Back in the Saddle Again

I’ve had a life-long love affair with bicycles. Starting with my first hundred pound Huffy in my youth then a more peer-acceptable Schwinn in my teen years. Later on, I got my first racing bicycle, a Peugeot. As I matured, I got a more sophisticated Cannondale then a Raleigh hybrid and finally a mountain bike and another Trek hybrid.

Last season when Brian was in town, we rented a couple of e-bikes and cruised my Palm Springs neighborhood. I tested out the pedal-assist gears and the throttle for longer hauls. The difference between a regular bicycle and this HRA-sanctioned mini-street rod was amazing. I was hooked.

When Sharon and I returned to Minnesota, I happened to come across a floor model on sale at my local bike shop and I was back in the saddle again. It had been a long time since I first ventured out beyond my hood to explore the greater Twin Cities area. Back in the day, it was nothing for me to take my hybrid, load it on my classic Ford Escape and go thirty or forty miles in the early morning hours. I developed a taste for touring that didn’t want to stop. Now I get to pick it up all over again.

It seems as if it was only yesterday when I was a casual interloper in the early morning world of iron riders and rail thin runners. They were early morning vagabonds who needed their cup of Joe to kick-start each day. It was an eclectic group of support crew, racers and runners gathered together to taste the first bite of dawn and forthcoming self-induced punishment.

After they left, I began my own Saturday morning meandering through the Twin Cities. There wasn’t an agenda or route to follow. My imagination and ever elusive recollections of times past would point me in some direction.

There had been some interesting feedback on my nostalgic trips visiting old haunts around the Twin Cities. Some readers liked the trips down memory lane. Others questioned why I kept going back almost as if I’m trying to relive my past. I thought I had touched on that in some of my blogs My Bootleg Years or I Found Susan’s House.

It used to be that during the summer months I’d take long bike rides to peruse my old haunts for changes or as a way to recap old memories still lingering there. But something happened this last time that altered that perception.

Surprisingly it wasn’t the old haunts that had changed. Instead, it was something that clicked differently inside my head this time around. I came to the sobering realization that not only were the old places gone but now they were relegated to the dust bins of history.

The Twin Cities had become a wasteland of relics from my past. A time long since forgotten except in black and white photos and old vinyl recordings. Time has that tendency to erase most vestiges of a period and in its place leave only vapid memory vapors that drift in and out of our consciousness from time to time. The changes were all around me but I didn’t see it until that summer.

I first discovered the Midtown Greenway many years ago. It’s a four-and-a-half-mile old railroad bed that had been converted to a bike path. That route begins on the Mississippi River Boulevard and ends around Lake Calhoun and Lake of the Isles. It became my gateway to downtown Minneapolis, Nord East, the Mississippi River, and many points North and East.

The intoxicating smell of soap weed and other noxious plants permeate the air. It brings back poignant memories of delivering newspapers past weed-choked empty fields those warm summer mornings.

An old black man is sitting outside his public housing unit. He’s smoking the first of many funny cigarettes. He waves and shouts: How ya doing? I answer “Just great” as I fly by with a casual nod. He smiles back and takes another puff, lost in his own little world.

The West Bank is where drunks and druggies and the homeless used to pester me outside the Triangle Bar. Now there are new groups of immigrants taking over the streets. The crowds used to be white. Now, not so much. The Triangle bar was shuttered decades ago and with it a visible reminder of my youthful days of hopes and dreams and wild aspirations.

A couple of blocks from my first apartment there used to be a seedy rundown strip mall with a Red Owl Grocery store where I got my meager staples and tins. Progress erased any and every vestige of that old neighborhood.

A grassy corner is all that remains where my squalid apartment building used to languish. The General Mills Research Lab replaced it. Now that building is also a thing of the past and reportedly going to be torn down.

Dinkytown was my hangout, refuge, local dive and music venue when I lived nearby. I tried to capture its ambiance in my novella: ‘Agnes, First Taste of Love.’ Granted, it wasn’t the Triangle Bar but its cast of characters wasn’t that far behind.

If rubble could talk it would speak volumes about Dinky town of the past. But those drab dirty old buildings are gone now along with their voices rendered mute. They’ve been replaced by developer’s fact sheets and city planner’s visions for a new student hometown. Dinky town today isn’t even close to what it once was. Now that they’ve ripped the soul out of the place city fathers want to make it an historic district. What a joke.

Wandering through the U of M campus did little to regenerate old memories of my brief existence there as a student. The closest I came to captured that old mind-set was the U of M School of Journalism. But that was before I dropped out, got drafted and began the rest of my life in earnest.

