Where the Penguins Went to Roost

Before Sharon’s health issues prevented me from venturing out on my bicycle this spring, I had a ritual dearly loved and enjoyed. My Springtime bike rides into St. Paul and Minneapolis were classic-at least in my mind. They would begin innocently enough; unplanned, scheduled or routed. Just another Saturday morning jaunt to discover or rediscover parts of the Twin Cities I hadn’t been to for a long time. It was a return (abet, just passing through) to those parts of the city that had affected my life so many years ago.

First stop on my journey of discovery always began at the Dunn Brothers coffee shop in the Longfellow neighborhood of South Minneapolis. The earlier in the morning the better. The perfect time for insomniacs, running and biking fanatics and one oldster reclaiming his past.

After a less than nutritional breakfast and some reflection, it was time to begin my journey of discovery. It might be down Lake Street to downtown Minneapolis. It might be down the River Boulevard to the University of Minnesota or south to Minnehaha Park. Today, it was a quick decision to head east toward the rising sun and my old haunts in Saint Paul.

F. Scott. Fitzgerald used to live in a row house with the plaque out front before fame and alcohol cut short his writing career.

There’s a story here and a poem too (Under Cathedral Dome) but Alice wouldn’t approve and besides that was another era long since past. It’s probably best left unspoken now…unless it shows up in some future novel.

Then it was a drop down off of Ramsey hill to what was once the edge of downtown Saint Paul.

This would have been the first of several marginal rental properties we lived in before my mother built our home in Highland Park. Not surprisingly, the entire neighborhood has turned over several times now or morphed into empty lots. The playground in the background is now United Children’s Hospital.

My mother’s first and only grasp at entrepreneurship came right after she got married. It was a small café they called ‘Frenchy’s Eats’ named after my father who was French-Canadian. The venture failed miserably because, according to my mother, the help stole from her and my father drank away the profits.

At the other end of the block from ‘Frenchy’s Eats’ is the bar where legend has it my father drank almost every night. It was a half a block and a total lack of responsibility away from my mother’s dreams and aspirations. I’ve written a play entitled’ Frenchy’s Eats’ which explores that period in my mother’s life, my own life later on, and the ensuing repercussions that flowed downstream.

The only memory I have of this rundown six-plex is a phone call my mother received one evening. She started crying… then my sister started crying…so naturally, I started crying. I was six years old at the time.

Years later, I found out that the phone call was from a grandmother (on my father’s side) informing my mother that my father had just died in some old flea-bitten hotel in Missoula, Montana. My mother told us he was on his way back to Minnesota from the west coast… after an absence of four years from our lives?

We were always warned not to talk to or go by the DPs. They were displaced persons mostly from Eastern Europe who were resettling in Minnesota after the war. I learned much later the building was a way-station for these refugees because they had to be quarantined for a certain period of time. The units are all condos now.

The Little Sisters of the Poor have been doing God’s work since 1855. They were feeding and housing the poor long before I was born. They’re still doing it today.

Wilder Nursery was one of the few day-care operations for indigent folks back when. For my mother it was a God-send. There was this older black woman who was a playground supervisor. She liked me. Kids can always tell when an adult likes them. She called me ‘butterball’ probably because I wasn’t the thinnest kid on the block. It was my first taste of affection from another human being and made me feel warm all over.

On our sporadic outings from Wilder Nursery, we would go down to Irving Park. Back then, it was old and tired and a sad reminder of its glory days back in the twenties. I led my gang of four- year-olds from the nursery. We would run around and scream at the other kids and pretend we were cowboys. I had a vivid imagination even back then.

I’ve often said I’m grateful that my mother gave me life and raised us in this house instead of an apartment. There are a lot of memories there. Mostly good ones and I never once felt different from the other kids on the block because I had a house to live in like they did.

The nuns were housed in this large building across the street from the little French church downtown. My sister and I had to walk by the nun’s residence each morning coming up from the streetcar line. We were always worried we’d meet up with the nuns on their way to school. Dressed in black and white, strict, stern, never-smiling, a walk with them for any distance was pure torture. But by eighth grade, as only a group of smart-ass boys would agree, that was where the penguins went to roost each night.

