[103/365] I'm gonna miss...

[cosmolinguist]

Brains are funny. There's a song that's been stuck in my head for the last few days, since I started thinking about Loring Park and the cherry spoon, because it mentions them.

It's a song I used to hear on the radio when I was a teenager, by like a lounge-lizard kind of guy called Vic Volare, it's called "I'm Gonna Miss Minneapolis" and it's surprisingly easy to find online now. It just namechecks a lot of places. The Loring Bar Café closed a few years later and Bde Maka Ska is no longer named after a racist, but of course I went to Loring Park and the cherry spoon, and the top of the IDS still feels magical to me after my first memory of it as a kid which was seeing it enveloped in clouds and the idea that a building could be so tall that clouds were lower than it blew my tiny child mind.

Anyway, I mention all this because I too miss Minneapolis. After a leisurely morning of a shower for D, basically the same breakfast at the café we went to our first morning, and a little stroll in the warming morning air, we checked out of our hotel and went to pick up a rental car.

Our plan to go to the Mall of America today changed at the last minute when D graciously agreed to forgo it so I could have lunch with one of the people who hadn't been able to make it last night and who I had been most wanting to see here. They suggested a place near them and it was great. They also suggested a nearby co-op (one I'd heard of because I've read about The Co-op Wars!) when I said I wanted to buy veggie protein (basically, a can of lentils and some meat-analogues) to adapt my mother's cooking to suit me.

So we did that and then drove here. D did great at his "driving an automatic on the other side of the road" adventures. For most of the trip we listened to the Doof, streaming from his phone. Very weird to hear it on a sunny afternoon! Very weird to see the familiar sights of this particular stretch of freeway without them also being tied up with the feelings of being in a car with my parents. I'd literally never been able to decouple those, in all my life. I think I'll have more to say about this later; I don't have the energy for it now.

When we got here my parents were sitting on the front steps which is so weird, I've never seen them do that in their lives. Mom cried when she hugged me. I asked her if she was okay even though I knew and she said yes even though it was a lie; this is how we have to communicate.

We sat outside on the patio and chatted, Mom and I made spaghetti (I added the lentils to my sauce, Mom added hamburger and sausage to the rest after I insisted that we didn't all have to eat plain sauce, and D ate both on my instruction to model that meat-eaters can also eat non-meat and not cause a fuss about it), we drank a bottle of wine, I showed D around the farm, we all played cards a bit and everyone went to bed early.

Mom's talking about wanting to be out of this house before winter. It feels really real now. I hope I'll be able to say more about this soon, but for now I'm just having those Our Town feelings again: "I can't look at everything hard enough."

Brains are funny.

Comments

[kshandra]

...I'm just having those Our Town feelings again: "I can't look at everything hard enough."

OMG this. When this building first went on the market and we were terrified it was going to force us out of the Bay Area, we started putting together a list of everything we wanted to make sure we went and did One Last Time. I'm so glad it no longer seems like that's going to happen to us, or at least not any time soon.

[cosmolinguist]

I'm glad you managed to avoid it. <3

[strange_complex]

I'm so glad you finally got to your parents after all this time! And all the more so if they really are planning to move. I hope you have a wonderful time with them.

[cosmolinguist]

I'm so glad too! I had easily the most positive visit with them I'd had since I got married. And, possibly, since ever. :)

[strange_complex]

That's really good to hear. And probably not unrelated to the different person you were there with, by the sounds of it. ;-)

[cosmolinguist]

Yeah, that's definitely part of it. Andrew found it so torturous to visit my family. And to be clear, much of that is on them! They were really ableist about his autism. I have no doubt that he did his best and he wanted me to have the best time possible. But it was so miserable for us both. This was so easy in comparison.

[otter]

which Co-op? Imagining either the Wedge or Lakewinds.

[cosmolinguist]

Seward.

[silveradept]

It sounds like there was a good time and a memorable time, and the separation is intentional.

[cosmolinguist]

Yeah. But even the memorable one was better than I'm used to it being! (Admittedly, that's not a very high bar, but still...)

[tarasacon]

*reading*

[cosmolinguist]

<3