LILEKS (James) The Bleat

Saturday night we went to the Georges' for a dinner. They had two house guests staying over night; the gentleman had come to town to give a talk at the Georges’ church, and his wife was along for the fun. I can’t call them elderly, even though they were seniors plus ten or twenty years - they were energetic & engaged, not a jot of dodderitis between them. I’d say “spry,” but that always makes me think of Granny Clampett running around. Their age wouldn’t be relevant at all, were it not for their stories. And they had stories.

Joe had some tales from the war, and like just about every other WW2 vet I’ve heard, the tales hadn’t grown from year to year; they hadn’t been burnished or edited or draped with purple bunting. The stories were small, simple, and had great heft. This sort of man doesn’t brag. (They ought to rename that base Ft. Reticentt.) In a way you wish they’d act more like Boomers, and give you a yarn - but when they tell a story, they often sit there with their hands folded in their laps, looking down as they recollect, occasionally raising a hand to signal some great calamity.

So imagine you’re a young man from Iowa, now in Europe, now at war. You’re escorting convoys, hanging in the sky over the water, watching the broken black line of ships snake along below. It’s an awe-inspiring sight on any morning, but this morning is different. Vesuvius erupted. You can see the lava stream down the mountain. You’re not going to forget that.

I always feel awed and small in the presence of these guys; we owe them everything. But we owe Joe a bit more. His full name is Major Joe Gomer, and he was one of the Tuskegee Airmen.

If you don’t know who they are, you whippersnapper, shame on you. The Tuskegee Airmen were an all-Black fighter squadron who fought Germans in the sky and segregation on the ground. Major Gomer’s daughter put up a webpage here, if you want the full story. I’d love to share some of the tales Maj. Gomer and his delightful wife passed along, but they didn’t talk with the expectation that the conversation would end up on a web site, so I’ll leave you to imagine.

An American hero without peer.

My wife’s elderly aunt died last week; just found out today. Longtime Bleat readers might recall occasional tales about visiting the nursing home - that’s where Aunt Lee spent her last years. She lived long enough to want to live no longer; she fell asleep and the spring wound down. I have a poster on my wall of the view from the beauty parlor where she worked in the 50s and 60s. It was a little shop in the Physicians and Surgeon’s building. Four buildings, four corners: the P & S, the elegant Young Quinlan, the old drugstore and the big white pain palace called the Medical Arts building. The odd obelisk of the Foshay Tower rose in the distance. I have a poster of the Foshay seen between the Medical Arts and Quinlan buildings.

Around the time Aunt Lee went into the nursing home, construction began on a blunt stupid structure as tall as it is banal; it completely blocks the sight of the Foshay tower from the Nicollet Mall.

Sometimes you can remember people by remembering what they saw. When people die they take so much with them, so many details already lost in the fog of senescence. I’m not just talking about family stories, but commonplace facts of daily life - the brand name of an obscure chewing gum, the sound a parking meter made when you inserted your coins, the typeface on the advertising circular the grocer always tucked in the bag, a voice on the local radio station, the way the Gateway Park looked at night from the top of the Nicollet Hotel. The past vanishes one synapse at a time; some parts of the past are locked in a hundred thousand minds, unexamined for decades, and when they’re finally gone you’ve no idea what they were in the first place. It’ll drive you mad; it’ll make you want to note everything and scan all your receipts and take pictures of fast-food menus. History shouldn’t be a highlight reel.

Here’s what she saw. God speed, Lee.

Finally: today is the 40th birthday of Southdale, the Mother of All Malls. The first all-enclosed suburban shopping mall with an interior court was built here in the Twin Cities. I’ve whipped up a small tribute in this week’s Flotsam Cove.

My first trip to the cities was to see Southdale. It was as much a Wonder of the World then as the Mall of America is today; the idea that Fargo could have one of its own someday would have struck my parents as nonsense. (And pointless, too - didn’t we have a downtown for shopping?) I went to Southdale today to snap a few pictures, and stood on the same spot my dad stood to shoot the sidewalk cafe below. Nowadays it’s just another regional mall in an indistinguishable suburb, surrounded by the usual suspects: Pizza Uno, Restoration Hardware, CompUSA. Lube shops, fast food, Mattress Giant. It’s Anywhere America - you have to check the license plates in the car ahead of you to know where you are. But there was nothing there when Southdale went in - a big drive-in down France Avenue, a gas station at the freeway interchange. Nothing much else. Farmland and trees.

At the Dayton’s store my parents bought me a stuffed dog with a music box embedded in the kapok; it played “Some Enchanted Evening.” My mom wound it up every night and it plinked its way though the melody until I fell asleep. Now it’s in a drawer in my old bedroom in Fargo; now I’m here.

Across the street and up the field from Southdale, they’d later build a hospital. That’s where my daughter was born. Back then the birthing room was just a spot in the sky, waiting for walls.

Where am I going with this? Nowhere in particular. Other than this: Swap stories and save gum wrappers. That’s what you’re hear for. Glean what you can from the day; pass it along. Don’t worry that it’s too trivial or meaningless.

If I worried about that, I’d never write another bleat.