I was conscripted into service as an altar boy right after fourth grade. My slot was the 11:30 mass every Sunday. So, for years I’d get up at 4:30 to do my paper route and then waste a good part of the morning until I took the bus downtown for mass. I argued for an early morning slot but the priest liked the schedule just as it was. It pleased my mother to see me serve God every Sunday but it sure screwed up my Sundays for other things.

St. Louis grade school was run with an iron fist by the French nuns. The entire school consisted of four large rooms, two per floor. There were two grades per room. The bathrooms and cafeteria were in the basement. Some of the nuns were nice but never overly friendly. Some (in retrospect) were psychotic and dangerous to small children and helpless animals. But that was a different era.

It was in first grade that the dear old nuns informed my mother that the French spelling of my name was Denis, not Dennis. I’ve been Denis ever since. I learned at an early age that one doesn’t challenge French nuns.  Shortly after I graduated, they tore down the school and put up a parking lot.

Cretin High School was a true turning point in my life. I was lost and scared and absolutely clueless. But somehow, I made it through four years and got a good education. After that, there was no turning back. While I was done trudging up the hill and avoiding the penguins, I was still on my quest for a lifetime of learning. My kids have already thanked me. My grandkids can thank me in the future.

My Tabernacle

It’s been almost a year and a half since we’ve been in Palm Springs. Last Fall, Sharon’s health issues curtailed traveling and relegated us to a long cold winter in Minnesota. Now we hope to return this fall. One of the first things I want to do upon my return to the desert is climb a mountain.

It’s my ‘third place’ in the desert much like my mulch garden is back in Minnesota. Most of us have a third place. First is home, second is work and third is some gathering spot for collecting one’s thoughts and sharing human kind. For me, it’s strictly a place to reflect and meditate on life’s bountiful basket of hopes and dreams, stumbles and leaps forward.

As much as I relish my citrus grove, lake front and Mississippi River for though-gathering, the mountains are special. Not just any mountain but my favorite sanctuary of solitude and comfort in my backyard. It’s my granite tabernacle for reflection and contemplation. A slab of rock that warms my bottom as well as my soul. An escape for quiet soul-searching amid the shadows of Indian lore and homes of the rich and invisible.  

The Coachella Valley is shouldered by several mountain chains which have imbued this area with numerous opportunities to seek solace, quiet reflection, exercise, and release from the routine of our daily lives.

Something magical; no almost spiritual, can happen during a mountain hike. It’s a physical as well as mental challenge. At face value, it can be an afternoon of hiking, climbing or finger-probing the rough crags and fissures of the mountain face. On a more spiritual level, it’s an assent into the vaulted realm of oxygen deprivation, aching muscles, sweat-drenched clothing, and overall mental exhilaration…all to put your head in the right place.

There’s a culture here among a small group of old ‘desert rats’ who work and hike these mountains year-round.  They care for the trails as an elder does the tribe. They endure scorching summer heat and windy overcast winter days. Most are rail-thin. Their skin looks like weathered copper or dried up old parchment. Most of them are lithe as an antelope.

Following that elite group of desert denizens come another eccentric group of trail runners and new age meditators.  They frequent the mountains like others hang out at Starbucks. Finally come the tourists, snowbirds and occasional weekend explorer (many with families in tow.)

In the spring, the trail is accented with blooming yellow brittlebush and flowering cacti…and at times an abundance of rattlesnakes. These rattlesnakes are usually very difficult to see since their coloration blends in perfectly with the rocks and gravel on the trail. One bite and it’s off to the hospital for several vials of antivenin serum. It’s an expensive proposition at several thousand dollars per vial.   

           

There are picnic tables at the top which are perfect for casual reflection without worrying about some rattlesnake biting you on the butt. Scenic vistas go on forever in a field of quiet that is almost deafening. Along with dreams and meandering what-ifs, it’s a perfect place to escape within your head and do some exploring there. But it still doesn’t compare to my tabernacle.

I’ve tried yoga, marathons and long trail runs. Collectively they punish the body and sometimes sooth the soul. Oxygen deprivation and bodily stress can cause the mind to wander into some very strange places. My tabernacle can also take me there. It just takes a long climb to get there.

