think about the bounty of vegetables my little plot of land in the city has offered up for me. I worship a very different God, though, than that which many of my neighbors revere.
I cannot imagine a situation where I would tell one of those neighbors, “please, don’t pray to your God here.” There is neither a physical place nor a metaphysical space where I would ever ask someone not to commune with their higher power.
I don’t understand how a person in the United States of America can “respectfully” ask another person not to worship somewhere. I, as a non-believer, can walk into any church I want and pray in my head to whatever deity I choose. Muslims can go right up to the fences surrounding ground zero and pray – I don’t think even Sarah Palin would try to stop them. What difference, exactly, is there if they choose to build a community center nearby in which to carry out their prayers and ministries?
There is no disrespect taking place here. Disrespect would be if someone were recruiting martyrs from nearby neighborhoods to brainwash them and set them loose on the populace. We’re talking about a Cultural Center and Gym. The plans even include a 9/11 memorial. How can anyone claim the people behind this project are being insensitive to the memories of the people who died?
I give up. I really can’t make a better case than Mayor Michael Bloomberg did at Governor’s Island on August 3, and thank whatever God you believe in that New York has this guy now instead of the Giulli-turd. I never really felt that connected with Bloomberg, but after this speech I’d give him a kidney. Him and any other American who makes it in before we change the 14th Amendment.
It’s about ideals, people. It’s not about commandments. It’s not about prohibitions. It’s not about arbitrary sanctions. It’s America. It’s about freedoms. Anyone who tells you different hasn’t been paying attention for the last 200 years. And it’s not just about freedom of religion; it’s about freedom of interpretation. It’s about tearing along I-80 at 120 MPH up the Donner Pass. That is when I worship my God – when said God reminds me that s/he could end me at any given moment. If the exercise of your freedoms does not impinge on anyone else’s exercise of their freedoms, you can worship or do just about anything else any damn place you want.
So the Dove World Outreach Center wants us all to burn a Koran on September 11th. How is this helpful? How a dove, the symbol of peace, can be turned into an omen, is beyond me. In fact, how the Dove Outreach Center can call itself that while the only out-reaching it is doing is to sucker-punch those of us who have compassion, is beyond me. Apparently, they’ve out-reached their welcome. I for one plan to spend this coming September 11th how I spend most Saturdays since my hours have been cut back at work – exulting in my own idleness. I’ll probably pick some tomatoes from the garden to make a BLT, maybe go for a bike ride, maybe mail a Koran to the Dove World Outreach Center. I’d like it if they read it, but I can’t stop them from using it however they see fit. It is America, after all.

A Summer Weekend in the Country

Three-hundred-sixty days a year, this hillside is an ordinary hillside. Full of unmown grass and unchecked groves of old growth trees. Five days out of the year though, Hennepin County descends on this place and turns it into something grand. The striped canvas canopies go up, the rides are erected, and the livestock are unloaded into their sawdust-floored tent. Funnel cakes and corn dogs are fried, and the air is filled with music, mud, and aromas of all kinds.
Twine goes up in horizontal lines to demark parking spaces. Signs appear on the two-lane county highways surrounding the grounds. The majority of people in the county, being city-dwellers, don’t notice. But the most talented bakers, quilters, musicians, and demolition drivers from Hennepin County converge on this park in Corcoran to show off their skills and wares, and to be judged by their peers. Teenagers come from far and wide around the area to preen, to parade, and to pretend they don’t know their whole world is watching them.
The county fair is a microcosm of Americana in the Midwest. By daylight, the respectable elders showcase their learned skills and crafts to the universal admiration of one and all, while the kids pet goats and eat mini-donuts. Then, once the sun goes down and the faux calliope on the carousel starts up, all of our progeny line up to be happily loaded into an iron cage by a mustachioed man and hurled into the night in every direction, against all the advice we’ve given them (and remember, this is in contrast to the demolition derby drivers). By night, there are all kinds of unsavory joys – mud, beer, rock and roll, cotton candy. There is an unspoken element of the unsafe in a county fair. Something that harkens back to ages ago, it may be a horticultural gathering place for the families of the county, but it still has an air that might just seduce your son to run away with the traveling circus.
I once met a girl who later ended up running away with a carny from the state fair midway. I never really understood why until I went to the Hennepin County Fair for the first time. There is in fact a romantic element to the fair (by which I refer to number 4a in the Merriam-Webster definition). The exhibitions and petting zoos are contrasted with the traveling people who turn it into a spectacle. Without the carnival aspect, it’s just a quilting bee. With them, it becomes an event. It is impressive to imagine that these people, these travelers, create this much awe and wonder from an ordinary hillside wherever they go, and to want to imagine we can become such catalysts for adventure ourselves.
I am old enough to know better. I have moved beyond the barking and preening, and I am comfortable not creating awe wherever I go. I am content to pet the goats and I am impressed by the ribbons on the jelly jars. My fiancée, as it turns out, makes the best corn relish in Hennepin County. We found this out last summer, when an impartial panel of judges bestowed a ribbon and a very proletarian $8 prize on her. The eight bucks I’m sure we spent on beer, or produce, or maybe a movie ticket, but the fact that the relish came in first is something we’ve yet to grow tired of. I myself entered some of my Swedish Rye Bread this year, and Octoberfest Mustard, and Maple Nut-Brown Ale, just because I can, and for zero dollars, it’s the best price for feedback.
But what I’m really going to the fair for is the demolition derby. It’s the mustachioed man loading kids into the “Kami-Kaze” ride. It’s the sitting under the big tent with a beer and a corn dog imagining how peaceful this hillside normally is, and what we degenerates have done with it. And yes, it’s for coming home with mud on every bit of my clothing and not being even the least bit sorry. Because I’m not one of the respectable elders yet, and I won’t act like one until I earn that blue ribbon.

