Story Seven

That time I went to Minneapolis.

Minneapolis is a lovely city when it isn’t on fire. I had hoped never to return, which is impossible when you’re due for court, which is how I found myself carrying my own bloodied clothes through the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport last weekend. I had wisely preserved them for evidence, and they had sat in the back of my closet for a year and a half. The law moves slowly.

The hotel that I stayed at had a restaurant for breakfast and my waiter was an affable man who noticed my eyepatch because he wears one too. We traded stories about how we got them like people do when they meet strangers who share a visible but not common characteristic. His was a lifelong degeneration and we decided that neither path to monocularism was particularly nice but that in any case it’s good we’d lost our left eyes.

The world is built for right handed people after all, and it would suck more to constantly have to adapt to see where a door handle or point of sale machine were.

I wish I could tell you more about the visit; I can’t because court so I will just say that it involved Napalm Death and either the Steelers or the Cavaliers, which I only figured out by process of elimination as they were the two potential sports teams who might have been in my hotel lobby.

It also involved some very nice cheesesteak, which was the fulfillment of my first wish out of the hospital. Specifically I wanted a steak and a beer or a cheeseburger and a bourbon, but couldn’t get them because the city was on lockdown and burning. So this time I split the difference with a cheesesteak and a gin cocktail, which sounds like a terrible combination but was actually quite lovely.

When I left the next day, I found myself staring down an hour and a half wait to get through TSA, and I have to say it’s the first time in my life I ever admitted to being truly disabled because there was no way I could manage that line. Sitting, maybe, but needing to constantly look around and dodge small children and confused tourists on my left side would have me collapsing in half an hour. So I walked up to disability services and simply asked to borrow a chair.  They wouldn’t give me one to use, but they did assign one to me with a nice man who told me his name was Max. You know how people who move to the States pick American names to tell to Americans? This guy’s name was not Max. So I asked him why he picked that, and it turns out it was because of Max Headroom, which was the kind of hilariously surreal deep cut that made perfect sense to me while I was being whisked through the Minneapolis TSA and treated with far more respect than I am personally used to from TSA anywhere and law enforcement in Minneapolis specifically.

I don’t think I started breathing again until I deplaned in Nashville. A woman next to me on the plane carried on an aging Sony video camera and let me take a look at it but seemed very disinterested in talking, which is directly 100% the usual reaction that broadcast journos typically have near us mere print workers. I thought about asking if she needed any locals to interview about the tornadoes; I covered the last ones in Nashville after all. But I said I was also a journalist and she got that look that I sometimes get when I’m writing in a bar and someone says they also have a novel and I figured if she was on the last commuter seat with nothing but a camera as a carryon I didn’t need to push my own street cred. And besides, she was network. I bet they put her up somewhere nice and rented her a decent car and she could do her own work.

I came home to a house that’s weird and messy and overfull of warm light and happy children and some cats who are either very angry or very contented depending on the minute, and we gave them catnip - both the children and the cats. My youngest, while she is reaching the age where she’s far too grown up to play, still occasionally gets on the floor and meows and won’t respond unless I call her a kitty and scratch behind her ears.

I have always loved music but never got too much into Christmas songs, and perhaps it is a function of the kind of nostalgia that comes with age or perhaps the trouble is that in my house it seems safe and warm and outside is ull of death and bullets, but I find my brain singing just these words on a loop, which is annoying because you have to finish the line but these are the only words that seem resonant: “the weather outside is frightful, but the fire is so delightful, and since we’ve no place to go—”

I don’t have a fire but I am grateful this year for warm-colored lights and happy kids and three asshole cats.