That's awesome! I was in Dallas last Spring and I thought it was a beautiful city. Vivid, wonderful memories of walking up and down the park in the center of downtown and paying like $8 for an espresso at a restaurant with glass walls.
In Minneapolis, you come for the healthcare and stay for the weather. Or, you're stuck because of the weather. That's the only way I can justify how I wound up living here. Small world though, right?
I came to Minneapolis from the DC suburbs of Maryland as a very young man away from home for the first time in 1977.
It was like walking into a time warp because for all the modernity, in some ways, Minneapolis was still very much in the 1950's and Saint Paul was in the 1930's. People who had been born in the 1960's or later were "sort of" caught up with the two coasts, culturally speaking, maybe even ahead of CA and NY in some ways but folks born in the 40's and 50's were light years behind.
Downtown Minneapolis was an incredible head trip for me, the flophouses, the hardcore drinking bars, the old guys who still wore Dick Tracy clothing and talked like the old gangster movies, and I was to find out it was because real gangsters had been running the place not too much before I arrived there, the amazing Victorian homes everyone took for granted, the cops who didn't think twice about knocking the crap out of you if you mouthed off...but here is the amazing thing, they didn't maim you or kill you, they didn't shoot you. They just slapped you around pretty good. I never knew anything like that back home!
And the WINTER. Thank God I made friends quickly, they helped me view the harsh winters as an adventure, so I decided in my mind that it WAS an adventure. I willed myself to become a sort of "Hippie Minnesota Wilderness Man" and I wore a long fringe leather jacket with the long fringes and high boots and a wide brimmed leather hat. I bought my first guns. I went hunting and fishing, I even went ice fishing and suffered through that sitting in the little fish houses with old guys who thought it was funny to drink a lot of beer and then cut monster farts. I learned to winterize my 1967 Chevy C10 Stepside pickup the HARD WAY and never made those mistakes again.
And I finally got a part time gig playing piano in the
Club Royale, now known as The Wabasha Street Caves.
I met dark haired young Ojibwe girls from Saint Paul with great big sad black eyes who worked as waitresses and fell in love at the drop of a hat, or the sound of Billy Joel. And eventually I wound up in a band.
A band with a rehearsal space the size of an entire city block for $250 a month.
And I haven't even begun to talk about springtime, when the women bloomed like flowers in the desert at the first rain.
The lakes, the clean water, the incredible air, the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, the Iron Range bars where any blues band from the Twin Cities might as well be The Beatles or The Stones.
And the education and the health care...of course. And of course the bizarre summers, which outside of the Twin Cities featured mosquitoes so large that the FAA should have given them tail numbers.
Sorry I rambled, but there will always be a special place in my heart for the Twin Cities.
It was an incredible thrill to be a young man in Minneapolis if you had come from boring political DC.
