“This has been the longest ten minutes of my entire life.” His words shattered the silence in the car.
An hour and a half earlier we had departed from a Northwest Chicago suburb for a road trip to Minneapolis. After a quick stop at the Dairy Mart, a 1950s throwback drive-in, in Huntley for pork tenderloin baskets, we tripped up onto the Interstate at Marengo.
“You stoopid ass! You trying to kill us?” A driver tried to make us into a pancake right off the bat. I threw on the Minne CD and turned it up really LOUD. The crazier the driving the more volume I need to drive out the stupidity.
Chick Magnet and I are off to see my old college pal and his new wife. Chick Magnet is 12. He is my nephew. He is my best buddy. We think in the same bent way, so we understand one another. His friend Devin just gave him this black T-shirt with white lettering emblazoned across the front…Chick Magnet. His last girlfriend, the one he bought the genuine garnet pendant for, dumped him. Now he holds hands with no one. He is on the prowl, well as much as an innocent can be. As he says, “I don’t have it quite figured out yet.” The kid has balls and he comes with his own CDs!
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Be back soon. I must go outside and catch some rays. I need to go into winter with a good tan or I will end up with that light deficiency condition in February. So give me an hour.]
Okay. Back. Just consider that interruption like a teevee commercial.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Here’s why Illinois sucks: We are on the Interstate and it is jammed car-to-car, brake lights flashing, we are traveling at 35 mph! Okay, so you might be thinking that it is Labor Day weekend and a lot of peeps live in Chicago and want to escape, but, ha! That’s not it. The problem is tollbooths. Yep. There are 3 tollbooths to the IL/WI border. So this mammoth stream of cars is getting sucked down and spit out 3 times. Cops are everywhere on the sides of the road attending to countless rear-enders. HELLO ILLINOIS! Give up on all of the graft money. Don’t all of you politicians have a big enough mansion, enough toys by now? And worst of all your highways suck…pothole city. Your neighbor to the north has excellent roads…big and FREE. Learn.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sorry about the rant but it was extremely difficult to drive in that mess and it took us 3 1/3 hours to get to Madison, a normal 1 1/2 drive. So now the music is over and Chick Magnet is staring at the clock.
It is dark. Strings of red taillights ribbon through the night ahead of me, a ribbon of white headlights trails off to the left. Oncoming traffic is as dense as outgoing.
One of those smoky-throated late night DJs would be perfect right now. Click.
The traffic remained dense all of the way to the Dells, a playground for families where you can take a water duck and view the rock formations named after Native American chiefs or you can do a million water slides or see mermaids. There is even a gentlemen’s club called Tubby’s, so Dad can drop the kiddies off at a water park and go have fun for a few hours.
Right after the Dells, as traffic lessened, we stopped at the Kwik Trip, a trucker gas stop, and picked up treats: cheese curds, Frito scoops, and a bag of Cranberry Trails. Diversion.
While I was in line the guy behind me struck up a conversation. He was on his way to home to Minne. He slipped me his card and said to call anytime I was in town. He works at the same museum as two of my friends...small world. I gave him one of my cards. Chick Magnet is learning. He also thinks I am crazee. “That dude could be a maniac Interstate killer. Why would you even talk to him? He just wants to sex you. Girls are dumb.”
Then whoosh! 80 mph all of the way to Minneapolis, rolling through the lush hills of Wisconsin with a full moon shining in the car over my left shoulder, a witchy moon bath five hours long.
We ate some of the food before Chick Magnet gave up chasing the digital numbers on the clock and fell asleep.
Cheese curd is some kind of squirted out cheese stuff. I have never had it before. Ridiculous for a Wisconsin girl, I know. The funny thing is that it squeaks when you chew it. Very tasty on a Frito! And the Cranberry Trails has M & M’s mixed in with it! Ha! That’s the same thing I did in college…bought a bag each of sesame sticks, cashews, trail mix, and M & M’s, then mixed them together. Otherwise it was too dry in my mouth. Real health food!!! Sometimes you can just sense when you are home. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
G put his sleepy face to the sidelight window. He had waited up for us. It was 3 a.m.
G had two guest rooms ready for us, but Chick Magnet gets scared being alone in strange places so I crawled in with him until he fell back asleep. Then I went out on the patio and walked their huge yard trying to dispel the excess energy I had from the trip…one minute I was suppose to be alert and now suddenly I was suppose to be tired.
G was still up so he showed me his house…very pleasant, very Danish. I admired his MTM sunken living room and asked if we could please please please check out the Mary bronze statue at Nicollet and Seventh. He said sure after chiding me about my teevee pop culture taste. “What has happened to you?” said the man with an Eames on his wall.
