Real Housewives of the Twin Cities

This would probably make any realtor cringe. The idea that, for some, home-buying is a beauty contest draped in stately homes, manicured lawns, a little red school house for precious cherubs and a blissful existence for any and all who enter its realm. This is in line with the preachings of The Journal of Consumer Affairs which ranks (tongue stuck in cheek) the ‘best places to live’ around the country. Their curated list, in turn, ranks in the same category as the home-buying philosophy found in Money Magazine, People Magazine, and YouTube videos.

Anyone and everyone, with their own vested interest, can tell you where the best place to live might be. The reality is that home-buying is often a game in which it’s the best façade that wins in terms of pedigree, history, desirable zip codes and the illusion that says once there, ‘you’ve arrived.’

It seems as if Lakeville wants to be the new Edina. Edina wants to keep its crown while the outlier suburbs want a piece of that action too. Highland Park has kept its panache and St. Louis Park seems to want theirs back by rebranding itself ‘Westapolis.’ Then there are other communities like Burnsville who wonder what happened to their once esteemed status in the greater pecking order of ‘I have arrived’ homes. Minnetonka Beach seems to have grabbed that title from them for now.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I understand the ‘hype.’ I live in California half the year and certainly get it in terms of presenting the best home-buying package possible. Yet, it’s been interesting to watch what’s happening with home-buying in the Twin Cities? It used to be so clear and simple. Where you lived was often determined by proximity to jobs, schools, retail and entertainment. While that equation hasn’t changed its coat of many colors, the real estate lexicon has evolved with the times.

I’ve been out of the real estate game for some time now but my interest hasn’t diminished over the years. With the miles traveled, it’s often interesting, amusing and at times perplexing to me to see what the current market is like. It seems that what’s old is new again and current trends often reflect past events, only with new costumes and ‘hot’ labels instead.

When my family first moved to Apple Valley in the late Seventies, it was Burnsville that held the title as the fastest growing community south of the river. It had great schools, brand new housing developments and a thriving commercial component.

Apple Valley was no slouch itself but was still in its infancy, having just been newly minted Apple Valley from its old moniker of Lebanon Township. My, how times have changed. The city now boasts a large collection of apartments, condominiums and senior housing at its core and leafy large lot homes surrounding downtown.

Back then, South of Apple Valley was only farm land. Rosemount, Lakeville, and Farmington were still tiny hamlets only connected by narrow two-lane blacktop roads.

Out west, Eden Prairie was just starting to grow as an alternative to the western suburbs that nestled around Lake Minnetonka. Wayzata, Orono and others were still relatively untouched by growth and development.

Now Lakeville has claimed its title as the place to be with its higher end homes, two high schools, growing retail outlets and plenty of land to develop.

Unfortunately, the removal of all ‘inclusion posters’ in its schools because a few parents want them gone doesn’t speak well of its inclusionary façade. It would almost seem as if they don’t want ‘those people infecting their tony communities.’ Lake Elmo seems to have suffered from the same malaise. Which is an interesting juxtaposition since the quality of the school district still seems to be the prevailing number one factor on what young families are looking for in their new address.

From my perch as an outsider for six months out of the year, I’m not influenced by the daily weather conditions, traffic jams, political charades, brain-numbing newscasts and other distractions from what’s really happening in my hometown. To be clear, I love Minnesota and wouldn’t want to live anyplace else. But it isn’t all ‘puff and stuff’ despite what the latest housing blitz wants you to believe.

I still believe some of the best values can be found in my city’s older neighborhoods with their solid Orin Thompson build homes, large lots, easy access to parks and amenities, reliable city services and overall friendly neighbors. We don’t need ten years and mature trees to see those values, they’re already there.

In my community and others like it, there are still solid home-grown values that the new administration in D.C., outstate politicians, and ‘back to the past’ dreamers want you to believe have changed for the worst. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Even with its age-related spots, Minnesota is still full of ‘Yeah, you bet-cha’ friendly folks who will quickly lend a helping hand.  Its core values of goodness haven’t changed despite the rhetoric and antics by some who wish otherwise. If you’re going to live anyplace, Minnesota is as good a place as any.  I’ve lived that reality all my life and so has my family.