The Dew Drop on the campus of the University of St. Catherine’s was a font of old memories. There were a couple of girlfriends back then and toe-dancing with romance as if I knew what I was doing. When that ploy failed, I began tripping around the globe until that wandering ended in matrimony.

The old Ford auto plant, once a staple of local fixtures during my youth, is now gone. In its place has sprung up a one hundred-and-twenty-five-acre development site full of a wide variety of housing and some commercial entities. Little it seems has remained of my youth in terms of buildings,

Part of me thinks I won’t be retracing my old bike routes anymore. It won’t be because of bad memories. Rather the absence of visible landmarks makes it harder to reconcile memories with recollection, nostalgia with history and reality with a reflective glance at my past. It’s a gravel road that has long since been paved over.

Yet time is on my side. I still get to look back through old photographs in awe and amazement at what once was while still listening to those old familiar musical refrains. Once on the road in my new e-bike, I’ll be a younger man, with a volt of electricity to guide me along the way, still eager to blaze new memory trails and perhaps crossing paths with some old memory haunts yet undiscovered. That wouldn’t be a bad thing either.

Strange California Connections

Around 1968, Paul Whiteman, a well-known big band leader from the 20s and 30s, built his west coast home in a new California development called Canyon Country Club Estates.

Canyon Country Club Estates had been carved out of the barren desert just south of downtown Palm Springs. It was meant to be a welcoming enclave for Jewish families who in the past had been denied membership in the other country clubs around the Coachella Valley. It turns out, this was just the first of a number of strange California connections for me.

Back up some forty-plus years and this same Big Band Leader and composer was performing in a midwestern auditorium as part of his nationwide tour for that season. A young adventurous woman named Hildegarde Noll was in the audience along with her girlfriends. They were all experiencing the big cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul for the first times in their lives. Hildegarde had moved down from Sterns County. She was one of eight children raised in a strict German Catholic farming family. She and her friends all worked as maids for well-to-do notables along Summit Avenue.

Hildegarde’s California connections run shallow and deep at the same time. She moved out west with several girlfriends and all secured jobs as maids for the monied elite who lived on Seventeen Mile Drive in Carmel. Her job allowed her to move from one millionaire’s home to the next, serving Hollywood stars and East Coast Industrialists.

As the kids and I drove along 17- mile drive by Carmel-by-the-Sea a couple of weeks ago, I couldn’t help but think about what it must have been like almost one hundred years earlier for my mother. She would have been in that same neighborhood, going into Monterey for household supplies and doing sundry chores. She probably walked the same wharf and along Cannery Row years earlier. It was as if we were both breathing in the same salt air. Sadly, all of that ended when her father got sick back on the farm and Hildegarde returned to Minnesota to care for him.

Fast forward a number of years later on and my mother, now separated from her husband (my father), was solicited for household help once again on the West Coast. Upon arrival, the job around Santa Barbara had unexpectedly disappeared. Hildegarde was left almost penniless with two toddlers in hand and no new job prospects. After spending less than a month there, she was forced to return to Minnesota once again.

As the kids and I drove around Monterey, Carmel-by-the-sea, Big Sur then down to Santa Barbara, I couldn’t help but reflect on what might have happened if my mom had gotten that job and stayed in California. Is it unreasonable to think that if she had stayed there, I might have found myself living an entirely different lifestyle rather than the one I had in St. Paul? I guess I’ll never know.

There is one thing I am sure of. Paul Whiteman only stayed in Canyon Country Club Estates for less than five years. He missed his old bandmates back east and returned to New Hampshire where he passed away shortly thereafter.

His home went through a series of owners until the mid-2000s when, once again, a Minnesota connection reappeared. Long-since enamored with California, this couple, a writer, and an artist, bought the house without knowing it’s past owner. My recent jaunt with the kids along the PCH only reinforced an over-active imagination that wondered: ‘What if?’

Mom, I’m back in California once again. Sure do miss you here.

On the Road Again

It’s my first long distance bike ride of the season and the season is almost over.

My normal routine of long bike rides was upended this summer by play practice, acting, and finally the production of my own play ‘Riot at Sage Corner.’ I sprinted to freedom the morning after our cast party.

Long distance bike riding, or in reality, meandering - is soul-searching at its finest. It’s yoga on wheels and meditation in the saddle. It’s a rediscovery of past haunts, mis-spent youth, lost love and between the sign posts… myself.  I’m alone with my recollections, dreams, passions and ever-present tape recorder to capture those fleeting thoughts that sometimes go in one ear and get stuck there.

