Diary -- February 2, 2019

Diary – February 2, 2019


　

　
First, polar vortex raged with high winds howling through the sclerotic veins of the tree tops – twenty below with wind chills to fifty below. Then, as the wind subsided, the cold air dropped into place and screwed itself down, close to the ground. At dawn: – 25. Julie’s Infiniti choked and died. My car barely started and seemed scarcely mobile. No wind was stirring. School was canceled. In the back yard, the dog moved skittishly, lifting her paws off the ice as if it were a hot griddle burning her. Birds were singing, but with a note of manic hilarity in their calls masking their anxiety. A crow made a jagged sound like someone vomiting.

　

Then, suddenly, it was warm, fifty-five degrees warmer. The ice didn’t melt, but the air was tolerable once more. You could breathe deeply. I attended a retirement party for the Chief of Police held at the Nature Center. Big windows opened views onto the wintry forest clogged with snow. A huge glacial erratic, big as a house, rested in the meadow. A local contractor had dragged that boulder into its place fifty years ago. When my children were little, I climbed up to the top of huge granite boulder. The rock was warm in the sun and, as I lounged there like an iguana, my kids scaled its lower flanks. I should have been happy but, then, there is always something...

　

The contractor who hauled the huge rock to that meadow died a few weeks ago, his wealth tangled up in gory litigation between estranged sons and the woman with whom he had lived during the last twenty years of his life. It occurred to me that his death, perhaps, would chop through the Gordian knot of the litigation. But death, of course, solves nothing.

　

The next day, it was 33 degrees, but not melting yet because snow covered everything in a deep white blanket. At the office, we were emailed a court order. My client had prevailed in an important motion. One of the other attorneys involved in the case called to congratulate me on the victory. This lawyer had been working intensively on the case, but, then, suffered a stroke, almost died, and was now side-lined. I told him that it was good to hear his voice and that I hoped that he was mending. He said that he was feeling better. His voice had an unfamiliar, high-pitched ring. I planned to attend the opera in St. Paul on Saturday and so, on impulse, I said that I would visit him if he felt well enough to see me. He said that he would like to see me and provided his address – it was an apartment in New Brighton, the suburb north of St. Paul where I had lived between first grade and the part of my seventh grade – in the middle of the school year, fall semester, the family moved to Richardson, another suburb but north of Dallas. I wondered why he was living in New Brighton, an odd location I thought.

　

The drive to the Cities was uneventful. It was 35 degree with the sky the color of dull metal, the tone of a shadow cast on snow by a tree or a light-pole. The clouds seemed fizzy with moisture and frost grew like grey mold on windshields and chrome. I stopped at the Northfield rest stop to use the toilet – my guts felt unsettled. I was alone: Julie was visiting with her new granddaughter, Baby Noelle, in Rochester. Neither Jack nor Angelica wanted to attend the opera.

I reached New Brighton forty minutes before my appointed time, exiting from the freeway on County Road E. I thought I should use the toilet again before visiting my colleague. A gas station near the exit from the freeway occupied a hollow between white fuel storage tanks and bleached-looking warehouses. At the gas pumps, two of the four cars pulled under the tin awning had their hoods propped open. The gas station window was obstructed by a blackboard on which daily food specials were printed in stark white letters – pasta was featured on Thursday: what kind of gas station features pasta as one of its specials? The men’s toilet was dialed to the red emblem "in use". The door to the women’s toilet was similarly marked. I bought some diet pop. A Black junkie staggered out of the woman’s toilet, a big guy with zombie-eyes and dreadlocks wearing a slashed-up military-issue coat. A couple of other Black junkies were lurking in the corners of the C-store, staring at the pastries and the coffee dispenser. As soon as the first junkie appeared, one of the others lurched to the women’s toilet and took his place. Then, a white junkie came into the place, a guy with a scraggly red beard and a thousand-yard stare. He giggled slightly and limped up and down the aisles between the bright displays of candy and potato chips. The men’s toilet burst open and another Black junkie fell forward, almost losing his balance on the puddles of melt-water on the tile. One of the other junkies lunged to occupy the toilet. This wasn’t going to work. I went outside to my car. I could see a couple of other big Black junkies stumbling around in the drainage ditch, dark moving scabs against the white snow.

