Sometimes Minnesota takes great pride in reminding you that this is Minnesota. I went outside today to walk down to Lake Harriet, and it was cold enough to chase me back in after just a few minutes. I didn't make it down there. It was also pretty windy, such that on the news they said that up north there would be wind chills somewhere around fifty degrees below zero.
Last night I remembered to get up and start the Mercedes-Benz so that it would be easier to start today if I needed it. It cranked pretty slowly, but it started, so I sat there at 3:00am warming it up. Once it was warm, I shut it off and went back to sleep. Fargo could not figure out what I was doing and was standing up on the windowsill nearest the driveway, meowing at me.
After I came back from my shortened hike in the cold, I started the Mercedes up again to keep it a little warm. I should look into getting one of those things that keeps the engine warm by plugging it into the wall. Here in Minnesota sometimes cars won't start for days if it gets too cold. That happens more way up north in the Mesabi Range and along Lake Superior, but it happens here, too.
I'm going to look through more stuff today. I'm also going to go wander around for a while, in the car this time.
It's later. I went out and drove around for a while. There wasn't much traffic, a big contrast to the day after Christmas. I went past all of my old schools, sort of in reverse order. I went over and drove around the UM campus, but didn't experience much of a connection to it. The buildings over there can be really drab and cookie-cutter, and the more you look at them, the more the place looks like a big Midwestern college-graduate factory. That's sort of a pessimistic view, but I guess that's the mood I'm in.
At least I had no problem parking just about anywhere. I used to spend a lot of time at the Walter Library over on East Bank, even though it was mostly a math and science library. Wilson was more geared toward what I was studying but was a pain to get to. All the trees outside Walter were bare.
I went over by Pioneer... I lived there for the last year and a half I was there. It's the only dorm that looked like what I always thought of as a campus dormitory, all brick and stone and wood and a little cupola on top. Old and traditional-looking. This would be in contrast to, say, Middlebrook, which looks like a particularly drab high-rise urban-renewal housing project, or Territorial, which looks a lot like some sort of insane asylum or secret CIA lab. Needless to say, I lived in Territorial for some time. The one nice thing about it was that it was non-smoking. There was this tunnel you used to have to go through to get over to the dining hall, and the floor was always cold.
Back across the river, I went over to my high school. Washburn hasn't changed much since I graduated, it still looks like the sort of high school Richie Cunningham and Potsie Webber went to in Happy Days. I don't remember the Fonz hanging around outside, though. It was a little too "soc" for that. A lot of my classmates were from families that were pretty well off. A lot of UM professors' kids. Some kids of 3M execs. Mostly middle-class kinds of people. There's a new tree they planted over near the one corner of the building that I don't remember being there. Other than that, it looks about the same. The student paper was called The Grist and at the time wasn't so hot. They sent my parents an issue a couple of years ago and I think it improved a lot. It's been around since the 1920's or something.
My middle school is north and west of there. Anwatin Middle School. I got to go there because we lived within Washburn's district and there's some sort of thing where they divided up who could go to what middle school program based on what high school was nearby. Anwatin (that's "ann-WATT'n" for those of you from somewhere else) was kind of neat. If I compared it to some other middle schools I've heard about or seen since, I guess it was pretty progressive. All I can tell for sure now is that they painted it and resurfaced the playground. It was my favorite school, probably because it was where I first started playing music because I wanted to, not because I felt like I was being pushed to. My grade school had had a lot of emphasis on music (so much so that it's now some sort of citywide magnet school for music and arts) but I always felt forced. By that token, anywhere that I'd have taken up music willingly would count as my favorite. Anwatin was, and I think still is, the sort of place that puts kids on a track to go to college. I don't think I was really aware of that at the time, and didn't feel any pressure about it. I must have thought all schools were like that. My parents went to a lot of effort to haul me up there every day, though. It's up past Lake Of The Isles... it's a task to drive to even for me now.
I went to Lyndale for half a year, 4th grade in 1977, then transferred up to Anwatin. I don't remember much about Lyndale at all. It looks like now they have kindergarten-through-3rd-grade, which they didn't used to have. Nowadays, I could have gone there for the first three or four years, instead of where I actually went, which was Ramsey.
I went over to Ramsey on my way back to the house, since it's only a few blocks past the high school and kind of closed the loop for me. That, and I was getting cold and hungry. Ramsey School is an older-looking building, and it had a lot of students, maybe 900. I trudged through the snow over to one of the windows and stuck my head up to look in. I can't believe that I once fit in those tiny little chairs. They seemed bigger when I was five or six, I suppose. I remember falling on the steps in front of the building once in the winter. I think it must have been 1976. It was cold, there was ice all over the place, and I fell and tore the sleeve of my coat. I was upset about it and I remember crying for probably ten or fifteen minutes when I got home.
I'm a lot taller now. When I fall down, it hurts more and I feel a lot more embarrassed.
While I was driving back down, I noticed they opened a new school, Whittier, at 26th and Grand. Looks like... McGrade School of the 1990s. Not particularly appealing architecture. Glad I went to something a little more traditional.
Well, now that I've taken you on a nice journey through the past, I'm going to go cook some pasta and check my mail.