The coffee shop is a welcome sight of iron riders and rail thin runners. These mostly white middle-age athletes are gearing up for several races this fall.  They’re early morning vagabonds who need their cup of Joe to kick-start each day. It’s an eclectic group of support crew, racers, runners and neighborhood hangers-on gathered together to taste the first bite of dawn and forthcoming self-induced punishment. I’m here to look and marvel and suppress my envy.

There are also a lot of runners out training for the Twin Cities Marathon. The Tour de France wannabes haven’t yet begun to cluster around my coffee shop before their race down Summit Avenue. Today it’s only the hardcore diehards or marginally insane who are out exercising this frosty morning.

After they leave I’ll begin my Saturday morning meanderings through the Twin Cities. There won’t be an agenda or route to follow. My imagination and ever elusive recollections of times past will point me in some direction. Crossing the bridge, I see the U of M rowing club is out before barges crowd the waterways.

It used to be that during the summer months I’d take long bike rides to peruse my old haunts for changes or as a way to recap old memories still lingering there. But something happened late last summer that altered that perception.

Surprisingly it wasn’t the old haunts that had changed. Instead it was something that clicked differently inside my head that time around. I came to the sobering realization that not only were the old places gone but now they were relegated to the dust bins of history.

The Twin Cities had become a wasteland of relics from my past. A time long forgotten except in black and white photos and old vinyl recordings. Time has that tendency to erase most vestiges of a period and in its place leave only vapid memory vapors that drift in and out of our consciousness from time to time.

The changes were all around me but I didn’t see it until last fall.

Much like another blog At the corner of Fairview and Summit, this ride will take me past a lot of my old haunts and a retracing of my other lives. Most of those old places are now generations apart from where I am today. But they still bring back a boatload of memories, most of them good and a few very poignant.

It’s so early on Summit Avenue, the governor is still asleep. My first romantic breakup after Sunday mass took place just down the block. At this point in my third and last marathon I was pretty much a walking, jogging zombie; each step as painful as the last. I worked briefly for the Catholic Archdiocese in the James J. Hill Mansion. Sharden Productions, Inc. and related real estate ventures were conceived in those oak-paneled halls.

The Little French Church is now surrounded by high-rise apartments and light rail tracks. For me it was eight years of Catholic education. Daily mass because we had to and public transportation before it became hip. Does anyone remember the street cars which came before buses?

I moved with public television down to Lowertown when it was still empty warehouses and parking lots. Now it’s a hip thriving ‘happening’ place for millennials. Nearby the Mississippi River has long been a magnet for the land-locked before Laguna Beach and the PCH fueled my own latent surfer’s imagination.

    

Melanie’s home is just two blocks off of my old paper route. Here the latest rage is teardowns and larger homes because the neighborhood has gotten so hot. Who knew? Fifty years ago we couldn’t wait to ‘get out of Dodge.’ Now they’re flocking back to raise their families in my old backyard.

There’s something about this place that still draws me back even in the chill of early fall. And it has nothing to do with the images that corporate and government Minnesota want to paint for outsiders.

Forget about what the PR hacks are saying or the Chamber of Commerce’s latest spiel about the glories of living in Minnesota. Forget our professional (subsidized) sports teams or even dare I say, Garrison Keller’s Prairie Home Companion as a folksy homespun version of Grandma’s tales of yesteryear.

      

Instead I’m talking about a culture of intrinsic family values, a creed of hard work and an unapologetic pride in being from here. They say our cold weather leaves just the strong of heart behind. I touched on this in my blog: Going Home Again. Whether it’s true or not, it is a moniker I subscribe to.

I don’t think I’ll be retracing my old bike routes anymore. It won’t be because of bad memories. Rather the absence of visible landmarks makes it harder to reconcile memories with recollection, nostalgia with history and reality with a reflective glance at my past. It’s a gravel road that has been paved over.

Yet time is on my side. I still get to look back through old photographs in awe and amazement at what once was while still listening to those old familiar musical refrains. I’m still reliving so much that others can’t or won’t see or feel themselves.

Come next spring, new adventures wait. Charlotte, my youngest granddaughter, is now a two-wheeler like her brother. Perhaps I can enlist them as my posse and together we can discover new routes and adventures around the Twin Cities. I’ll be a younger man then and hopefully still eager to blaze new memory trails for that younger generation.

Perhaps I’ll cross trails with some old memory haunts yet undiscovered.

That wouldn’t be a bad thing either.