　

I found a toilet at the New Brighton community center. It was winter fun sign-up day and the parking lot was packed with cars and the corridors in the building jammed with small children and their parents. The children smelled bad and the tile floors were half-flooded and the toilet was crammed with burly-looking men with shaved heads belaboring toddlers in Russian, Syrian, and some African dialects. I had to wait in line to use the stall and the big men with the shaved heads and dirty-looking moustaches stared at me sullenly.

　

I drove up to 860 22^nd Ave. NW, the little home with a one-car tuck-under garage where I lived when I was a child. The house was tiny and the crumbling stucco facade was painted a faded green as if the place were camouflaged, trying to melt into the trees growing on the slope in the back yard. I wanted to stop by side of the road, no sidewalks or curbs here, and walk up into the backyard to see if the old retaining wall made from flat, yellow field-stones was still in place. We had a burning barrel that was next to the retaining wall. This wall made a convenient platform to observe the fascinating progress of the flames as they blackened the cardboard and waste–paper, unfurling little orange banners over the trash and leaking a sour twisty black smoke into the air. The back of the house had window-wells and I recall that in the Spring and Summer, these moist spider-haunted cavities were always full of big, sleek salamanders with tiger-spots on their bellies. Next door, Tom Norback lived, my cerebral friend, and, then, frail and sickly Dennis Olson and, then, on the hilltop – but everything now seemed leveled-out and squashed-down to my adult eyes – Scott Anderson with the scarred frenum under his nose where his hare-lip had been corrected. Across the street, the Grabowski’s lived, a large clan – father Grabowski was a line-man and his florid, black-haired wife went by the nickname "Boots." Everything was small, diminished, things still in their proper place but the hills flattened it seemed (if you’re riding a bike , I guess, hills seem bigger and you experience the topography in your calves and thighs) and the distances all compressed together.

　

I took the road down to a subdivision that those of us living on upper hill, under the New Brighton water-tower called "Quality Homes." For some reason, as a child, I had disdained Quality Homes and its inhabitants, but, in fact, I saw now that the houses were much nicer and better built than the jim-crack places up the slope where I had lived. I knew that the frontage road behind the freeway wall led down to Quality Homes and, then, two blocks through the subdivision to the hill road, a more heavily traveled thoroughfare that dropped down from the municipal water-tower to what was, then, the center of the village. Along the way, the road passed over a bridge where there was a small stream braided through a tiny wilderness of sumac and thorns, a watery maze so densely overgrown that you could scarcely penetrate even a foot or two into the thicket. But there was now no trace of the stream and the underbrush – perhaps, the creek had been made to flow underground.

　

The thoroughfare descending the hill passed some apartments built like brick ovens, nasty places full of questionable people, at least as I recalled from my childhood, and, then, there was a little Catholic cemetery with a stucco Jesus stapled to cross made from concrete painted dark brown. At the end of the road, there was a tee. An old two-story building made from dark, turd-colored brick stood at the intersection. The old, dark building was hinged into a flat, nondescript wing bricked in pale yellow stone – a structure that had been new and modern in 1961, when I attended school there. All my life, I have dreamed of this school and the old wing with his wide echoing halls and tile smelling of harsh antiseptic and the principal’s office on the second floor, up stairs that seemed very high and daunting when I was little. In my dream, I climb past the second floor to a marvelous third story – the third story is much larger and, apparently, majestically cantilevered and it is full of strange porticos and recesses in which there are burning barrel fires and strange beasts and it overlooks a wild, mountainous wilderness. As I drove by the real building, now seemingly deserted, I verified what I have also known all my life – notwithstanding my flamboyant dream, the dour old wing of the school has no third floor.

