Wednesday, July 11, 2007

Short trip through a long time...

This past weekend, Alison and I took a very short trip through quite a few places. Adam and Jamie (my brother and his wife) drove from their home in Texas up to Minot, ND, where my parents live, so we decided to swing up ourselves to see everyone. The trip was only a couple days, but took me through quite a few memories of places I’ve spent a great deal of time. Friday night, we drove to Grand Forks, where we spent our first night at our friend David’s. I started getting the feeling that I’d never left last August, and that we were still Grand Forks residents. There were so many cues everywhere that were so familiar that it felt I’d never moved on. Green and tan Pipers overhead, UND campus, all my old apartments, the highways I’ve spent literally thousands of miles road biking on, Happy Harry’s (the dirty IV in the arm of Grand Forks), the list goes on. Even filling our car with gas at a pump I’d visited regularly on the way out of town (towards the airport) gave me serious de ja vue. Edward told me once on a visit back to GF after he had been gone a while that it was really weird to be back, and I sure felt it this trip. Everything was exactly the same, except that almost no one I know still lives there. Anyhow. Next up was Minot, where I grew up. That was a little less familiar, cuz it’s been so long since I lived there. The thing I noticed there was how “Minot-y” everybody is. I can’t quite explain it, but every location in the world builds a sort of conformity of feel to it’s residents. Everyone fits a sort of mold after enough time, and you don’t find it anywhere else. And when your town is located far away from nearly everything out on the prairie, it sure becomes it’s own world. Glenburn was next, which is the farm community my mom was raise near, and the family farm just outside of “town”. The people there are nothing like the suburban families I’m surrounded by here in the Cities. They live a life in the open, doing work completely foreign to those in the urban/suburban hustle. It seems to be a shrinking world with nonetheless deep roots. Interesting to see. We traveled through Bismarck on the way back to the Cities to attend a birthday party for my uncle Randy and my aunt Lynn. Once again, Bismarck has it’s own “feel”, completely different from any of the other places mentioned. I’d describe it as a the product of open prairie roots with Midwestern and Native values, combined with the modern suburban need to expand. Once again interesting. Basically, in even a short time, a traveler can pick up on drastically different “feels” of the place traveled, even if they are only a couple hours apart. The other places I’ve lived and traveled- SLC, St. Louis, Moab, Kenora, San Fransico, CO, WV, the Pacific NW, etc., etc., have such diverse living experiences. There are no two places exactly alike, and that makes traveling one of my favorite ways to spend my time. Too many experiences in life to sit in front of the TV.

On another note, I was also able to hear Adam play his trombone again during this trip. My aunt Avis in Minot, plays with a jazz combo call Java Jive Jazz, and they invited Adam to be a featured guest artist at their Saturday night show. Adam can manage to not play for months, and then get up in front of a venue and play a whole nights set of pieces he may or may not have ever seen. Impressive. And beyond that being entertaining, it was good just to focus on some music. Even though I don’t do much playing myself anymore, music has always been important to me. I’ve always thought of it as a sort of audible form of feeling. But I’ll save that for another day, this entry is getting entirely too long. As you were…

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