Runaway Carts and Forgotten Produce

I had my own little "Sliding Doors" moment this evening. Bear with me through the background: Lisa and I were making spicy ginger sticky wings for dinner, and we thought we'd do a cabbage salad to go with them. I, however, had forgotten to buy scallions last time I was at the store. So while the wings cooked, I headed over to Rainbow Foods to get a bunch. Rainbow in Robbinsdale is in a giant old building with an interminable surface parking lot that spans a couple thousand feet along Bottineau Blvd, where it is shared by an Outpatient Center for North Memorial.
So I walked in from the car through hurricane gusts (it's been windy in the Midwest today), got my fifty-nine cent bunch of green onions, and stepped up to the register. The clerk and I exchanged some banter: "Just the onions?" "Yeah," I said, "I forgot ONE ingredient when I was here earlier. Next time I'm making a list." We both chuckled. As I walked away I realized she had forgotten to give me my 41¢ change from my dollar. I paused and thought, "it's just forty-one cents," and kept walking. As I was exiting the store there was a woman in front of me pushing a cart with one bag of groceries and her (I would guess) four year old son in it. Coming out the front door I noticed out of the corner of my eye one of those big, heavy, child-seat equipped carts rolling, propelled by this evening's heavy winds up the parking lot straight for them. There was a girl coming into the store who had seen this and was jogging over, but couldn't get there in time. I ran ahead and stopped the cart just before it hit this woman, her cart, and consequently her kid. It was actually moving at a clip with some destructive momentum. She thanked me, and I said "Where the hell did that come from?" The other girl said, "Way over there! We watched it come all the way up from the hospital!"
I'm not saying I saved anyone's life, but it occurred to me that if I had turned around and said, "Excuse me ma'am, I think you forgot my change," I likely would have exited the store to see this woman standing over her son, skinned knees and all, surrounded by groceries in the parking lot. I'd say avoiding the band-aids and repacking was worth forty-one cents. But now I have to go raid the couch cushions so I can get a paper tomorrow morning.

Of Ice and Men

I was thinking about something last week while my team lost our final curling match of the season.
My Grandfather (maternal, I never knew my paternal) died when I was twenty years old. I remember very few moments of my early childhood, but those that I do involve his errorless hand. Not in some creepy Jim Jones way, but merely as the trusted family elder who knew a lot of things about a lot of things. All of my uncles, competent men who were experts in their fields, would defer to him and ask his opinion.
When Grandma moved out of their house a couple years later, I was just starting to curl at the St. Paul club, so my mother nabbed his old trophies for me as they were clearing out the house. I thought, wow, my grandfather led his team to victory! After six seasons of playing the game myself I now know that this, of course, is not even remotely true. Curling is a four-person game. From the order of names on the trophies in my den I would guess my granddad played second or third for his team. So there is a good chance he got chewed out on a semi-weekly basis. Don’t get me wrong – curling is a tactful sport, it’s not like anyone was tearing into him, but if he flashed a take-out, or hogged a guard, I’m sure his teammates let him know just how short he fell of their expectations.
It is a really odd thing… picturing my grandfather, the family patriarch, as a curler. Picturing someone turning to my grandfather, sacred elder of my childhood, and calling, “why weren’t you on that earlier, chucklehead?!” This is not the portrait I have of him in my mind (perhaps my mother’s may come closer to that than mine). The vision makes him instantly more relatable, not the wise distant elder, but some bumbling guy who happened to sire five children (and he was a great father who did raise them well). I have to say I think I prefer this idea of him. I never really saw too many likenesses between us until I could imagine him stepping out onto the sheet and forgetting he had his gripper off and landing ass-first on the ice. Or having to buy the first round after the game because he missed his last shot. He has attained a hallowed place in my pantheon of Stoic Old Men Who Talk Straight, but the idea of him throwing 42 pounds of granite across the ice makes him seem like a fallible human again. It is so easy to canonize the dead, and some people will always condemn you if you try to make them human. I however am happy to see the ills of my heroes so I know I can someday hope to become a shadow of what they were on this Earth. So thanks, Grandpa - you still have mighty big shoes for me to fill, but with this new perspective I at least have a fighting chance.