　

I passed a church shaped like a boat and hidden in brush. Once, before my Uncle Dave died in Vietnam, I road in the car with him and my Grandmother. We were going to hamburger place in Roseville. A rendering plant leaked a greenish plume of rancid smoke into the sky. "What kind of church is that?" my Nebraska grandma asked. Dave said: "Must be a Lutheran Church. They have the stupidest-looking dumb-ass churches." I was offended, the grandson of the Lutheran pastor, but I held my tongue.

　

We used to take swimming lessons on a cold beach on Long Lake. The beach is gone now, occupied by an arc of apartments called "The View" presumably because some of the rooms overlook the icy expanse of the lake. When I was a child, Long Lake was just one of the innumerable bodies of water dotting the landscape – except for the beach, accessed by a gravel road, the shore of the water was swampy, shallows staked with tall cattails and gentle wooded hills sloping very gradually away from the bowl-shaped depression occupied by the lake. The place was lonely, forsaken, among the tract housing sprouting on the hillsides above the freeway. No one lived there.

　

But now my poor friend who had suffered a stroke was confined to a room in "The View", the four-story structures one after another interlocked in the hollow where the old beach had been. Apparently, it was an Assisted-Living facility – a phalanx of unused wheelchairs stood along the walls in the lobby and an old man was shambling along next to his wife who was pushing a walker. The old man let me through the security door, remarking that the weather was much finer than a few days before. I agreed with him.

　

I was met at my colleague’s apartment by a young woman, his daughter. She ushered me into a small room. The windows cast white, refined light into the space, part sitting room and part kitchen. Stacks of boxes were stacked along the wall – it looked as if my friend was in the process of moving into the place. He was seated in a cozy-looking upright chair. I shook his good hand. The left side of his body seemed inert and he held his left hand, half-clenched in his lap. I sat on the couch but discovered that my position was not good – my colleague had to turn to see me and couldn’t exactly get his neck and head to move in that direction. So I moved and took up a position on a sort of hassock at the foot of his chair. Next to where he was sitting, a companionable stack of books seemed to totter a little – a fat biography of Ulysses S. Grant, a thinner biography of Ruth Bader Ginsberg, some typed slip-decisions from the Court of Appeals and other books, some of them about recovering from cerebral stroke. The young woman reclined on a nearby couch, reading something on her I-Pad.

　

My friend told me that he had come home from depositions in Wisconsin. He collapsed on the floor and was not found for two-and-a-half days. He had no memory of those two days. His partner, an associate and his secretary found him. He didn’t seem to want to talk about his affliction and changed the subject.

　

We talked about the law. His memory about old cases was exhaustive. He could recall vivid details of cases tried thirty years ago. He still remembered the appellate decisions in which he had taken part. His memory for the past, at least with respect to old litigation, was superb, far better than mine. Indeed, he seemed to take delight in testing my memory. He asked me if I recalled mediating a case with him and another lawyer that we both knew. I had no memory about this mediation at all. He said that he had effected a settlement using the device made famous by my former, and long dead, senior partner Kenny Strom. "Do you know what I am talking about?" he asked. I said that I did not. "Miller-Shugert" he replied. "It was the case that resulted in the ‘Miller-Shugert’ type of release." I knew what a Miller-Scugert release was. In my defense, the reason I hadn’t understood his question was because my other partner, Don R– , had actually written the briefs and argued the appeal in that matter. My friend’s speech was accurate, precise, and detailed with names and places. He seemed to have total recall of all of every lawsuit in which he had been involved as defense counsel. He told me about terrible injuries, peoples’ eyes knocked out of their head when their orbital bones were shattered, massive head injuries, brain damage with cerebrospinal fluid oozing out of the nose or the ears. He seemed calm, utterly lucid, and incapable of any emotion.

　

I think it would be a nightmare to be trapped in a mind occupied only by memories of old lawsuits, forgotten trials, long-ago appeals and legal arguments. But, perhaps, I have never been well-suited to the law.

　

After an hour, I bid him farewell. I gripped his hand hard and looked carefully into his eyes. My colleague seemed old and bird-like, fragile, something like an injured hawk.