The next day was glorious billowy white-cloud day, a trip to see the Oldenburg spoon, a poem bridge 18 lanes of traffic wide, the Gehry glassfish, and two bookstores (at one I picked up a GET OUT OF HELL card. I plan to use it if I ever get pulled over for speeding. It could work, you know), a greasy spoon for lunch, the Hemporium (that’s so C.M. could get his hemp for jewelry making), Hiawatha Park where a guy about 16 yelled to Chick Magnet, “Where did you get that shirt? I gotta have one!” Chick Magnet was grinning.
But NO, No Mary. She isn’t there yet.
The grounds of G’s house are breath-taking…a massive wraparound pond, brilliant-colored flowers everywhere (thanx to wife Laura), an artful drainage ditch of gorgeous red rock, hummingbirds, goldfinches, woodpeckers, and a knotty-pine all-windows summerhouse I could live out my life in!
That night Chick Magnet and I really wanted to hit one of the old-fashioned minigolf places but our hosts didn’t know of any, so we womped them at back yard croquet. Their excuse being that they had to let the guests win. “You two are great hosts, but you are lame at croquet.” Sorry.
We ended the night with glasses of some 1000-year-old cognac. Ouch! The stuff burned my lips. I was on fire. I have never figured out how to drink.
Just as C.M. was going off to bed I received a call on my cell. “Busy?” said the man. “Nope.” I answered, “I was hoping you would call.” G didn’t like the idea, but I went to a little bar I sometimes hang at when I am in the Twin Cities. I was back by midnight, I swear. Sunday in the T.C. is dry.
Now here is the real highlight of the trip, I mean besides the night before. The next morning G made us an authentic Danish brunch called a Smorrebrod! (Those “o’s” are suppose to have a front slash through them, but that isn’t on my keyboard) All Danish is spoken in the back of the throat so it sounds like you are eating the words…very guttural.
The Smorrebrod is served in five courses!
The tricky part is this: Before each course you are to shoot a shot of Aquavit. Good God. You could end up hammered before noon. And Aquavit tastes like liquid rye bread. Obviously I didn’t shoot, but I did sip and it didn’t even burn or blister my lips like martinis do, instead it simply tasted goofy. Oh, and before you drink you look each dinner guest directly in the eye and say “skoal.” PLUS there was beer also. I guess Danes can’t consume too much booze.
The food was marvelous. Each course is served on a thin slice of buttered rye bread with a lettuce leaf. First it was curried herring, then lox and scrambled eggs, followed by thin-stacked pork slices with a light dill sauce, next Havarti cheese with thin radish slices, lastly a raspberry pudding dessert (not sweet) topped with homemade cream and two ginger cookies in the shape of flowers. The last item is called Rodgrod med flode, which means cool dessert in Danish. If you ever go to Denmark this is the phrase the people will test you on to see if you really are Danish. Ha! G taught me how to say it and I am 0% Danish!
After hugs and kisses and a lot of chiding about me the artgirl now driving a big white bourgeois Buick, Chick Magnet and I headed back down the Interstate. The Twin Cities are cool yet I always feel a certain retirement/too laid back quality in the air. WAKE UP Minnesotans. And no I didn’t even get to hear anyone do that groovy “Fargospeak” this time.
Next stop Madison.
“Do you have to dance even when you drive?” Chick Magnet thinks I suck sometimes. Counting Crows How could anyone not sing with Adam? Chick Magnet started humming along. Powerman 5000 next!
Hordes of students were already back in town…punk Mohawks, a perfect Marilyn Monroe, those men that wear tight black jeans, tight black T-shirts (ewww!), a group of gay men and their dogs, an assortment of peeps that were either geniuses or asylum dropouts, and an mixed bag of confused first-time-away-from-home students roamed the streets. Chick Magnets eyes were popping.
We ate Middle Eastern food at my fav spot, The Saz, plein air.
Chick Magnet and I spent the rest of the day swimming in the hotel pool and ate a lot of junky-boxed sweets. He’s a fish just like me.
Some dumb ass had thrown all of the plastic poolside furniture into the pool. I was going to call the front desk, but C.M. said he had an idea. He went furniture- fishing using the pool skimmer as a pole. Cheap hilarious amusement.
The next day’s drive was a breeze. We got off the Interstate at 14 so I could drop C.M. back at home. The Lake was jammed with the usual group of International tourists. A gaggle of 15-year-old girls, sitting on the grassy knoll down at the beach turned around and stared at Chick Magnet’s shirt. “Aw, isn’t he cute.” one of them said as we passed. I swear C.M. was walking on air the rest of the way through town. I picked up two new sarongs at one of the family’s businesses, and then headed out of town.
Chick Magnet said he had the best time of his entire life. YES, but please take that shirt off! You have been wearing it for 3 days!!!! Men. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
On the last leg of the journey, during the hour-long drive to my house I realized that one blowout on the Interstate and all of us would have been in a 100-car-pile-up, Cream of Wheat. So a tip of my hat to all of the ace-jock drivers!
[Thanx!!!! to Egan!!!! my story is recovered!]
Hi! from Rebecca Barrington
