GK: A walk in the park on a historic day

The Column: 09.15.21

Saturday morning, walking around south Minneapolis, a neighborhood where, back in my youth, when your elders start neglecting their lawn, you might move them out of the bungalow and plant them here in a one-BR apt. until they can no longer climb stairs and then there’d be a family meeting — shoot them? Or plunk them in the nursing home? — and off to Happy Acres they go, worn out since elliptical machines didn’t exist back then and there were no trainers except animal trainers.

And now it’s a neighborhood of 21-year-olds as you can see from the corner grocery, which is all bags of snacks and soda pop and frozen pizzas. Youth can survive on silage, if necessary. Young women walk their dogs at 8 a.m. and a man sleeps on a bus stop bench, a suitcase beside him. The apartment buildings all post For Rent signs, some offer deals, some have roommates waiting.

I walk around, awestruck at the courage of the young. You come to the city from Aitkin or Brainerd or Cottonwood and either you get a job waiting on table and maybe salt away some dough or you go to school and rack up piles of debt, or maybe you do both and work 15-hour days and all in hopes of making a good life, whatever that might mean in your case.

I worked in a scullery near here when I was 18, the summer before college, working the dishwasher at a hotel, and since I planned to be a writer, I walked around Loring Park on my break, thinking profound thoughts, practicing smoking Pall Malls, exhaling in an artistic manner. I was raised fundamentalist and left home to go to the U in September where I made Jewish friends and saw ballet and smoked in class and listened to long-haired radicals orate on the Mall and wrote incomprehensible poetry and had a big time.

A young woman approached and I wish I could ask her what it’s like to be her in 2021 but she has a large dog on a leash who probably is trained to fend off the curious, so I pass by, averting my eyes, but I wish her well. I wish them all well, even as I worry they’ll trip on the same old pitfalls I did and become social climbers and show-offs or time-wasters and drifters. I also worry they’ll get stuck in a dead-end job with a dope for a boss and be disincentivized to break free.

It was a historic day, Saturday. It was September 11, though maybe the kids in the neighborhood don’t recall it so clearly as we elders do, a day on which the towers fell and the country suddenly was united, conservative and liberal and indifferent, old and young, city and small town and rural, when the city of New York showed heroic kindness and courage among strangers and a day later people gathered with lit candles outside their buildings and sang “America” and “God Bless America” and meant every word. Then, unaccountably, our leaders set out to make the Middle East into an American democracy and instead we became more like Afghanistan, a tribal culture, warlords vying for power, but that chapter is now at an end. Let angry old men fight over the wreckage for another year or two, but eventually the young will prevail.

The young woman walking her dog passed and I wondered what her thoughts about the day might be and I almost asked, but she was wearing a COVID mask and the dog looked at me warily, so I didn’t. When we were, briefly, twenty years ago, a united people, you could feel the spirit in the streets and people spoke easily to each other. The terrorists didn’t terrorize us, they emboldened us to love each other and to worry about the young who will inherit what we’ve badly botched up. Signs and portents abound, if only we will look up from our feet. The young are passionate about the environment and climate change. There are millions of people who cannot imagine modifying their sumptuous lifestyle in the interest of conservation in behalf of future generations and the habitability of the earth — they would rather die than do that and as soon as they do die, the world will take a step forward.

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MRS. SULLIVAN
 
“Function follows form,” said Louis Sullivan one warm
Evening in Chicago over beer. His wife said, “Dear,
I think you meant it the other way around.” 
Sullivan took a drink and frowned.
“Okay, Form follows function,” he said. 
A light appeared above his head,
A spark of architectural brilliance
That soon would dazzle millions.
“Write it down,” she said. “Here's a pencil.”
And soon Mr. Sullivan was influential
And thanks to his wife’s correction
Architecture headed in a functional direction.
But he often wondered if maybe he had been mistook
And if things should be used according to how they look.