It was 3:00 pm and I was hungry. My guts felt sort of twisted and uneasy. I went back to the C-Store by the freeway exit but the toilets were both occupied and there were more Black junkies lurking in the aisles. I decided to go to a McDonald’s. I followed the freeway to the McDonald’s but found it to be inaccessible on the other side of a moat of frozen ditch full of manicured "water features" and on the wrong side of a confusing network of one-way roads. I took the highway past the inaccessible McDonald’s to the first intersection, turned and saw ahead of a me a C-Store near an exit ramp. I parked there and, then, noticed the two cars stalled next to the pumps with their hoods propped open. It was the place with the drug addicts from which I had just come. Several shadowy figures were on stagger-patrol at the edges of the parking lot. I drove back onto the freeway, went the opposite direction and, then, exited where I saw an Arby’s sign. The exit was confusing and I saw the Arby’s briefly, atop a hill like a fort, but I couldn’t figure out how to get there. The road sluiced me back onto the highway and I drove for a mile or so, sighting ahead of me a gas station and convenience store that looked like a reasonable place to stop. I pulled up to the C-store and, inside, saw there a huge black man wearing sweat pants and shirt – he was too enormous to fit into any kind of ordinary clothing – with a tiny white woman with green and yellow stars tattooed all over her face. The enormous Black man and the little disfigured White woman were buying cinnamon rolls. The place looked familiar and, when I went to the toilets, both were turned to red on the door-knobs, occupied, and, then, when I gazed out the window I could see the prowling junkies and the two cars with their hoods propped open next to the pumps and, then, when I went to my car, the blackboard-like sign announcing that the place sold "Pasta" on Thursdays. I drove back to the Community Center, found a spot in the crowded chaotic parking lot, and, then, used the foul-smelling, flooded toilet full of screaming toddlers and young men with shaved, bald heads. I went into the library and found a spot – the last seat open in the whole place – and started reading my book, Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion, writing some citations in a spiral notebook. It occurred to me to use my cell-phone to check if the St. Paul fucking winter fucking carnival was underway. I don’t like that celebration – it clogs the streets with drunk morons and makes it impossible to park anywhere near the Ordway where the opera was going to performed. Sometimes, a parade snakes through downtown and makes it literally impossible to cross the street and, of course, all of the one-ways and through streets are barricaded by cop cars and there are party-goers everywhere, the more intoxicated ones comfortably bedded down in the rich stew of slush on the sidewalks and gutters. The phone told me that the St. fucking Paul winter fucking carnival was in full bloom and, indeed, this was the night for the torchlight parade. So I got up, went to my car, deciding that I had to get to St. fucking Paul before the city became impassable.



Grey streets with sidewalks covered with grey slush flushed out of the gutters, police barricades, armies of the walking wounded benumbed by booze shuffling between buildings – St. Paul. Tonight there’s a hockey game, the Minnesota Wild at the Excel Center and, of course, the torchlight parade, various Winter Carnival balls, the opera and the fireworks stockpiled to be shot over Harriet Island, mass confusion and limited parking, although I’m early enough to get a space in the parking lot built against the river bluff, six levels down, twenty bucks a car. But now what? I have four hours until curtain and nothing really to do, nowhere to go.

　

