Visiting home after a long time away

The Column: 10.09.23

We Minnesotans believe in low-key. We don’t make a big deal about it unless it’s about our kids. And so one morning last week, when I ordered steak and eggs for breakfast and got a splotch of ovular grease and sirloin of Percheron and stale toast, after I sawed away at the horsemeat and the waitperson asked how everything was, I said, “Fine.” It dawned on me in that very moment that I have never ever not even once sent food back to the kitchen.

It was a revelation. I think I would complain if a cockroach was swimming in the soup or a colony of ants resided in the wedge salad, but a breakfast like the one I got, I accept as the luck of the draw, same as you accept potholes or panhandling drug addicts. This is a Minnesota point of view: “Who do I think I am to complain about a tough steak in a world where so many go hungry?” I always regarded this as virtuous, but now it seems like cowardice, the fear of unpleasantness. 

Flattery is offensive to a Minnesotan. My mother recoiled if someone praised her cooking and I do the same when someone praises a book I wrote. My wife says, “Accept compliments gracefully,” and she’s so right, but you can tell when you’re being buttered up and when people speak from the heart. I was walking along Wabasha Street in downtown St. Paul last week (after the breakfast) and a couple passed me and the man said quietly, “It’s good to see you again, sir.” A quiet welcome from a city I left years ago and it touched me. The modesty of it said that he’s a Minnesotan too.

Minnesota reticence can be a problem; it often comes off as indifference. There are many jokes about this — the Norwegian who always took his wife with him on trips so he wouldn’t have to hug her goodbye — a Minnesota extrovert is someone who stares at your shoes instead of his own — but it’s a handicap. I had coffee last week with a woman I’ve known for forty years, an odd serendipitous friendship, and we talked for an hour and she was so easy to talk to and we said goodbye and I hugged her and said, “I hope you know that I cherish being your friend,” which surprised me, hearing the words come out of my mouth.

I left Minnesota because I was slandered there and thrown under the bus and in true Minnesota fashion I tried to ignore it, which only made it more painful and so I found the comfort of anonymity in New York where people customarily send a bad breakfast back for the chef to reconsider, which, as my wife points out, tends to improve the overall quality of breakfasts.

I’m sure that is true but I can’t change my upbringing. When I didn’t clean my plate, Mother told me that the starving children of China would consider themselves lucky to have that fried liver and cauliflower and tater tots for dinner. I haven’t eaten liver since I left home at 18 but the lesson was learned: shut up and be grateful.

So I’m perplexed by the Anger Caucus in the House of Representatives. Matt Gaetz is not from Minnesota, nor is Jim Jordan, nor is the embittered billionaire in the courtroom in New York. There he is, stark naked and raving mad, sharing nuclear secrets with members of his golf club, composing fictional tax returns, insulting the judge, a politician whom some people look on as a male Mona Lisa and other people see as a sculpture fashioned from giraffe turds: either way, he’s one of a kind. The Anger Caucus doesn’t send a bad breakfast back to the kitchen, they hurl it against a wall and throw chairs and overturn tables, which is coming to be accepted as normal behavior.

This makes me appreciate Minnesota more. I still have friends there and I cherish them more and more as the years drift by. I wouldn’t come right out and say so, of course, lest it seem like flattery, but if I had breakfast with a friend and she were served horsemeat, I would take it back to the kitchen. She’d say, “Please don’t, it’s okay,” but I’d tell the cook to try again. “This woman taught special ed for thirty years; she deserves better.”

Serenity at 70, Gaiety at 80: Why you should keep on getting older by Garrison Keillor

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