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Gristmill: From a Minneapolis Rooftop

Wed, 06/03/2020 - 11:12

“Almost every establishment has their windows boarded up, can’t go far without seeing something smoldering or smashed. Gas station four blocks from me was burned to the ground.”

So reports an old friend from the Minneapolis war zone. 

This was on Facebook. Not quite a hunkered-down Syrian rebel frantically tweeting news out of Aleppo as the bombs fall, but in the same ballpark. So I thought it was funny when someone commented, “Which gas station?”

“The Speedway on Lake and Aldrich,” came the earnest answer.

Uh-huh, we have those here. No big loss.

Not to make light of the protesting of George Floyd’s brutal police-state killing. Let me just say, payback is a mother-effer.

Back to the report: “People with signs, people with masks — throngs of people with brooms and shovels, who came to clean up, after the city’s destructive alter-ego trashed the place last night.”

Alter-ego is an interesting phrasing. You also might call it the id unleashed.

“But it’s a beautiful day and the streets are quiet — on top of the COVID shutdown and the curfew for tonight, I think a lot of people cleared out of town, anticipating more destruction once the sun goes down. Do you think if I climbed on top of the Uptown tower and shouted ‘ENOUGH!’ as loud as I could, that it would all go away?” 

That’s a cri de coeur if I ever heard one. I’ll step in here and presume to explain my friend’s anguish — Minneapolis is a great American city. I happen to have lived there for a single idyllic year after college, which was also spent in the Upper Midwest, in south-central Wisconsin. What can I say, I’m a square and felt at home there.

I remember a series of lakes — of course, a few of Minnesota’s 10,000 — connected by a bicycle-friendly greenway. (The Specialized mountain job I bought at Flanders Bros. Cycles on Lyndale Ave. is still going strong.) I remember coffee shops with big plate-glass windows and no pushy time limits as I sat and read “The Grapes of Wrath.” I remember affordable apartments in handsome red-brick-outside, dark-wood-inside buildings. I remember seeing Kevin Kling’s “The Ice Fishing Play” in an intimate setting in a city with more theater seats per capita than anywhere but New York.

Did I mention affordable?

“The helicopters,” my friend types with a nearly audible groan. “I feel like Ray Liotta towards the end of ‘Goodfellas’ . . . 115-year-old windows do not like helicopters . . . rattling like they’re gonna jump out of their frames.”

In more ways than one, the innocence is lost. Hang tough, Mpls., Minn.


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