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.

Back to My Future

Marty McBride did it in 1985, a trip backwards into the future. Recently for Father’s Day, my daughter took me on that same trip back into the future. I saw things as they had become, not as they used to be, when I was growing up. It was a world changing around me even as my own world kept getting smaller and smaller.

‘The way they used to be’ was the world I came from. It was where I grew up and a world where I’ve been held hostage by my vapid memories for all these years. It was a future which I’ve only glimpsed at in quick head turns at social media press clippings.

University Avenue, where used car lots once proliferated the landscape, has been sliced and diced by light rail, high and low income apartments, and craft breweries. Now there are gourmet restaurants serving food I can’t even pronounce and a brand new temple to soccer which wasn’t even around when I was passing through there. When I was growing up, sandlot baseball was about as close to sports as I ever got. I never played a single game even though the lot wasn’t that far away.

This new temple to the skilled game of kick ball has replaced the bus barns which replaced the streetcar barns decades earlier. There are more slots for bike parking than stalls for cars and the light rail is only steps away. My, how things have changed.

Soccer entered our lives with our two kids playing VAA (Valley Athletic Association) soccer each summer. That was soon replaced by high school sports and our world moved on. Now the grandkids (at least the Minnesota ones) get to experience the game on a whole new professional level. Lucky them.

A century-old brewery omnipresent during my eight year bus ride downtown to grade school is now an indoor shopping mall planted next door to artist’s lofts and gallery space. A fixture on the West Seventh Street corridor has morphed into retail and residential space.

Where barrels of mash once rolled off the assembly line, now tiny shops catering to curious millennial tastes dominate the landscape. It was a challenge not to question some of the shops and restaurants there for their unique blend of ‘what is that’ and ‘you’ve got to be kidding me.’ But that’s just the old man in me talking now. I kept my mouth shut and enjoyed the trip into my kids' and grandkids' future. We’re not in Old Saint Paul anymore.

In my time, the Irvine Park neighborhood which abutted West Seventh Street corridor was a sad remnant of a once glorious past. The ornate mansions and upscale housing had been reduced to rooming houses, decrepit run down shacks and poor people’s palaces. Wilder Playground was our refuge when Mom was at work and the Gem Theater provided wonderful distractions from the reality at home. West Seventh Street was a commercial thoroughfare of auto shops, thrift stores, and small neighborhood grocery stores just barely hold on to solvency. But time changes all things.

An auto garage located not far from my itinerant home in Poorville is now a hip brewery. There’s a food truck planted next door where I first ventured out to explore the neighborhood on my bicycle. That is the future few saw coming from my old part of town.

It’s all become a new part of town that I won’t see much of in the future. I have moved on both physically and mentally. There are simply too many mountains to climb and rivers to cross with the time I have left. But it’s nice to know the old neighborhood has come around again.