Oh, to be back at my home away from home, answering those all too familiar questions, "Where do you live again&-wait, where's that?" to all my new floormates. I'm quite ethnic. And I have nothing against the Midwest and its typically tundra-esque terrain, its cornfields, fishing museums and Scandinavian blondes. I'm just in need of respite from slapping mosquitoes and swimming the milfoil away from my dock on Lake Minnetonka.
Yes: that's all I did this summer besides eat homegrown tomatoes, listen to loons and attend The Great Minnesota Get-Together, known also as The Minnesota State Fair, where I witnessed the epic gluttony and low-grade passions of my fellow prairie home companions&-deep-fried Twinkies, jumbo pickles and catfish-on-a-stick, to name a few&-and thus felt quite sophisticated by comparison.
That's all we do back home for fun: we observe seed art and butter sculptures of dairy princesses, glimpse at the winners of the fattest pig competition and judge designer chickens, llamas, rare goose breeds, geckos, poisonous snakes, 650-pound men and other livestock anomalies.
There isn't much else in the unknown terrain of sky-tinted water that became the 32nd state of our nation on May 11, 1858.
I'm [mostly] kidding, though people seem to take me for my word when I say that, and thus I'm feeling a need to put my little house on the prairie on the map. The place isn't as "mad cold" and "wicked boring" as everyone here seems to assume. Yes, it warms up in the summer, and no, The Land of 10,000 Lakes is not part of Canada.
Actually, we're kind of a big deal&-and I say that with the humbleness expected of us Minnesota Nice, of course. The City on a Hill may boast Ralph Waldo Emerson and Edgar Allen Poe (and, I admit it, many other notable geniuses) but Minnesota towns like Anoka and Sauk Center boast their own, too, namely Garrison Keillor, Sinclair Lewis and F. Scott Fitzgerald, whom I pretend to channel as I make my way amid elite East Eggers who don't realize that we are the reason for their General Mills cereal. Yes, preppy coasties, the girl with the moose necklace is judging you.
Really&-Minnesota owns Target, started Medtronic, distributes your Land O' Lakes butter and headquarters Best Buy. We invented Post-It notes (you're welcome). I live down the street from Cargill, Inc. And I've heard enough hype about Paul Revere's house, when back home I can see the Pillsbury family's abode across Wayzata bay.
Poor Minneapolis is the epitome of tragically hip: a ridiculously happening culture pitifully surrounded by Wisconsin, Iowa, the Dakotas and the Canadian plains. We're the birthplace of Prince, Morris Day and Bob Dylan and the convening ground of rock bands like Soul Asylum, The Jayhawks, The Suburbs and The Replacements. Craig Finn of The Hold Steady went to my high school. There should be no wonder as to why a place so crazily cold is so cool.
Still, no one ever comes to visit us, and thus the Mississippi River cries its way down to more known bodies of water, i.e. New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico. Our beaches may lack the waves and fauna of the Boston Harbor, but Lake Itasca and Lake Superior deserve a little more credit.
Sure, Minnesota may lack a Quincy Market and underground public transportation and street performers, but my adventures in my native Evergreen Forests are in no way incomparable to those in the town of beans &-we have our own quirks that make up for any lacks, like the basaltic rock pothole remains of Wisconsin Glaciation, the one-story, two-room Taylors Falls Public Library and Caribou Coffee Coolers, which inspired the poor mimicry people in this here neck of the woods refer to as Frappuccinos. Uff da.
My roommate's from New York. She didn't know my home state existed before she was a teenager; I'm the second Minnesotan she's ever met in her life. But she's been well schooled, now. There's a flag hanging from our Myles Standish wall which screams a "Minnesota: 1858" surrounded by our state everythings&-the blueberry muffin, the Norway Pine, the walleye, the loon and the lady slipper. We do, in fact, exist.
I certainly don't regret choosing to toil away my college years in this big, old city. Ethnicity is hardly a "Bread and Butter State" strong point, and everything seems so much bigger and better in this Cradle of Liberty that was civilized approximately 200 years prior.
And someday, I'm sure, my studying in the Athens of America will be worth it. But even if I ever win a Pullet Surprise, I can't deny my roots in L'Étoile du Nord, home of wild rice, honeycrisp apples, wild turkeys that scurry around your driveways and little else.
Just don't make too much fun of us, though. Remember: we owned Randy Moss and Kevin Garnett before you did.
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