And proud of it.

Long Rider

My Mother's statue of the blessed Virgin Mary in my backyard.

Walking on hard-packed snow at twenty below zero feels like crunching bubble-wrap with your feet. Crawling out of a warm bed at 4:30 in the morning can be just as unnerving and traumatic. Even the Blessed Virgin Mary was buried under three feet of snow.

The cold air nips at your cheeks and stings your skin until the clothes pile on and almost by rote behavior you begin the arduous task of delivering newspapers once again. It was my first fleeting taste of entrepreneurship starting in seventh grade.

The one saving grace to that morning ritual was my salmon-colored transistor radio and the wonderful story-songs it painted in my brain. A world of flashy cars with long fins and beautiful young maidens. The intoxicating sound of rock and roll and all those rebellious images it conjured up in my malleable mind which in turn only lent more fuel to an already rampant imagination.

I thought about those deep winter sojourns when I took my first of many long distance bike rides early Saturday morning. It has long been a summer ritual for me before writing, yard work and the grandchildren’s athletic schedule steal time away from such casual pursuits.

There is something very special about those springtime rides that bring back a plethora of memories. Growing up on Randolph Avenue, Cretin High School and the College of Saint Thomas. Warm summer romances. Late night excursions along the river. Walking hand in hand with that someone special who will probably be replaced by another someone special the following summer.

I guess in our youth such shameful girlfriend swapping is all part of the teenage roller coaster of life; a portrait of angst and pathos switching places with love and lust at seventeen. Living and loving and learning all within a couple of square miles of one another.

Riding down Summit Avenue this morning before dawn is a challenge. I haven’t had my coffee yet and there’s no iPad and quiet time before the rest of the world wakes up. Later on in the summer it’s a more relaxed ride because the morning air doesn’t creep under my layers to bite at my skin. I don’t have to wear long pants and gloves to ward off the chill and the sweat comes more slowly.

There are few runners out this early in the season unlike later on when everyone is training for Grandma’s or Twin Cities marathons. 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 die-hards or marginally insane who are out exercising this frosty morning. Crossing the bridge, I see the U of M rowing club is out before barges crowd the waterways.

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 three marathons 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. Eight years of Catholic education. Daily mass because we had to and public transportation before it became hip.

  

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.

1158 Randolph Avenue. Built for Eight Thousand Dollars by my Mother and Uncle Joe in 1948. A comfortable nest for a wondering wandering mind, blind ambition and soaring expectations. Eight years traveling by bus to grade school in downtown Saint Paul. By high school, I couldn’t wait to escape a dying downtown.

  

Cretin High School. A pivotal point in my life and solid respect for education. The first taste of love or whatever it was back then. A thirst for knowledge that hasn’t gone dry after all these years.

Courtesy of Jerry Hoffman

Senior dance Cretin High School - Courtesy of Jerry Hoffman

Myself and Joyce at the Senior dance - courtesy of Jerry Hoffman

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 spring. 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.

 

Some might argue that I’ve abandoned my state because I spend winters elsewhere. While it’s true I’d much rather hike a mountain in January than shovel snow, I’d like to believe I’ve earned the right to escape when I can.

Delivering newspapers at twenty below zero was a tough way for a kid to get started in business. But there were valuable lessons learned back then.

And besides I always had Buddy and Ritchie and the Big Bopper to show me the way.

Going Home Again

I guess you can go home again…and a lot of people seem to be doing it.

Recently, I stumbled across a popular magazine that’s been around for quite some time now.  It’s called “The Good Old Days Magazine.”  I heard about it from a colleague in one of my writing groups. It got me to thinking about the proliferation of media avenues recently created to help us return to our past or at least explore what really happened in those years gone by. This ability to revisit ones past has surfaced in a number of different venues.