I think we've all had enough here.

Language alert: some people or employers may take issue with a couple of words in this post. Also, an apology: I know I promised a reprieve from my recent rants, but this is too important not to talk about, even in this micro format.
In the year 2009, Minneapolis had 19 homicides, down from 40 in 2008. We all felt good – violent crime was on the retreat. These numbers were in contrast to the mid-nineties, when my city was burdened with the moniker “Murderapolis” with 97 at its annual peak in 1995. Last year’s 19 is the lowest we’ve had in over 25 years.
It is now March 7. In 2010 so far, we’ve had 10 homicides. In the first two months of the year (the quietest crime months, historically), we’re already halfway through last year’s total. I was at the store buying some beer yesterday after driving through a mob of people on Penn and 26th. There were bullhorns, cruisers, and hand-made signs. I didn’t read the paper on Friday, so I asked at the store about the gathering. The cashier said it was a march for peace, and the guy behind me in line chimed in: “This is messed up, man! I’m not from here, but where I’m from, if someone’s on the street and they fuck up, brother gets gat, but no one else. Up here, this gang banging all over, people ain’t even involved, minding their business getting gunned down!” Last year I would have said he was wrong, and that innocents are largely safe. This year I’m no longer so sure. The crowd was a peace march to the church where the funeral was being held for the latest shooting victim, a 17 year old girl shot in the neck while standing in a group of friends outside a party. I thought, well that’s good. It’s good that people are standing up to this and being counted against this violence. Then this morning I opened up the local section of the paper to read that a gang fight broke out inside the church at the conclusion of the 17 year old girl’s funeral. Do me a favor and read the underlined, linked portion of that sentence aloud. See if you aren’t just a little ashamed to be talking about a major American city. Seriously, at a fucking funeral?!
What the hell is wrong with these assholes? I’m sorry, but I’ve lived on the north side long enough to say this is my neighborhood too - as well as the woman two houses down who works for the city, the men who own and run the Quick Mart two blocks over, the teachers at the school at the end of my block, not to mention the children going to said school - and I’d like to respectfully ask these gang bangers to get the hell out of our city. We citizens of this place are trying to build a positive community up here, opening restaurants and businesses, creating community gardens, making public art, and you are cutting down our efforts. So get out. If you want to be a tough guy, cowboy, or vigilante with your guns and dope, you go do it somewhere else. We’re trying to freakin' live here. The quotation in the paper from Al Flowers, the former mayoral candidate, community activist, and sometimes political troublemaker, says it best. Outside the church yesterday, he called into a bullhorn as the police tried to diffuse the situation, “This is a baby’s funeral! Seventeen years old and she can’t rest in peace?”
Can I just say that in five plus years of owning a home on the north side of MPLS, this spring is the first time I’ve ever avoided certain areas of the neighborhood, even in my car, for safety reasons. That is not the neighborhood I bought into, and desperately wanted to turn into a beautiful urban area. That is not a place I would want to open a business or raise a family in. That is not a place that will attract new residents – residents who care about the place and want to live in a truly neighborly hood.
I’ve always been the quiet neighbor. The guy who lives here and gardens and walks places in the neighborhood, but pretty much keeps to himself. As of now I am making a resolution (if a late one). This year I am going to be more involved in the life of the greater community. I will get to know more of my neighbors, and show them that I truly care about our block, our community, and their own well-being. I will attend block parties, Take Back the Night picnics, and public festivals. I will be a visible part of this neighborhood, because I am a part of it, and I don’t like some of the violent elements that have been rearing their ugly, gun-toting heads lately. So to the north side council members, Don Samuels, Diane Hofstede, & my own Barb Johnson, police chief Tim Dolan, and Mayor R.T. Rybak, I say this: I’m going to do my part. Now it is up to you all to give us a fighting chance. Step up beat patrols, yes, but also get more familiar with this troubled community. Ask us how the municipal powers that be can facilitate growth and the culture of this part of the city. We are unique, and have unique problems here. We will need unique solutions that only we on the ground can come up with, but only you can make happen. Let’s talk.

