Tuesday, October 29, 2024 Growing Up in Minnesota

I started my life on Bryant Avenue South in Minneapolis, MN. My parents bought that house the year I was born and my mother finally sold it in October of 2012. It felt like losing a friend. Every room in that house contained memories for me. When I was just a wee lassie, my parents put up nifty wallpaper in the living room, dining room, library and on up the stairs. I had just learned to write my name and it seemed a perfectly reasonable thing to take a pin and scratch my name into the wallpaper, right at the landing on the stairs. I remember the exact spot. It never occurred to me that this was NOT a good idea. It remained there all of my growing up years, the letters all capitals, all crooked.

My parents didn’t give me a middle name, so all of my documents at various schools listed my name as Lynn NMN B_______, the NMN standing for No Middle Name. Apparently, you had better have a middle name in this country or the forms can’t comprehend you. It seemed that half of the girls I knew had Lynn as a middle name, so I would tell people that I had no need of a middle name because my first name WAS a middle name. I fixed that problem when I turned 18 by going to court to take my mother’s maiden name as my middle name. That’s the only time I’ve had my day in court. I had to bring two people to vouch for me and things got a little giggly. I gave the legal papers to my mom for Mother’s Day that year.

I was a sensitive, shy child. The story is told of my mother taking me to a small drugstore at an age when I certainly knew how to talk. The proprietor tried to chat me up, but I was frozen with shyness and couldn’t say a word. My mother, trying to coax me into proving that I wasn’t just being rude, said to me, “Lynn, say something!” In the face of this pressure, I finally spoke up quietly, determined to do the right thing. “Something,” I said obediently. And there you have it, me in a nutshell: wanting to do the right thing, but often clueless about what that might be.

I grew up in the land of wind chill and mosquitos, of snow banks and lakes, of ice and humidity. I now know why people stay in places even less hospitable than my land; it’s where my roots are and I am root-bound. Others have a wanderlust that hinders them from putting down roots; they are more like seeds blowing hither and yon by the wind with no roots to hold them in place. Some people can make a home wherever they are. When I am away from home, I feel like an alien and no matter how much I may enjoy the people I visit and the places that I go, an inner voice calls to me saying, “Home, it’s time to go home,” and those roots, stretched but not broken, draw me back. I could never live the life of a vagabond. I have put down roots in new places, so I’m not a complete social recluse, but it takes me about a year before I truly feel at home in a new place.

The winters of my childhood were landscaped with giant snowdrifts along the edge of the sidewalks and huge mounds of snow in our backyard. We lived only a half a block away from a park that had an ice rink and a warming house all winter long. I remember trooping down there with my siblings a few times when the warming house was closed and the cold was brutal. I could barely put my skates on and take them off, my hands were so cold. But somehow this didn’t stop us from going. The warming house was tended by a strange older man that we all called Igor. Somehow I doubt that this was really his name. It was a popular place and some nights there were 30-40 kids there. Igor would get tired of the mayhem and noise once in a while and yell at everyone, but generally he was a pretty good egg. Most of the time we all skated free form, but once a week or so, someone would get up a game of Pom-Pom Pullaway (I’ve never seen it spelled and have no idea what it meant). One person was chosen to be “it” and the rest of us would line up at one end of the rink. “Pom, Pom, Pullaway!” he would call and we’d all skate to the other side, while he would try to catch people as they skated across. If he touched you, you had to join him at the center of the rink and assist in catching people the next round. Pretty soon, all but the most clever skaters were in the middle and it was great fun trying to catch those last few insanely good skaters. They were usually hockey players that could stop on a dime and switch directions. One time, I was in that elite group, having learned a few tricks of my own and it was a thrill being able to elude so many skaters.

The park also had lovely sledding hills which we used frequently. The steepest and longest hill was called “King’s Hill.” My dad wanted to get some film footage of us sledding one time and came with us. He saw me go down a shorter hill with a rather large dip at the bottom which sent me soaring, flipping, and landing in a heap. I was on a mini-boggan, basically a thick plastic sheet with a hole in the front to hold onto. Generally, one went down on one’s knees. Anyway, after seeing my spectacular spill, Dad was pretty enthusiastic about filming me in slow motion going down the same way, so he waited at the bottom and sent me back up. I did not share his enthusiasm for the project, since going into the dip had hurt my knees and the tumble hadn’t felt so great either. However, I was willing to make a sacrifice for art, so down I went. The closer I got to the bottom, the less attractive the filming prospect was and the more vivid my memory of the pain. At the last moment, I skirted the side of the dip and arrived painlessly at the bottom, but boy, was my dad disappointed. Every time I watch that footage it makes me laugh, but at the time, I was just a wee bit annoyed that Dad was willing to risk my neck for some good slo-mo action.

Summers in Minnesota were sunny, green and beautiful, which made up for the sticky humidity and the inevitable bug bites. Mosquitos have always loved me – it’s a curse I’ve learned to live with. We didn’t have air conditioning so our home was filled with fans. Our bedroom had an oscillating fan; on the worst muggy nights I’d revel in that little burst of man-made wind as it passed over me in between short intervals. My pillow would get hot and every so often, I’d turn it over to start with a “cool” side. Even our summer thunderstorms were a grand affair with deluges that filled our gutters and loud thunderclaps that shook the house and made me run to Dad and Mom for safety. Growing up surrounded by lakes was something I took for granted as a child, assuming that everyone had them. Ah, the lakes! Nearest to us was Lake Harriet, a moderate-sized lake with swimming beaches and a 3.5 mile bicycle/walking path all around it. I traversed it countless times on my bike when I got old enough. We’d go swimming at Lake Harriet on those hot days and come home to a refreshing meal of tuna salad or shrimp salad and watermelon on the screened-in back porch.

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Summers were also largely unscheduled. We were not enrolled in any summer sports, nor did we go to summer camps. Don’t pity me – it was wonderful! School, especially from junior high school on, was like entering prison each fall, and release from school at the beginning of June was like a reprieve from a life sentence. I read books, biked, played frisbee, went swimming, did stuff with friends, went on camping trips with the family, and felt free, free, free! When the cicadas began their piercing song toward the end of summer, I knew that those happy-go-lucky days were coming to an end and school was looming on the horizon. To this day, summers are a magical time that bring always back that sense of possibility and wide-open space in my life.

I’ll probably scratch this post onto some wallpaper in the morning.