I hike down Kellogg among the spectral crowds, no one high-stepping it because the old cobblestones and the sidewalks and the crossings are all very slippery. My plan is to find a quiet nook in the lobby of the Intercontinental Hotel, four blocks from the Ordway where the opera will be presented – I have several books to read and plan to sit in the bar, perhaps, making notes on Sometimes a Great Notion. As it turns out, lines of people dressed in Winter fucking Carnival regalia are awaiting seats in the bar, the place uproarious and filled to overflowing, and, no fewer than two formal balls are scheduled for this evening, after the torchlight parade and the fireworks. The downtown Intercontinental Hotel is the headquarters for the Vulcans, red-caped men and women with soot smeared all over their faces and forearms. The Vulcans ride fire-trucks with sirens blaring and their office is to assault the Court of King Borealis and his ice-nymphs, set afire the crystal walls of the ice palace, and forcibly make warm what has been frozen. They are less harbingers of Spring then of chaos – fire and melting and flood. But, of course, in actuality, the fearsome Vulcans are merely Jaycees, Junior Chamber members, that is, small retailers, the owners of mom-and-pop C-stores and second-hand clothing emporiums, insurance agents, real estate brokers, assorted shopkeepers, financial advisors, the whole Main Street riffraff liberated by their devilishly red costumes and vast amounts of strong drink to all sorts of mischief. For a time, it was feared that the Vulcans and their merry Krewe would be abolished on account of the rampant sexual harassment that they committed, hurtling about the streets aboard rickety, antique fire engines and dismounting to kiss girls and smear their faces with soot or grab their pussies, as the President of the United States would say, violating women and girls by the dozens until rules and regulations were passed to restrict this sort of activity. The Vulcans are now coed and lady Vulcans were staggering around the lobby dead-drunk, their breasts flopping out of their Vampirella outfits, the girl fire-nymphs leaning on the arms of their red-caped male escorts, all of them sloppily drinking schnaps out of the eight-inch silver flasks. So here I was, sitting in a chair in Vulcan central, next to the door from which the Krewes were departing onto the howling fire-trucks. Two female Vulcans are sprawled across from me on a love-seat, breasts mostly exposed but otherwise bundled up in black and red coats, sashes across their torsos covered in Winter Carnival buttons. They are drinking beer from plastic cups and discussing the provisions in their rooms upstairs – is there going to be enough booze for the night? – and the men with them are guzzling schnaps from not one but four or five silver flasks passed back and forth and, then, a fire truck, sirens wailing, pulls up to the door and its time to go, although due to drunkenness it takes a long time to board the truck, get people organized dangling from the running boards and piled up atop the hook-and-ladder assembly, a mob of people hanging onto the fire-truck by the merest cunt-hair, one might say, and, then, the Vulcan commanders pacing through the people crammed into the lobby, faces corked-up to a foul black, eyes flashing, red capes like bat wings making the men seem just like comic-book super-heroes. And, so it goes, for two-and-a-half hours, my nose pushed into my book, writing notes in a spiral notebook, chaos all around, although once the parade starts, about 5:45 in the blue-grey dusk and ranks of people marching with fire light up the old building facades as if it were the Dresden firestorm, the lobby clears out a little and you can breathe a bit more easily. The Vulcans will return – after they assault King Borealis and his ice-nymphs and burn down his ice-palace, they will be back, all of the blackened and sooty Krewes, for the grand Ball in the grand ballrooms upstairs...

　

The toilet is acrid with vomit. The floor is awash with puke. Out on the streets, the drunks are puking into the grey-brown slush. Vomit is like fire. The Vulcans vomit flame onto King Borealis and the sky goes electric with fireworks.

　

I desperately need a drink. I go into the bar but every single stool and table and chair is occupied. The bar counter is a trough with people crammed elbow-to-elbow, men dressed like drum majorettes or military officers of Ruritanian republics, plumes and feathers, and the women all costumed like Klondike era prostitutes. After making a circuit of the bar, I see that it’s impossible to order a drink and, so, I walk over to the Ordway. Normally, Kellogg Park in the pretty square between the St. Paul Hotel (HQ for King Borealis, the Court of Four Winds, and the ice-nymphs), the Public Library, the old Federal Court Building and the Ordway – possibly the prettiest public space in the whole country – normally, this leafy place with fountains and benches is full of revelers and there are ice sculptures the size of elephants in the park, vendors, and a stage wrapped in a cocoon of plastic where bands are playing. But the park is under renovation, the whole place surrounded by cyclone fences and orange barricades and it seems strangely dark, even, forlorn.

　

An hour before the opera performance, the rehearsal accompanist, an earnest young man (undoubtedly gay) lectures about 100 opera-goers about the opera that is about to be performed, The Italian Straw Hat. The young man hammers out the principal melodies on the piano and some understudies sing a couple numbers and, behind him, the great glass windows on the facade of the Ordway Theater flash violently with fireworks and a rumble like thunder rolls across the manic city.

