Brackett Field Park, Minneapolis
I read Tom Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again in the fall of 1975, at Oberlin College, before I dropped out. In the autobiographical novel, a young white man from Asheville moves to New York City and then returns to the South where he feels he no longer belongs. Unfortunately, despite Wolfe’s protestations, he, and his fictional self still clung to the racist ideas he grew up with. As a young person who left home and spent formative years in North Carolina and the Northeast, the book agitated me. I remember debating Wolfe’s relevance as a college text, asking why we didn’t read Toni’s Morrison’s Bluest Eye, instead, which takes place in Loraine Ohio, eleven miles from Oberlin. Got a B minus in that class.
It was not the contents of Wolfe’s book but the title was on my mind when, after a year away, I returned to Minnesota for a visit. I wondered if I even had the right to call it a homecoming. Many would not consider me a Minnesotan. I wasn’t born there, and I have no ancestors there. In 1976, at age 17, I ran away to the Twin Cities and settled. I found the love of my life in Minneapolis, and we raised a child there. Five decades passed. It is as close to a homeland as I have.
I had a bittersweet relationship with Minneapolis; joys, yes, but also attacks, rejections, resentments, and persistent blues. I often dreamt of leaving but I’d persist because in the 1970s when the Twin Cities was like a ground zero for Anonymous groups, I joined one. I was not a Twelve Step success, but one of the program’s aphorisms stuck with me. There is no geographical cure. When I desired a break from what bogged me down in the Twin Cities, I would remember that mantra and try to hold on.
In 2011 however, I did get away for a year, cycling the perimeter of the US with my spouse, an experience that only increased my wanderlust. In the fall of 2023, when we had both retired, we sold our home and gave away our possessions, put what we could carry in backpacks, and began a life on the run.
A year later, after living in 19 countries, we returned “home” for a visit. I was nervous. How would it feel to be in Minneapolis without a place to live that was ours or a plan to stay? Would anyone want to see me? Would I feel accomplishment or a sense of failure about my years there? Would I wish I had never left? Would I want to stay? I made sure we had reservations for the next six months of travel, as though the town itself would suck me back in if I didn’t have a planned exit.
The return was as emotional as I imagined but in different ways. We saw 1/3 of the people we wanted to see and did a quarter of what we planned to do. Much time was spent on maintenance health care. We attended the wedding of our nephew but from a distance. Our child Emily came for the wedding and caught COVID. David and I never tested positive, but we curtailed our time with others in case we did.
I thought it would be hard to see the house we lived in for 30 years, but it wasn’t. I felt removed, like it belonged to someone else—which it does. What made me weepy was walking to old haunts: the creek, the holding pond, the grocery store, the café, sitting on a favorite park bench, watching a blue heron walk on water.
We joined the parade circling the Bde Maka Ska at dusk. We also walked Lakes’ Phalen, Wildwood, White Bear, Como, Powderhorn, and Harriet. We crossed the Mississippi River and followed the path along Minnehaha Creek. I enjoyed Phalen in East St. Paul the most, not because it was familiar, but because Emily was with us.
We traversed the Cities on foot. First days, while staying with a friend in the south suburb we walked the boulevards of Bloomington, past signs supporting police, and George Floyd’s name woven into a fence. Staying in our old neighborhood for ten days, We did the South Minneapolis circuit: Butter Bakery Café, George Floyd Square, and the 37th street people’s cemetery, honoring souls killed by police in the US. We attended a small pro-Palestine protest in Powderhorn Park and missed a larger one. We met beloved friends at May Day Café and Butter and Turtle Bread.
Movement Photographer King Demetrius Pendleton’s Gallery in George Floyd Square.
We walked from South Minneapolis to downtown St Paul to meet with the Twin Cities Labor Chorus, taking a diagonal from 4th and 46th Streets South to the river at Franklin Avenue, crossing the Mississippi into Prospect Park, onto University Ave where Minneapolis becomes St Paul. I felt no claim to our house of 30 years, but walking these familiar paths, I sensed indelible ownership. Where my foot falls is mine and nobody can take that away from me—not even me.
During our visit, the lilacs were blooming! Deep purple, white, and lavender. Lilacs are a Minnesota sign of spring. Nothing is more beautiful or smells as sweet. We had a bush that grew as tall as the house. Back in the day, before we had a house or a bush, David and I used to steal lilacs in springtime and put them on our table for each other’s May birthdays. Walking by on our former home I saw purple blossoms envelop the roof! Beautiful, yet an ominous sign of a climate in flux.
A year later, there were still encampments in parks and parking lots of people without homes. I found this social neglect newly shocking. Everywhere I have been, inequality is the primary ill, but nowhere did we see people without homes in the numbers that we have in this frigid city rich in Fortune 500 companies and non-profits. I saw people living outside in Paris, Dublin, and Lisbon, and many people living by handouts in Cadiz, Spain, but no place leaves people without homes in the winter ice and summer heat like Minneapolis. (Here in Istanbul where I write, our host told us homelessness is nearly nonexistent. I was skeptical. After two weeks, I am starting to believe him.)
In some ways, the more things have changed the more they have returned to old patterns. This summer a Jewish Israeli scholar of genocide was offered a job in the Center for Holocaust and Gender Studies at the University of Minnesota. The offer was rescinded when Professor Segal used his scholarship to analyze genocide in Gaza. This outrage made me think of Michael McConnell. He and his husband were the first gay couple legally married in the US. In 1970 he also came to the University of Minnesota to fulfill a job offer, only to have the University Library rescind it because he was openly gay. Lucky for Minneapolis, the Hennepin County Library hired Michael. So far the Twin Cities lost its chance of being enriched by Professor Raz Segal. If the Israeli had stayed, he would have found fertile ground for collaboration with progressive thinkers and doers in our community. The activism in the Twin Cities is the other reason it will always be (a) home to me.
I am finishing this essay days after the disastrous US elections. What can I offer?
- I do not recommend that everyone leave the US. The world is full of greed and corruption. The struggle is always and everywhere. However, a change of scenery can indeed transform your perspective. Travel does remind one that the United States is a part of a big world, even though its two major political parties deny it. We are one planet, one ocean made up of many seas, one land made of many continents, one people facing the crunch of climate end-times, In all corners of our small world, we desperately need a redistribution of the wealth, a full disarmament, and a radical plan to secure our grandchildren’s future.
- Change gonna come, and it will be good and bad. What we do makes a difference, though we may never know how.
- Lilac blossoms are as beautiful in October as they are in May.
As for the question, can you go home again: When you are young and leave home to find yourself, you may indeed not be able to return because you have changed too much. If however, you run away when you are in your 60s, no matter how far you go, no matter how many other places you will call home, you may never be able to completely uproot. Minneapolis— land of lakes and contradictions— you are forever in my heart.
I write this from a corner café in Istanbul, a block from our apartment. Already when we venture into another neighborhood or take a ferry to a nearby island, I am relieved to be back to this geography of several blocks in Karikoy, Istanbul that, after fourteen days, I have already claimed as mine—in the same way that this stray Turkish kitten erasing my sentences with its paws, has claimed me for its own.
