What am I doing here? When I began to consider a year of nomadery, one of the ideas that occurred to me was that I could finally spend significant periods of time with people whom I adore and don't get to see very much, like my mom and my life partners, Jackie and Carly. So I'm in Minneapolis mainly to see Jackie, who is from this area originally and has been living here for the last few years, and whom I've missed dearly. A second objective to being here is the same objective I have whenever I travel to exotic places: to get a sense of the place, culture and people.
I arrived on Sunday the 4th, and my plan was to unpack, set up shop, and get back to work on Monday without missing a beat. HA!
Here are some of my adventures and learnings from my first week in Minneapolis.
1. I miss my mom. A lot.
When I was living in Bend (Why did I not write Adventures in Bend?!?) I saw Mom every day; we usually took a walk together and talked the whole time about anything from our daily schedule to life philosophies. Since arriving in Minneapolis I've had to resist the urge to call her every day. (I've only talked to her three times this week - success!) I'm 35, for god's sake. I feel silly for being so attached to my mom at this age. When I was living in Portland I only talked to her once a week usually, and that was just fine. But what can I say? She's awesome and I really enjoy her company. It'd be like living with one of your best friends for a while and then suddenly not seeing them every day. It takes a period of adjustment.
2. Mary Alice, the landlady/housemate.
She's 86. Her two first names are my grandmothers' names. She's a Leo. (For the record, she asked me for my sign first.) She's Buddhist, and when I asked her what attracts her to that faith, she said she got into it when she was living in India and that a lot of her friends are Buddhist. She's a real estate agent - yes, still working - and a landlady. She and I live in the upstairs part of the faded pink and brick duplex she owns. Mary Alice wears turtleneck sweaters and fuzzy slippers and then flings all the doors open when it gets warmer than 63 degrees outside. Clearly, she and I have different ideas about what constitutes "warm." Today Mary Alice described her filing system as "antediluvian" and then she had to explain to me what that word means.
3. Walks with Milton.
One of the best things about having a dog is that even when I want to hide in my room and pretend the outside world doesn't exist, I can't. I have to take him for a walk. Every day we've wandered a little further or in a different direction, and I'm sure by the time we leave I'll have a pretty good sense of this neighborhood and maybe even a couple of the adjacent ones.
Things I've noticed:
1) There is no goose poop for us to fight about. (We learned in Bend that he LOVES goose poop, and I do not love for him to eat it because it's disgusting. It's one of the few things he and I actually fight about.)
2) There are fewer skateboarders here than in Bend, but there are more rollerbladers, and it turns out that he hates them just as much as the skateboarders.
3) Everyone in Minneapolis is super fit. No one seems to take leisurely walks; they're all running, biking, speed-walking, or rollerblading. Even the other dog walkers seem mission-driven.
4) The weather here is f'ing crazy. The week before we arrived, it snowed. The day we arrived and for a couple days afterwards, it was sunny and in the mid to high 60s. Yesterday it was supposed to be 81 degrees, and indeed during the hour of our daily walk it was sunny and humid and I was dying in a long-sleeved t-shirt and jeans, but we also had thunderstorms on and off all day long (Milton HATES thunder, btw) and there was a tornado watch. Today it was so cold all day my feet and fingers felt like little blocks of ice.
4 Going to the
I had somehow totally forgotten that the normal activities of daily life, such as going to the grocery store, are more time- and energy-consuming in a new environment and culture. Luckily I don't also have the added pressure of a foreign language to contend with just yet. Unless you count the fact that they don't go to grocery stores here; they go to co-ops. Which is a cool idea and puts me in a crunchy-granola-Portland mindset. I'm imagining a store decorated in earthy tones, where everybody's wandering around high on pot and flipping their dreadlocks about.
So once I finally find out where the
Once I'm inside, it becomes clear to me that I'm the only one here who does not have the store layout and all its products memorized. While everyone else is zooming around like hummingbirds on a mission, I'm wandering in circles like a mooncalf, trying to figure out where the f'ing onions are because they're not in any of the produce bins in the produce section and then, later, spending fifteen minutes reading all the labels on the all-natural Organic cereals to figure out which don't have sugar in them but might still taste good.
When I finally did ask a guy who works there where the onions were, though, he gave me a great big genuine smile and walked me right to them. They were just outside the produce section, next to the tortillas, which I also hadn't been able to find.
5. Lunch with Jackie downtown.
I met up with Jackie on the second floor of her building in a hall that reminded me a little of an airport hallway in that it had a couple eateries and a couple shops. She wanted to know if I wanted to go to a pedestrian mall outside. I said yes, and she proceeded to lead me through a series of buildings, all connected via skyways and all equipped with at least three food courts per building, it seemed to me.
What I learned during our journey:
1) I am slovenly (or: the vast majority of people who work in downtown, Minneapolis are very fit and wear streamlined corporate clothes);
2) I am slow, I don't know what I'm doing, and I'm in everybody's way.
I have more stories to tell, but this post is way too long as it is, so they will have to wait. Until next time...
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