Of Losses, Big & Small

Right now I can't decide which is a bigger disappointment - being a liberal Democrat or being a Vikings fan. They are actually remarkably similar disappointments. Both teams are powerless for long stretches, unable to do anything productive for fans or constituents, and then every few years they find a star (or an all-star cast), and the hope starts to grow again. It starts small - you think, hey, maybe we'll actually get to the postseason this year, or, all right, maybe we'll get the money back to get those 35,000 people back on healthcare rolls. But soon enough the stars start to impress, and you start the season 9-0, and you start dreaming Superbowl dreams. Or a young upstart shows up, energizing the party and sweeping a wave of optimism into Washington.
This is it! This is the best chance you've ever had to get to the big game, or to insure every man, woman, and child! If you're going to do it, this is the best group of people with the best shot at it! Everything is going along swimmingly until an interception is thrown, or it comes out that someone in the party said something stupid and racist. A recovered fumble is lost again, rather than being run in for a touchdown. Fox news is allowed to dictate the discourse, and somehow manages to paint you as simultaneously weak, and a fascist. The perfect kicker misses his first field goal of the year. You lose a seat in a safe state, and have to kiss your whole year of work goodbye (the Kennedy seat? Really? Top notch work, guys!). You try to play it cool - it was too bad, but we'll come out just as hard next year! However, as the year plays on, it becomes apparent that the star just can't stay here if we're not going to be competitive - we lose him to a richer team out east. Remember those Fox news viewers? They vote your guys out. And suddenly you realize you're "rebuilding" again. When will the next time come when the hope starts? You don't know, but you're sure you won't fall for it again. Screw those bums, if they can't do anything! If they're always going to almost achieve, only to shoot themselves in the foot again, you're just not going to hope anymore!
But you can't help it, because it's in your blood. I didn't ask to be a Vikings fan. I know most of them barely have any ties to this geographical place, but somehow they still conjure in me a pride in my homeland, the North Woods. I didn't ask to be a Liberal Democrat. It's not my fault I was born with compassion and empathy. I never asked my parents to instill in me a concept of fairness and justice for every person, but now I'm stuck with it. This winter has been especially brutal, with the disparity between hopes and results much larger than usual. I'm not saying I'm giving up on either of my ineffectual teams, but we'd better get either a Superbowl win or universal health care soon, because I don't know how much more of this disappointment I can take.

All's Fair at the Fair...

Alright, I spent the day at the Minnesota State Fair Saturday. I love that once a year I have to physically prepare myself for a fair. More on that in my Yelp.com review of it here. We hit the Creative Activities building to check out Lisa's award-winning strawberry jelly, we saw the state's biggest boar (testicles the size of my head, no lie), we took a tour of some of the campers that make me celebrate humankind's ability to cram the necessities of life into no more than one hundred square feet, and we also celebrated Michelle Bachmann's craziness immortalized in three, count 'em, three separate seed-art pieces (see below for one of them).

There were the butter heads of Princess Kay of the Milky Way, there were the curds (of course), and there was heritage square. Heritage square is this little area between the Midway and the Grandstand that is a celebration of State Fair history, and Carnival culture in Minnesota. I love the fair because every year I get more disillusioned with public life, but every year there is a place where I can go and be one hundred percent public for a day and no one judges me for it. It is a real, geographical place that we all (200,000 of us) converge on to be swept through the streets by the crowd and be offered so many options of how to spend our precious fair hours, show off our wares, or interact with our elected officials. Or one could watch a parade of costumed llamas, or win a giant stuffed banana, or get scared out of one's wits at the haunted house.

We got to see the Rockabilly show from Deke Dickerson and the Ecco-fonics at one of the free stages (see right), and then we got to wander the midway after dark and take in the lights, the sweat, the carny raconteurs, the fried dough smell, and the awkward teenagers trying to impress one another.

Here's why fairs like this are still relevant in the twenty-first century: They are the last remaining vestige of original festival Americana. They are the only place one can still see the Family Farm in all its glory. They are one of the rare spots where all the pretense is thrown out the window and buyers aren't afraid to haggle and hawkers aren't modest. They are one of the only places left where everybody in the community comes together with all our diverse interests and ideas and we just exist together, and if we don't like someone we meet, to hell with it, we'll spend some time chatting anyway - we're at the Fair after all. It's the only place I've ever bummed a smoke from a guy and spent the next twenty minutes talking (as a city boy) to him about crop yield. It's the only place I've ever had a political debate with someone I don't agree with not devolve into either a shouting match or quiet resentment (because at least we could agree on the cheese curds, maybe).