　

The opera is frivolous and, although it’s supposed to be funny, no one’s laughing, and, like all operas, it goes on too damn long. I’m distracted by weather reports displayed on my cell-phone: drizzle one-hundred miles south where I am going, freezing rain and dangerously dense fog. The temperature is 37 and, so, I don’t know how the drizzle can be freezing but, in fact, if this is the case then I am screwed, royally and thoroughly screwed. My seats are located in a box to the left of the stage on the mezzanine level and there are four chairs in the box in front of me, perhaps, the best seats in the house. These seats were once occupied by the regal Opera Queen, Tom, and his various consorts, all handsome, if surly-looking, young men. Tom was a wealthy surgeon who lived on lake Minnetonka, the scion of some much-decayed but still wealthy Minneapolis milling or grain trading family. When he hosted parties at his manor, music was provided by three-fifths of the Minnesota Orchestra on contract to him, lavish affairs attended by leading politicians and business tycoons. Tom went to operas all over the world and could talk knowledgeably about this year’s season at La Scala or the Teatro Massimo in Palermo, for example, and he didn’t attend one show of an opera, but rather two or three or, even, four if he thought the performances were suitably grand. For, at least, a decade I sat behind Tom, dutifully chatting a little with him at each performance – he was always amusingly catty, snarky one might say, about the divas and whether they were in good voice or not. He applauded by gently tapping the balustrade in front of his seat and, during the obligatory standing ovation, Tom, as an actual aficionado, obstinately remained seated – he knew what quality was and didn’t bestow his praise lightly. But, then, Tom, who was a bit long in the tooth, vanished and his seats, it seemed, were cast open to the merest hoi polloi. So now two couples occupied Tom’s bespoke place in the box, people who seemed to have lost their way from the Minnesota Wild game being played adjacent to the opera house – that is, brutish businessmen with their ignorant wives, sports fans as far as I could see, and they were accompanied by a big elderly gentleman who was placed in the location where wheelchairs are usually deployed on this side of the proscenium, that is, directly next to where I was sitting, but with a better view of the stage. The old fellow smelled of gin and he was not in a wheelchair at all, rather a chair was pulled in from the lobby, a seat too comfortable because he promptly fell asleep as soon as the opera’s first chords sounded – he, then, reclined in his chair, head tilted back and snoring loudly. At intermission, he aroused himself, applauded the orchestra and players, and lumbered out into the lobby for another drink. Music apparently was soporific to him because, again, at the first notes in the second half overture, he again toppled face forward into the arms of Morpheus and remained sleeping until it was time to stand and add his acclamation to the standing ovation. But I was anxious to depart and, so, as the audience was wildly applauding and shouting bravo and bravissimo, I pushed by the narcoleptic old gent and hustled out into the cold and damp.

　

　

Many years ago, I argued a case to the Minnesota Supreme Court. In those days, the Court conducted hearings in the capitol building within an ornate chamber with high, coffered ceilings, marble statuary, and gilded murals. My senior partner was present and, after the proceedings, we went downtown for a drink. St. Paul was more bucolic thirty-five years ago, sweeter and slower paced than Minneapolis and late on a summer afternoon, the town seemed deserted. We parked at a meter next to Kellogg Park and, then, walked across the warm white sidewalk to the Minnesota Club.

Inside, portraits of eminent men loomed over the enameled green of billiard tables and the velvet settees and couches and it was dim and cool, the anteroom to a caverns and crypts. A marble bar counter shimmered like an iceberg in one counter and stylish-looking girls with fashion-model faces and figures were mixing martinis in silver canisters. The club had been founded about the time Minnesota became a State and it was the refuge for senators and judges and captains of industry. Venetian curtains scaling high windows excluded the glare of the day. People spoke in low, confidential whispers. Twenty minutes after we arrived, several of the Justices to whom I had argued the case appeared. They solemnly glided past the billiard tables and sat near the bar. The waitresses knew what they wanted before they ordered.

