Don’t think you knew you were in this song.
It was on February 3, 2005 that I first arrived in Minneapolis with the intention of becoming a full-time resident from that point forward. Who moves to Minneapolis in February, the worst month of them all? That makes it exactly five years today. What a surprise, as David Bowie himself sang.
My friend Dave — a figure I always closely associate with Bowie — helped me load up a UHaul trailer hitched to my old Mercury Tracer wagon on the morning of the 1st, and we drove up from Louisville through Indiana, Illinois and Wisconsin on the 2nd. We arrived here at about 5pm on the 3rd, just in time for rush hour. We sat stuck in traffic on westbound 94 between St. Paul and Minneapolis for a half-hour, scanning for radio stations. We found The Current at 89.3, which was about a month old. The on-air people were bragging about how new and great they were, and then they played a song by Run Westy Run, which was identified as a Minneapolis band. “I guess this is it,” I told Dave.
We pulled into my new apartment, in a two-story house on Powderhorn Park I shared with two graduate students that I never saw again after I moved out a few months later. We unloaded all my personal effects into a pile in the living room. I didn’t have a bed yet; the plan was to drive to the IKEA in Bloomington and buy one there. There was two feet of snow on the ground. A neighbor wandered over to say hi, and told us about the May Day parade in the park.
Dave and I leafed through a copy of the City Pages from a nearby newpaper box to find the closest bar for dinner. It happened to be Matt’s, a few blocks away, where we each had a Grain Belt Premium and a Jucy Lucy. We told everyone in the bar I’d just arrived in town. A woman one table over told us that all the best Italian restaurants were in St. Paul, and we should go eat at Mancini’s. I still have never eaten at Mancini’s, incidentally; Dave and I both liked Matt’s so much we went back the next morning for breakfast. The same waitresses were working in the morning as from the night before, and all found our double-dipping very amusing.
Dave took a plane back to Louisville on the 4th or 5th. It was just me after that. It was the first time I’d ever been in a city and had nothing in particular I needed to be doing. I had nowhere to be. I had no job. I didn’t know anybody. I’d saved up enough money to get by for a month or two. It was an amazing feeling. It’s a feeling I will probably never have in quite the same way again.
What I miss most about those first two months here is the dreams, oddly. I would have the most vivid dreams about the city at night. I didn’t know how to find my way around, besides the most basic notions of where my house was located. At night, my unconscious would fill in the gaps, and I would dream of hills and tunnels and winding streets and alleys that turned into bridges and skyways that led to the Cathedral of St. Paul. I’d sometimes drive around in those first two months trying to remember where that hill with the beautiful view of the Basillica was located. Then I’d remember there was no such hill; it had been a dream. It was like living in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities.
Eventually, of course, I filled in the gaps myself. When you move somewhere, you slowly trade possibility for experience. The experiences match the possibilities, or fail to meet them, or exceeds them altogether. In my case, I am happy to report that the experiences I have had in Minneapolis in the past five years have been as strange and wonderful, in their own modest ways, as those early dreamscapes. In fact, the greatest gift that the city has given me is that it has never lost that sense of possibility. I mean, it’s five years later, and I’ve still never been to Mancini’s.
