Fall Falling Leaves Moon
Tom Crane, Bill Schmidt, Scott Simpson, Mark Odegard and Frank Broderick and I gathered at the Black Forest for the Woolly Mammoth first Monday restaurant meeting. We had gone to the Black Forest regularly for many years, then, partly at my urging, had moved onto other cuisines and other locales. Now, though, as my time here has become limited I find myself wanting to return to familiar places.
The Whittier Neighborhood was the site of my year-long internship while in seminary-part at Bethlehem-Stewart Presbyterian (only two blocks west of the Black Forest on 26th) and part at South Central Ministry just across Lake Street from Whittier in the Longfellow Neighborhood. In 1976 the Presbyterian church ordained me to the ministry of word and sacrament at Bethlehem-Stewart, an ordination I held until 1996 when, in Phoenix, Arizona at the Unitarian-Universalist General Assembly, I entered the U-U ministry.
So a lot of person history intersects at the corner of 26th and Nicollet, where the Black Forest is. Not far from there toward the north and east three blocks, too, is the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. A nexus for me in many ways.
Frank’s back from Ireland, looking much better and feeling no pain in his legs. Tom’s hand has mostly healed. Mark and Elizabeth have decided to spend three months or so in southern France, staring mid-January. Scott admitted he had spent time in his youth a mail-man substitute. And worked as a Lamplighter while sleeping in People’s Park in Vancouver, B.C. Bill Schmidt’s becoming Spinozified and finding this Dutch Jew a very compatible thinker.
On the drive home, a drive I’ve made more or less regularly from Minneapolis or St. Paul to Andover for the last 20 years, I realized that though I spent 20 years in the city and consider myself an urban guy, I’ve really only spent 20 years in cities. The other 47 years have been in smaller to medium sized towns or the far burbs. Interesting how a place can impress itself into our sense of who we are.