I know the festival of the harvest goes all the way back to pagan times, but there's just something so quintessentially American about it in my mind - maybe instilled by the Pilgrim Thanksgiving stories from my elementary school days, but I think it's more than that. As I said in my review on Yelp (not to plug that again), it is a bacchanal of proportions that match our wide horizons. As Midwesterners, we in Minnesota are part of one of the largest and most productive agricultural regions on the planet, and as such whether one lives in the city or the country or a small town one has a basic connection to the land and its offerings that makes us respect the end of summer and the onset of autumn. That is why State Fairs are still relevant in our culture, and I am thankful to my state for putting on the best damn one there is (see below).

Requiem for a Lion

Well, it finally happened. Teddy is gone. God bless him, and God speed. He will be missed. I cannot think of anyone in Congress who had more friends on the other side of the aisle. I was actually trying to conjure someone with similar bipartisan respect, and as much as I love calling Al Franken my U.S. Senator, the only other person I can come up with is Paul Wellstone. God only knows where we'd be if that blessed man were still alive and in the senate. We were robbed of the next generation's Liberal Lion by that plane crash. But as for the original Lion, Edward, let's state the obvious: He was the only Kennedy brother who lived long enough to see his hair turn white, and arguably the one who made the most difference in American life, just given the length of his political tenure. He was a Kennedy, to be sure, and as such he was dogged by allegations of all kinds, from unseemly partying to the Chappaquiddick incident. But at heart, he was a liberal senator capable of building the kind of consensus with conservatives we can't even imagine in today's politically charged arena.
So now we're left with Patrick, a Congressional Kennedy without the charisma of a Jack or a Bobby or even his late father Ted. I say that without venom - I really like Pat Kennedy (and his unlikely friendship with our own Minnesotan Jim Ramstad), but it would appear that the dynastic days have finally drawn to a close, and this Mayo Clinic rehab alum will be content to quietly champion his causes without meriting undue spotlight. For that I commend him, and as a Midwesterner I respect his humility. From what I can tell, it seems that the story of the greatest generation Kennedy brothers has been one of failure to live up to expectations, and I salute Patrick for moving past that. Tonight on PBS they had a special highlighting the Joe Jr. through Ted generation and they kept mentioning the onus that was put on the survivors. When John died Bobby had to live up. When Bobby died Ted had to live up. It appears that the next generation of Kennedys is over that particular pressure. RFK Jr or Pat Kennedy aren't running for national office any time soon, and that is to their credit. And so with the passing of a lion, an entire coat of arms fades into American political history. We'll miss you, Edward.

I'm well, thanks.

I got called off of work today, and was a little bitter about it. Lisa came home and I walked up to the market for milk. There was, as always, some idiot in front of me buying seven thousand candy bars with her EBT food-stamp card. I was in a foul mood standing there with my purchase, waiting to set down my two freaking dollars and go home, and the woman behind me said, "How you doin' today?" I assumed she was talking to someone else in the store until she came around my left side and repeated herself with eye contact, verbatim, with the exact same cadence: "How you doin' today?" I was a little taken aback, and then answered, "Very well, you?" She said she was well too. So all is well.
What she probably doesn't know, though, is that this turned my whole day around. when I left for the store I was a much maligned proletariat denied a day's work and forced to spend more on milk. I had to put up with the riff-raff of the neighborhood in front of me in line and was feeling surly about everything. As soon as this woman asked me how I was, though, I thought for half a second and said "very well, you?" I guess I hadn't thought about it, but in the grand scheme my life is pretty decent, and I'm lucky that the worst thing I can complain about is some trashy shit in front of me buying junk food using state funds. That's really not that bad. That's just living in this neighborhood. So when she asked that innocent question (twice), she brought to my attention the fact that I really am, in fact, quite well. I could gripe, but overall things are pretty okay. I assume that's what she meant when she replied with the same answer - she's probably got a mortgage or rent payment she's worried about, and maybe the house next door is vacant and haven to unsavories, but damnit, she lives here and cares about who else does. She genuinely wanted to know if I was doing alright, and genuinely wanted me to know that she was too.
So thank you, Quick Stop lady, for some much needed perspective on my day. I am very well, thank you, and I hope you can say the same. Let's do this again sometime soon.