Whatever It Takes

She was born on a dirt farm in the middle of nowhere, Nebraska. Rental farm land that barely covered expenses and put food on the table. Her father worked the field’s every day and her mom tended to their home. It was bare bones living but it was a good life.

The family moved to another farm when she was eight years old. By then she was getting up early in the morning to help her father milk the cows, sling hay and keep the bulk tank spotless. She was the eldest daughter doing what was needed to be done to sustain the family.

Even then there were strong influences that shaped her life. People and events that steeled her determination to make something of herself beyond the 250 acres of wheat, soybeans and corn.

She had a loving grandmother who was more worldly than most farm wives. For two years the young girl walked from school to Grandma’s house for lunch. Instead of washing dishes, they played with dolls, colored, made sugar pies and drew pictures. A myriad of other mind-expanding experiences at every visit.

Long before women figured out, they didn’t have to wear girdles every time they stepped outside, there was an aunt who pioneered early feminist Zen for the young girl. The aunt traveled the world and ran a bar in the winter months. She could command a bar stool discussion with the best of her patrons. In the summers, her aunt had a gift shop up north where the young girl worked. It was there she learned how to charm the customers and make the sale, honing her business skills.

During her junior year in high school, a nun took a liking to her and told her she had to go to college. She would be the first in her family to do so. And even though there was no money for such a venture, it really wasn’t negotiable. The nun taught her how to break the rules and glass ceilings in that small town.

In small town America, she was the student class president her freshman, sophomore and junior year. Even though she was elected class president her senior year, the nuns decided a boy should have that position. So, the young girl learned to roll with the clerical punches and still come out on top. She went to Girls State, was awarded the Betty Crocker Homemaker of the Year Award and elected Sodality President. The nuns couldn’t take that away from her.

Back in high school, a neighboring farm boy came to ask her out on a date. She politely declined and suffered the wrath of her father who thought she should have gone out simply because she had been asked. “What will our neighbors think?” her father asked her. “It doesn’t matter,” she answered. Still doesn’t.

One day the girl’s mother was cornered in town by ‘the attorney’s wife.’ The townies wanted to know why her daughter, a simple farm girl, thought she could go to such an elite all girl college in the cities. “Who does she think she is?” the woman asked the girl’s mother. “Her own self!” her mother answered. And that was that.

The young girl gleamed from all her life experiences the proposition that she ‘could’ and therefore she ‘would.’ If she wanted it, she would work for it. There was no free lunch but she was skilled in the kitchen. Those were giant assumptions in the early sixties, which in turn, she would pass on to her own children and grandchildren. No excuses, she would say, just focused determination to do what was needed to be done. ‘Whatever it takes,’ she would often say.

And she realized very early that she was smarter than most of the boys she dated. She still feels that way about men in general although she hasn’t dated in quite some time.

In college, she had to work almost full time while attending school as a day student. She lived with her aunt and learned to manage a tight schedule, be judicious about her sleep and still find time for student activities. She ended up student MEA president her senior year and traveled to Washington to represent the state. It was four years of sacrifice, hard work and little sleep and she excelled at everything she did.

Day students were not the girls who lived on campus. Boarders often didn’t have to work; they enjoyed time for studies, boys down the road and pondering their future career or lifestyle. Some enjoyed a preponderance of wealth. Like the girl with seven suede jackets.

This girl had a different suede jacket for each day of the week. Different colors, different styles and all unique. It spoke to the wardrobe packed in her dorm room. For many girls on campus, it was a gilded world of their liking. A few were pampered, privileged and very entitled. Others were not as privileged but still lived in a world far apart from morning milking chores and afternoon fieldwork the young girl was used to.

The young girl’s humble background and tough work ethic provided a sterling example for her children and grandchildren for what hard work, focus and determination can accomplish for a person. Success followed her academic and business career every step of the way.

She’s been president, chair, board member or committee member of every organization she’s ever belonged to. With her it’s almost a given. She was the first woman president of her Rotary club and first female Rotary district governor. Her list of posts, appointments, awards and recognition could fill a very large book. She still commands and gets the respect of every man in the group.

Businessmen universally respect her because she’s got the chops, the business acumen to deal with adverse situations, tough calls to make and focused goals to achieve. And unlike some of her professional colleagues, she has a common-sense approach to conflict resolution. She’s like a mama bear in an Ann Taylor suit.

Negotiations are her forte. Her ready smile and easy demeanor belie a sharp focus on the issues at hand, a calculating mind and deep insight into the human condition. Hardly seems fair to those sitting across from her in any business or political negotiations. I like to say she will eat you for lunch and you just came for dessert.

If I ever get my own writing thing going for me, I’m going to ask her to negotiate on my behalf. Her daughter is an attorney. No surprise there. Between the two of them, they would make a formidable team on my side.

In another life, she might have led a breakout at the cloisters, been Ophelia’s sister, a confidant to Clare Boothe Luce and most certainly a blue stocking suffragette. Perhaps even an Amazon Queen.

She still thinks she is smarter than most men. But I’m not going to give her that one.

I married her instead.

Everything is History Now

I am a casual interloper in this early morning world of iron riders and rail thin runners. These mostly white middle-aged 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.

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.

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

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 year 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 this 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.

West Bank

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.