A few years ago, the Minnesota Club folded – the eminent men who had frequented the place were dead or demented and the culture that they represented was also in tatters. The place had fallen into disrepair. For a while, it was run as an upscale sports bar but the place was across the street from the high alabaster sarcophagus of the public library and, in general, sports fans, even the most elite, don’t like to be anywhere near a library because the thought of books intolerably sours drinks and puts a man in mind of ancient lessons either disdained or failed. So, after the bankruptcy of the sports bar, the old Club was shuttered but available for rental for wedding receptions, corporate retreats, and other gatherings. Sometimes, after the opera, I would walk by the Minnesota Club and hear the throb of disco music inside and, then, look up to those great windows with the Venetian blinds to see the rhythmic flash of a strobe light – outside the front door, a big crowd of Russian immigrants were gathered wearing wild and crazy disco finery, all of them frantically smoking cigarettes and weed before hurrying back into the dance.

After The Italian Straw Hat, I saw a man sprawled on the pavement next to the Minnesota Club. Two women were wailing. "It’s ice, it’s just solid ice," one of them cried. The man was lying stark and unconscious on the stones that had split open his head. Blood was pillowing his hair and shoulders. A few yards away other people were staring at the calamity, pecking at the cell-phones. Other people leaving the opera crossed the street to avoid the glaze of black ice on which the man had slipped.

　

　

Revelers from the Winter fucking Carnival were sashaying along the other side of the street, hurrying from one entertainment to another. The crowd was large and fleet-footed, churning through the inch-deep slush and firecrackers were snapping and rattling in back alleys. The revelers didn’t see the man with the cracked skull lying on the other side of the street or, if they saw him, they were indifferent. This is the nature of a big city – people hastening on errands of pleasure rush blindly past those who have fallen in the same pursuits.

　

A half-block from where the unconscious man was bleeding on the sidewalk, well-dressed people hurrying to their cars were stopped at the intersection on Kellogg Boulevard. A cop wearing a florescent yellow vest was standing out in intersection waving a lantern-like flashlight. A chill was in the air and we stood backed-up behind the red light for a long time. The cop turned to the gathered people, now twenty or so, standing in the cross-walk. "It’s a long light isn’t it?" he remarked. We had been standing there, waiting to cross for seven minutes. "I thought you were controlling the light," a woman said. Down the street, police barricades still blocked part of the boulevard and squad cars with blue spinning lights were guarding the barricades. "I’m not controlling the light," the cop said. "They must be controlling the lights from down there," the woman said, pointing in the direction of the rapidly rotating blue light. "No, we don’t have the capacity to control the lights," the cop in the yellow vest said. He looked over his shoulder: "there’s a button on the light post," he said. "Would someone please push the button?" When the button was pushed, the light changed promptly.

　

Many streets were blocked in the downtown area and it took me several turns in the wrong direction and ten minutes to find my way to the freeway. I drove to Owatonna where I stopped to buy something to eat and put fuel in my car. South of Owatonna, driving became more difficult – it is 33 miles to the intersection between Interstates 35 and 90 and dense fog barred my way. At first, I drove the speed limit, blasting through drifting veils of fog, but, then, the fog became more dense and wrapped around my car closely and I had to slow down. Sometimes, a truck churned past me, driving much too fast for the conditions, but I had to slow and follow the fog-line on my right and the featureless white foam pressing against the windshield played tricks on my eyes – I hallucinated gremlins and deer on the highway. Interstate 90 was worse. I had to slow down to a crawl. The shadows of things looming on the side of the road seemed indefinite and strange to me. It took me a long time to find the exit into Austin. I kept wavering off the edge of the road and, then, finding that the exit was still some inexplicable distance ahead of me. After I found the exit, I climbed the ramp off the freeway and, then, turned to creep slowly through the white clouds swirling around me. I couldn’t see ahead any more and, so, I opened my window and leaned by head out into the wet fog and navigated by sound only: the steady rotary whoosh of my tires on wet asphalt told me when I was on the asphalt; a sound of creaking, crushed snow and ice told me that I had wandered off onto the shoulder. The sound of crashing metal, screams, and yelping dogs told me that I was hitting things hidden in the fog. And so I made my uncertain way forward traveling blindly, as is always the case, through night and fog.