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| I lived in Minneapolis when I was a child, a land where the temperature regularly dips below zero and snowfall of a foot more or more hardly raises an eyebrow. I’ve now lived away for so many years that when I do make one of my infrequent trips back to my hometown I struggle to orient myself within an increasingly blurry geography of personal significance, to find a single fragment to grasp on to as the vortex takes me inexorably somewhere else. It is a futile gesture, of course, as Thomas Wolfe warned us, and yet I continue to look for a fragment that keeps me afloat, if just for a moment, and can help me make sense of just one thing, of anything. The futuristic-looking Cooper Theatre, a Mad Man era icon of suburban moviegoing refinement (they had a bar!) is long gone, replaced by Anywhere, USA. The enigmatic bas relief stone sculpture of the Rock of Gibraltar that once adorned the top of the Prudential building, burned into my consciousness from endless drives down Highway 12 (no longer called Highway Twelve or even more archaically, Wayzata Boulevard)? Gone, replaced with the flat, bland corporate logo of Target. There’s birria, birria! to be had in Richfield, where formerly you’d find old fart restaurants like Edelweiss—and while I’m gratified to see my favorite Jalisco dish in a territory that was once deep in the Land of the Whitest of White People, I know that my interior pop-up book Minneapolis is an unsentimental internal fetish that is incongruent with the Minneapolis in front of my eyes. Thomas Wolfe was half-right: you cannot go home, but nevertheless, you do. And one of the things I left behind is my ability to tolerate, ok, endure, the cold. As I left Beverly Soon Tofu last night, having gorged on warming soon dubu jigaeand plates of well-wrought banchan, I shivered, zipped up my jacket, and remarked, “fuck, it’s freezing out!” It was only in the 50s, and yet it felt like I might expire if I stayed outside much longer. It is cold out today, too, and so we are hosting a tasting of earthy red wines, all French, all cabernet franc, and all fit for staying inside, trying to keep warm, and finishing the last of the stuffing and cranberry sauce.
Château de Minière “Bulles de Minière” NV |