Undressing My Avatar

One of the biggest challenges and ultimately greatest satisfaction for any writer comes from creating those characters that inhabit his or her world of fiction. It’s often the culmination of reimagining those elusive memories of people, places and events that made a significant im-pression on them. For me, it’s the art of encapsulating then capturing enough of a memory bubble to help recreate an avatar out of my past.

Sometimes the images jump out at me easily, defining themselves as perfect caricatures for the personas I’m trying to create. Other times they’re a combination of several individuals I’ve met or known in my past. It could also be someone’s unique personality, a character or figure from something I read or encountered or observed ions ago.

Yet there is always one major obstacle in creating such an avatar. The challenge of separating the reality of who I thought those people were from the reality of who really were. It’s like playing checkers inside my head, jumping from real to fictional, trading imagination for reality. The length of years passed only adds to the challenge of searching through the fog of time to gleam their true identity.

In essence I’m trying to unlock the layers of my memory bank and figure out who those people were back then and the role they played in my life. I am trying to undress them and, in the process, reveal their soul to my readers. Army friends, for example, stuck in khaki limbo, until another world beckoned them away.

But since mindset often colors personal experience, my recollections about that person tend to be less than completely accurate. Usually they’re reactions or prejudices based on limited knowledge or smeared into distortion by the passage of time and age and past conditioning.

Like most writers, I don’t know how to divorce my past lives, relationships, experiences, pre-judices, incidents, failures and successes from my story telling. That certainly is true when it comes to creating female characters in my stories.

The female protagonist, with all of her inherent complexities, is always harder to create than her male counterpart. Who am I really thinking of when I create a female character? My avatars aren’t always women I have known. They could be a movie character or stage persona that struck me with their unique characteristics, real or fictional. Unfortunately, it’s never a straight forward procedure but rather a rather subliminal process each time I want to create a new female character. I wish it were as easy as: “I knew that person…that person would suit my character… I will recreate that avatar in my character’s role.”

At times, it might be a compilation of several people that I’ve known or met in my past life even if I can’t identify with whom and or when or what exactly happened back then. But something did happen that scratched a memory scar on my brain that only now, through the creative process, is being uncovered as its multiple layers are peeled away.

It could be someone I never really knew that well but nevertheless left a strong impression on me. Like the dark-haired woman sipping her demitasse in Montmartre, Paris. She looked right through me with distain and disregard. Maybe it was that Canadian beauty in her tight turtle neck sweater pondering a new life in Belgium.

It could have been Maria, from Danish laundry, yearning for her Spanish homeland or the amorous Danish student who wanted to take me away for the weekend. It could have been Tina and our late night cerebral rendezvous in some nameless village in Denmark. It could have been that homeless old woman I met at Starbucks on Times Square.

It could be a moment in time that somehow left a scar in my brain. Images, real or otherwise, like that dusty curtain that framed a bedroom window overlooking the road outside, my mother’s sofa or singing folk songs at the Newman Center.

Photo Courtesy of Jerry Hoffman

I’ve met a lot of people through a lifetime of living and they’ve all left multiple impressions on my mind even if it wasn’t readily apparent at the time. Yet by wandering those dark dusty pass-ages of my memory alleys and byways, their personality traits/quirks/ flaws or subtle enounces often come to surface once again.

I want to remember what they felt like, smelt like, the vibes they were giving off even though most of us were oblivious to it at the time. I need to explore the essence of who they really were and then use that to recreate that person/s as my character.

If, in fact, my avatar is someone I used to know, I have to gleam from those scattered memories the most memorable incidents that defined that person. Their names define a moment, an in-cident and ultimately a part of me. Yet that process is never cut and dry. It took me six chapters before I figured out who Katherine really was in my novel “Follow the Cobbler.”  I was a bit surprised at first but then it really made perfect sense that this woman would bubble up to the surface and burst forth on my written pages. Fifty-five years and counting, she’s still around.

Some avatars are easy finds; others not so much. Yet all of them are a part of the wonderful discovery and refinement process that takes place when I finally seduce some fine woman into becoming my heroine, protagonist and, hopefully, memorable character in one of my stories.

Writing fiction for a female protagonist is more fluid than real life but can be just as challenging.