It’s not just one silly magazine.  There are several more that just focus on the 30s, 40s and 50s. Then there is the History Channel, the numerous historical magazines at Barnes & Noble and on-line. There is Ancestry.com and numerous other web sites devoted to helping us track down our past relatives, countries of origin and other off-hand tidbits just to liven up our search. There are also web sites that cover just about every historical event, milestone, personalities, monuments, landmarks, etc in the history of mankind.

On a more personal level for me, there’s a new Facebook page entitled ‘Old Saint Paul.’  Members of this site reminisce about their experiences growing up in Saint Paul.  Similar Facebook pages exist for ‘OldMinneapolis’ and many other neighborhoods and suburbs in and around the Twin Cities.

That delineation is even broken down further with a site entitled ‘I love Highland Park’ and another ‘West Seven Street; where all the cool kidshang out.’  I could do one myself entitled: “On the corner of Randolph and Hamline” since many of my past acquaintances, classmates, old friends, and I have so many memories centered around that street corner.

All of these opportunities to meander back through our past would seem to beg the larger question of whether or not ‘you can go home again.’

Maybe in its proper context ‘going back home’ is really a metaphor for self-discovery.  For unpacking that traveling bag of life experiences that you’ve been toting around for years. It means rummaging through those artifacts of your life that you left behind in old photos, letters, scrapbooks, journals, yearbooks and family mementos. It’s going back to see who you were, what you were, where you were and how far you’ve come. It’s perusing the past all the while keeping your feet firmly planted in the present. It’s imagining ‘what if’ when it’s safe to do so. And accepting the loss of friends, associates, events, people, places and things that are no longer a part of your life. It’s seeing past lovers for what they were; the good, the real and thus the inevitable. It’s taking past baggage and putting it on the shelf to stay there until you die and it doesn’t matter anymore.

It’s a return to your roots.  And if you have no roots, it’s a look back at when things started to matter in your life. When events began to register in your brain and got lodged there. It’s pushing past the ambiguity and cobwebs and jump-starting that memory motor so you can troll back through those calm waters of past experiences to look and listen and observe with fresh eyes what you never saw before.

Triangle Bar

 For me it’s a vicarious journey back to my roots through the recent resurgence of folk music, poetry, coffee houses, and salons.  ‘Going back home’ is a metaphorical return to Dinky Town and the West Bank and the numerous rundown haunts there…if only in my mind. It’s visiting the Blind Lemon in Berkeley, the Gas House in L.A. and the Drinking Gourd in San Francisco; famous coffee houses I never knew about.  It’s a trip to Greenwich Village even though I’d never been there before.

Those memory trips sometimes reveal back stories to past relationships and answer that tantalizing question ‘what if.’  There seem to be enough curtains pulled back to keep pushing forward on tired feet but fueled by an ever-inquiring mind.

It’s blogging about my past and throwing in current events to shake up the mix.  It’s writing novels, plays and screenplays. It’s drawing from a rambling road of starts and stops, attempts and failures and a few successes. It’s being a cowboy again, a landlord, and a young man earning his sea legs on a tapestry of prairie lands, looming mountains and spent expectations.

 It’s going back to what I never saw and seeing how far I’ve come.  It’s accepting the past while embracing what the future might hold. It’s all that and nothing more. A way to spend some time feeling good about what was and accepting what wasn’t. This is what I’ve become. That can’t be changed.

 In the end, it’s the satisfaction of being able to simply say, “It’s all good.”

Four Weeks in Purgatory

Campaigning Under a Polar Vortex

We landed in hell at around 2:30 on that January afternoon. It was an overcast yet sunny day. Outside the terminal, the wind was blowing hard and there was a 45 degree below zero wind chill. Welcome back to Minnesota under the polar vortex.

The weather wasn’t as advertised…it was worse. After being born and raised in Minnesota, I was used to blowing wind, biting cold and snow so deep you had to do chest-presses just to get over those miniature dirty white mountains.

