Old Man River

The Mississippi River gnaws its way through the Twin Cities like a dull knife on bark. Sediment and ever-changing currents have maligned its banks for centuries. Yet, much like my fascination with Lake Nokomis, I’ve always harbored a deep affection for the better sister of ‘the Old Muddy.’

The river is one of those icons that I can leave for a long time and yet return to with the same affection and emotions that it draws out of me every time I return to its sandy banks. The river has been with me my entire life. Just as I have grown and changed and meandered in different life directions, so too has this mighty river.

It played a subtle yet important role during my ‘lost years’ when I found solace, comfort, and companionship along its ever-changing shoreline. It was, at once, a place to go to get lost, to engage in worldly conversations, life-changing decisions and distractions from the reality of the moment.

One day, a visit to the river might mean a winter hike exploring its rocks and crevices with a friend, coffee thermos close at hand. The conversation has long since been forgotten; the cold not so much.

The next time, it could be offering up my car hood as a solar blanket to keep my girlfriend warm.

It was a moment in time for silly things like that.

Other times, it meant slipping down its rocky embankment for a solitary walk along its shores.

While I was working at Twin Cities Public Television, the station produced a documentary on the river and its special draw to Minnesotans.

It highlighted the river’s long and storied history as a landing spot for fur traders and steamboats. The film chronicled its importance to the commerce and industry that fed both cities, but especially the small hamlet of Saint Paul.

It’s been labeled the Port of Saint Paul and has long been a harbor for small boats on Harriett Island.

All through high school, I would hitchhike everywhere I went. One familiar route was down along Sheppard Road; a route that bordered the Mississippi River all the way to downtown Saint Paul. There, along the banks of the old river, sat the shacks, hovels, and homes of generation upon generation of immigrants who worked the river and factories in the city. Those immigrants who collected along its shoreline below the High Bridge finally evolved into St. Paul’s own Little Italy before its demise after the floods of 1965.

Anyplace along the river was always a great place to go on a date. Not just to make-out if that was on the agenda but also to wander and wonder and philosophize about anything under the moon.

The monument was just such a collective spot.

Once known as Shadow Falls, the monument was erected to honor the soldiers of World War I. Over the years, its surrounding landscape and accouterments have changed and evolved with the times but its overlook never fails to impress even the most familiar of visitors.

When I was living in near-squalor by the University of Minnesota, I would sometimes wander down to the riverbank across from downtown Minneapolis with Susan in hand to look and imagine where we might be in the future.

Susan and I would map out our lives, talk about our careers respectively in television and nursing, our dysfunctional families and everything we had in common. We would wax and wane philosophically about where we might be in ten years. Those salons of hopeful dreams were exciting, fruitful, and fulfilling for the moment, even though at least one of us knew, quite unspoken, that our future of pastel colors and soothing flavors probably wouldn’t include the other person.

Now fast forward almost fifty years and I’m once again wandering those Mississippi shores. When Sharon goes to her art class in Norde East Minneapolis, I find myself, once again, drawn to the river.

The times have changed, old friends come and gone, but the river remains constant. Old and sometimes slow like me, it continues its meandering down toward the gulf of Mexico but leaving behind all those wonderful old memories just piling up along its translucent transparent shores. It speaks to me of youth and inexperience, love, loss, success, failure, and most of all, longevity.

Nothing remains the same, they say.

Yes, I reply, but some things never change.

Ode to a Broken Down Palace

Everyone wants someplace to call home. But for me back then the house on Randolph Avenue had long since ceased being my home. After living in Europe it was simply a place to crash while I waited for my life to take some semblance of order. It was where I was raised but no longer belonged.

So finding that sad old relic of better times on University Avenue marked the beginning of another world I was about to enter. A cauldron of cast-offs and bottom feeders which accurately reflected where my head was at and where I was going…in no particular order. Disheveled, messy, chaotic and rudderless yet always angling for a better direction.

The Twin Cities has a long history of collecting enclaves of immigrant families and other bottom feeders who haven’t yet assimilated into modern day society. This apartment building was just such a place. It was Swedes Hollow, the Bohemian Flats, Little Italy and the West Side Flats all wrapped up in a half dozen squalid cut-up apartment units. As time progressed that area around the University of Minnesota, especially around Dinky Town and the West Bank, became my own microscopic version of Greenwich Village.

And as the song lyrics go ‘most of my changes were there.’