New Vikings Stadium - Minneapolis, MN

I wander downtown before our newest edifice to professional mayhem. Before Sunday afternoon begins this is where the bruisers and the brawlers gather for yet another party celebrating their ‘glory days.’ It’s a modern day rendezvous of rabid fans and modern-day hucksters.

East Bank

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 vestiges of that old neighborhood.

A grassy corner is all that remains where my squalid apartment building used to languish.

I heard about a new film that was just shown by the U of M Film Society called the ‘Dinkytown Uprising.’  It was written, directed, filmed and produced by a fellow student I took some film classes with way back in the late 60’s. He was a radical back then and hasn’t changed his colors much since then.

If rubble could talk it would speak volumes about Dinkytown. But those voices are mute now. They’ve been replaced by developer’s fact sheets and city planner’s visions for a new student hometown. Dinkytown 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. The closest I came to old mindset was the U of M School of Journalism. 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 fount 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 failed I began tripping around the globe until that ended in matrimony.

My wife was one of the first of her post-war generation to escape small town America. There are condos and a marina on the river now where the old Robin Hood Flour Mill used to stand. It’s a new generation that has discovered small town America and the ancient lure of the river.

Driving out to the old Schumacher farmstead I see that Dumfries tavern is gone now. It’s been replaced by several double-wides with ATVs parked in front.

Then glimpses from the road of the old farmstead. The farm house is gone now and only the barn remains as a relic to someone else’s past. I’ve got more than thirty-four years of history there.  Strange to see it gone.

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 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. 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.

Doing the Wabasha Shuffle

I’ve been doing the Wabasha shuffle for 40 plus years now. It started out when I was captivated by this brilliant blond from work with a worldly view of life and as well as a vivacious personality. She had been raised on a farm down south and I thought it would be interesting to visit that foreign environment.

Gradually the Wabasha shuffle matured into weekend visits to her parents farm, then their home in town and finally now to the nursing home where her father is residing with his Alzheimers disease. Her mother still lives in town and pretends she’s on her own. Yet it’s only because of weekly visits by her children and daily visits by town folk that she is able to live out her illusion of independence.

A farm in the family wasn’t what I thought it would be. When the kids were small, I had this idyllic vision of “Dick and Jane visit Grandpa’s Farm.”

Unfortunately reality painted quite a different picture. Grandpa was still a working farmer and had no time for little kids running behind his tractor. So Melanie spent her time trying to catch feral farm cats (good luck with that) and Brian wandered through the barn, finding hiding places up in the lofts.

Nothing much has changed in Wabasha as is often the case in small town America. But like so many others before me, I’ve shifted and changed and morphed into different personalities as the sands of time carried me from one career to the next and one lifestyle to another.

To the town folk of Wabasha, I’ve always been ‘one of them city boys.’ I stopped trying to make inroads into their conversations a long time ago. Farmers regarded me with even more suspicion because of my city ties. Imagine their collective consternation when one of their own married a big city fella.

On our last visit to Wabasha, even my uniform of the day was wrong. I was wearing my trail running shoes, jeans I hadn’t worn in six months, a black t-shirt that read’ I love SF,’ my Galway jacket and a baseball cap with ‘writer’ inscribed on it. Little did I know that the real uniform of the day was boots and jeans, sweatshirts (Twins led the Vikings with the U.S. Army coming up a solid third) cammie jackets and baseball caps (again the Twins were leading the Vikings)

So often going back home means going back in time. But as Bob Dylan famously said there is ‘no direction home.’ Sadly, it can’t be done. The time capsule that is Wabasha, Minnesota is replicated across the country. Returning there to capture what once was is like trying to catch the wind (apologies to Donovan). It hasn’t changed but we have and there in lies the dilemma.

I have a friend who is flying in from the East Coast to attend her 50^th high school reunion

in southwestern Minnesota. I think most people go to high school reunions to show off their lives in thinly veiled ways. It’s a game of “Look at who I married. Here is a picture of my handsome children and my beautiful grandchildren.” My friend became part of the East Coast academic/intellectia consortium of successful professionals. It’s probably a safe assumption that not all of her high school classmates have reached that same pinnacle of professional success. It can make for some awkward moments amid the social pleasantries and forced chatter of a reunion.

I’m guessing she will come to realize what I did at my own 50^th reunion. After fifties years apart, I had little if anything in common with my classmates. While I carried my accouterments of success in my head, it never came up. Men are that way. In theCompany of Old Men pretty much describes that scene. It was fascinating, enlightening, a little bit sad and a little bit funny. It brought back a few fond memories but mostly it brought out a sly smile and wonderment that I had actually survived the trauma and confusion of those teen years.

Now after a second season in Palm Springs, returning to Minnesota to do the Wabasha shuffle is once again part of my summer agenda. And yet it is still pretty much the same soundtrack in terms of ‘been there before, don’t want to go back there again.’ But, of course, we must for the in-laws. It’s all part of shared marital responsibilities.

So I smile and make pleasant faces and try very hard to care about the price of grocery store staples and bloated government programs and all those issues paramount to small town America. Those foreign environments on the coast are never discussed and focus is always given to matters that really count like spring crops and fall harvests.  It’s still a foreign environment I rarely inhabit and must strive hard to make it work for me. I left all that behind when I moved away from home.

I’ll leave my Zen back in the desert for the summer and try to forge an understanding of small town America back here in Minnesota. I’m willing to step back in time but never enough to get lost there.