I’d been there many times before. In grade school, delivering newspapers at 4:30 in the morning and trudging through the snow at twenty below zero. In college, unloading trucks at a wind chill of 80 below zero. Years later, I’d occasionally find myself running in white-out conditions because I hadn’t gotten in enough mileage for that week. The unrelenting cold has always been a pain in the derriere and on the extremities. But we were there for a purpose and a little blanket of sub-zero weather wasn’t about to deter us from our objective.

My wife and I had just left the warmth and comfort of Palm Springs to support our daughter who was running for State Representative in her district…64B in Highland Park, a neighborhood in Saint Paul, Minnesota. We were going to be back home for two weeks in January. Then another two more weeks in March just before the district convention which would decide who was running for that position of State Representative. It would be a total of four weeks in purgatory.

The return trip home for a total of four weeks meant I wouldn’t be writing…anything. I wouldn’t be exercising at the gym. I wouldn’t be running trails or bike riding. There were a lot of things, board meetings, neighborhood gatherings, etc. happening back in Palm Springs but they were all on hold for now. We were needed on the home front.

The campaign was shaping up to be a very tough contest for everyone involved. It was Melanie’s first plunge into running for state office; a veritable baptism of fire. A lot of folks who might have been able to help her had already committed to one of the other candidates or didn’t want to get involved at that level. There were six other very qualified candidates, most of whom had done this kind of campaigning before. The ‘good old boys network’ was supporting one candidate and long-time party activists had attached themselves to another one.

Our daughter, who was stepping into the election ring for the first time, was earning her SHK (School of Hard Knocks) bruises, blisters and kudos as she went along. There were good days and bad. It was a roller coaster of emotions with loving support, financial commitments, surprise turndowns and disappointing phone calls. It was a newspaper article that called her simply a ‘stay at home mom’ as if that was a bad thing while it ignored her deep involvement in the community. But through it all, Melanie persevered and kept to her grueling campaign schedule.

To be honest, Melanie had worked for a large law firm and spent considerable time at the capitol working for the same representative who was now leaving office. She knew the rules of the game and the enormous time-commitment it took. We were simply back in town as back-up babysitters and sounding board and encouragement coaches. It’s what parents do for their kids…no matter the age of their kids.

Two weeks of campaign work along with babysitting for most of that time wasn’t as much a chore as it sounds. It meant precious time with my daughter as I chauffeured her for door-knocking in the neighborhood. It was stuffing envelopes and fund-raising. It was squeezing in time to see grandma in Wabasha and stealing time for coffee with an old friend. It was making up new nighttime stories every time as I put Brennan and Charlotte to bed. It was making snow angels with them and playing King of the Hill in three above zero weather.

 We did another two weeks in March which pretty much followed the same pattern. The weather wasn’t as bitterly cold but it wasn’t Palm Springs blissful either. The travel put some real roadblocks in my seasonal participation in my writers group, the Palm Springs Writers Guild, city activities and neighborhood involvement. We never really had a chance to get involved as we had during other seasons. Perhaps next year.

When we were done and the campaigning was over, we slipped away on a Sun Country escape …until spring and another return flight again. We did what you’re supposed to do when one of your kids needs help. We’d do it again…in a heartbeat.

           

 

Oh yeah, Melanie didn’t get the endorsement…but it certainly wasn’t for her not trying. She lost that race and yet won in so many other meaningful ways.

Through this process, strangers and simple names on a card became ardent supporters and life-long friends.  Melanie went from a stay-at-home mom to someone with real campaign chops and war stories to tell. She went from Speech and Debate in high school to real-world campaigning in front of standing-room-only audiences. She went from mothering her kids to formulating political positions and strategies in neighborhood, city and state political circles. She went from a virtual unknown four months ago to a known and respected entity in the world of politics in Saint Paul and Minnesota.

She gained notable name recognition that no ad campaign could have done better for her. She earned the respect of the other candidates. She created a heightened awareness among the ‘in crowd’ that there was a new player in town. In other words, she won…big time…in the game of politics and life. What more could you ask for?

I can’t tell you how proud I am of that young woman who took a chance, put her life on hold and ‘went for it.’

Was four weeks in purgatory worth it?

Hell, yes!