It’s become part of my lexicon now. Not because of some foolish notion that it represented my ‘glory days’ or the ‘best years of my life.’ And hopefully not because it might sound like the musings of an old man. It was, instead, a moment in time long since gone but still captured in a few faded photographs and dusty vinyl jackets which help poke probing fingers of inquiry into that slowly fading memory bank cached inside my head. For those places and people and events all help define who and what I have become…and strive to be.

That white ghetto came to represent all those individuals I knew and loved and lost touch with over the years. It was the silly and foolish things I did and thought. It was all those wild aspirations and stumbles I took in the right direction. It was accidents that didn’t happen and a few that did. It was all those seemingly innocuous events that changed my life and laid the groundwork for a lifetime of story-telling in one form or another.

So while some oldsters may lament their sometimes checkered past or lost years I choose to embrace them as a reflective exercise. While some may scowl at rekindling the past by saying ‘it’s best not to look back’ and ‘let the past be,’ it is for me very personal.  It was a time of my lost years.

That’s a lot of accolades to pile on a rundown hulk of a building in a poor part of town. When first constructed around the turn of the century the building was reflective of an expanding and prosperous Minneapolis. The huge structure was home to a prominent businessman and his growing family. By the time I moved in it was owned by a shady real estate investor from Saint Louis Park who would never dare venture into that neighborhood at night. I had to go to his ethnic enclave of real estate ‘bottom feeders’ to sign my lease.

My unit on the second floor had been carved out of a once spacious master bedroom. The building had been chopped-up, divided and then subdivided into probably illegal apartments for whoever could afford the cheap rent.

There was a group of graduate students from Pakistan below me and odd assortments of humanity in the other units who seemed to come and go with the seasons. The building was, at once, a rundown hippie hangout, a nightly excuse for under-age drinking and sexual affairs and a sketchy abode for a wandering soul.

The overall mantra of the place seemed to be “Say Hi,” don’t ask questions and ignore what’s going on unless you think the place might burn down. In retrospect, I think I was nuts to live in such a dump but it suited my lifestyle back then and my frame of mind. I thought of my place as bohemian chic. Visitors might have had a different impression. Shortly after I moved out, they tore the building down and left an empty field.

Three women encompassed my frame of reference for that period.

First there was Sheila who had moved on with her life by that time while I was still trying to find mine.

Then there was Susan who was seeking the holy grail of life’s direction just as I was. She needed focus in her life and together we helped one another search for that shining light. Susan and I used to sit on her creaky front porch and waxed philosophically about life and love and what the future might hold for us.

She was significant in my life for several reasons, not the least of which was that we were both seekers. It was a collision of my time and space with hers. For a long time we were in the same orbit, thinking and living life alike, and traveling that strange road to maturity. We were both hungry. And with similar family backgrounds, we both found ourselves struggling to grab a handhold on that slippery ring called a career.

And finally there was Sharon waiting in the wings until such time as fortune brought us together at KTCA; the Public Television station.

After a couple of months working/writing at the Public Health Department, I ventured down Como Avenue to the studios of KTCA. They weren’t hiring at the time but they were glad to use my volunteer services in the evenings. I learned the craft of television from the ground up. It became my first real job where I never felt like I was working.

As significant as that old television building was in my life, even more prominent was a bar on the West Bank. That den of ear-busting music, sweet-smelling haze and questionable characters figured prominently in one of my first novels entitled “Love in the A Shau.” On the surface the Triangle Bar was a rundown three-two joint with intoxicating music, cheap beer and loud crowds that came to see, be seen or just smoke a joint in the corner. Beneath the surface it was my baptism into another life

During its heyday, the Triangle Bar became the flash point for a burgeoning music scene centered on the West Bank. Since they didn’t card, the bar attracted a lot of U of M students. I’m guessing the term ‘jail bait’ was first coined there.

But beneath that surface melting pot of hippies, junkies, college drop-outs, undercover cops and other assorted flotsam from civilization came a wonderful collection of lost souls and seekers. Every night brought another stimulating conversation with some colorful character who usually gave a false last name, lied about their background but presented fascinating suppositions on life and love and war and college and our future in general. It was a true college education outside of the classroom.

They’re all gone now. Removed like push pins off a bulletin board of icons long since dis-appeared. My apartment on the avenue, the Triangle Bar, the old Public Health Department building on campus, crumbling Dinky Town, Newman Center with its folk music, the Grandview Theater and its foreign films and a dozen other sad-eyed structures all razed by a bulldozer called time. It was a sometimes conflicting confluence of attitude and interest, circumstance and focus, goals and objectives. And ultimately it led me to the stability I found in another human being who was opposite of me in almost every way.

Isn’t life strange that 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.”