Mr NYC in Minnesota

As lockdown has gone on ... and on ... my mind has been wandering back to places I've traveled over the years. While I haven't gone to that many places, I've gone to enough that I don't always recall them. And, shockingly, it wasn't until last week when I read an article about the State of Minnesota that I even remember that, oh yeah, I spent two summers there in the early 1990s.

Minnesota has been in the news a lot lately. Its biggest city, Minneapolis, was the site of the terrible police murder of George Floyd last year that rocked American race relations and led to coast-to-coast protests. The writer of this article, someone who has traveled and vacationed a lot in the state, indicates that death of George Floyd emphasized that there really two Minnesotas in the same way there are two Americas -- there's the Minnesota of A Prairie Home Campanion, the land of lakes and picturesque small towns, canoe trips and hikes in the forest, highway diners and friendly Scandavian immigrants, pure Americana, pure American myth (white America). Then there's the other Minnesota, the other America, the dark side of this Americana, the one we don't eulogize, the one we try to ignore -- the land of poverty and violence and drugs, the land of racism and police brutality, the land of lives of quiet desperation. The Floyd murder forced Minnesota and white Minnesotans, those in love with the myth, to see this in the nearly 10 minutes that that police officer kept his knee on Mr. Floyd's neck, killing him. 

Americana laid bare.

My Minnesota ventures certainly fell into the myth bucket -- sorta. In the summers after my freshman and sophomore years of high school, I went to a French language camp in northern Minnesota. There are these massive language camps there, run by Concordia University, where American teenagers go, live, speak, and embrace the culture of other countries. The biggest of all the camps was the German camp but they also had French, Chinese, and others. Not only did I go and speak French at this camp for a few weeks each time but it was also my first time meeting kids from other parts of the country. They were so different from kids in NYC, in many ways nicer, in many ways weirder, and the fact that I was from NYC made me strange and exotic to them. It was the first time I realized that most of the people in the rest of the country were both mesmerized and curious about their nation's biggest city. They would ask me lots of questions about it that I, at that young tender age, was incapable of answering.

Otherwise, besides the language part, it was a standard summer camp. Lots of camp fires, lots of sing-alongs, lots of sports, some truth-or-dare games, the whole deal. Honestly, it was second and last summer camp I ever attended -- for the most part summer camp wasn't my thing. I made friends with some kids and we promised that we'd stay in touch and be friends forever -- and now I don't even remember their names. It was typical teenage stuff.

I'd like to go back to Minnesota one day, maybe even venture back to the northern part of the state, to rediscover the myth of the state while also understanding its reality.

P.S. On a short flight from Minneapolis to northern Minnesota I looked back and saw Chelsea Clinton sitting in a seat. She attended one of the other language camps and, needless to say, a lot of people made a fuss over her. Her dad had been president for about six months at that time and the Secret Service agents were around but inconspicous. I didn't talk to her but I did overhear her tell someone about how much effort her mom made in making sure she had packed everything she needed. I remember seeing her drive off from the airport with a scary-looking official car behind the bus.  

P.P.S. Minnesota has produced some brilliant artists, many of whome came to NYC. Bob Dylan. F. Scott Fitzegerald. The Coen Brothers. Something must be in the water there!