Some sort of an attempt at I'm not sure what. The voice seems not natural to me, which suggests I was writing for some specific at least imagined audience. Once again I can't remember why or when or for what this was written. The story is true, and then I seem to be riffing on Howard Mohr. The tone irritates me but I dunno, maybe it will just make you wiggle.
Noone can explain these impulses. Somehow I knew it was time to come out of the closet, so to speak: I am not truly a native Minnesotan. I am a Californian expatriate. In vain do I point to my birth certificate (and many's the time I've done so) and proudly assert my birthplace as Staples, former home of Charles Schultes. At an early age I was whisked to the relentless sunshine and cool, rainy winters of San Diego. I returned to the state of my birth four years later. Any true Minnesotan can tell you that this is an unrealistic way to spend the so-called "formative" years. Real life is puncuated by Winters, where it seems that nearly everything dies except you. Understanding this fundamental reality underlying the Minnesota worldview is the key to unlocking the seeming mysteries facing the neophyte expatriate in this quietly perplexing state.
A brief tale to illustrate the point. One cold March night the Big Dump has finally come to pass and someone has gotten their very small car hung up on one of the foot tall snowdrifts the plow has left behind. Good Minnesotan Citizen that I am, I take my cigarette downstairs and go to help out. A large bearded man is giving the tiny car a run for it's money, rocking it by himself.
"Try a push?" I ask, heading for the front bumper.
"No, I think I got it..."
"You sure? No problem..."
"No I..." was all he could manage, putting his all into a big push that rocked back and set the car hanging at the top of the drift for a moment, then rolled back into its slough of despair. And he smiled and said "almost got it" and when it went back up the hill I just threw a little back into it and over it went. He thanked me and drove off in his little car in the biggest snow of the Winter.
The law of three refusals is a central tenet of Minnesotan mores. It is the kind of thing that gets into clever satires for tourists, you have ot turn down cookies three times before you can have one, the worst kind of meaningless moral ritual. In truth, it is rooted in a simple self-sufficiency and a desire not to cause trouble to others that can admittedly approach pathology in isolated cases. In the cookie world perhaps it is a basically empty compromise to abandoned restraint, but in the case of our man in the snow the situation is something more. Even in this restrained state I rarely get refused for a push in the snow more than once before the driver acquieses to the greater need. But our man was clearly of superior upbringing, careful to make it abundantly clear that he had gotten himself into this and was prepared to get himself out. He made certain it would truly be "no problem" by requiring to reassert my offer. In the end everybody won. He was not put out by being helped, I was not looking for adulation. It is a necessary attitude for a state where the weather can so routinely kill you.
This story illustrates another point: while the idea of refusing something three times is a fairly well-known Midwest phenomenon, the seldom perceived Minnesota correlary can take the unsuspecting transplant by surprise: if you refuse something three times your host has free reign to give it to you. If you're not hungry they can wrap it up for you to have later. Hence our man, born and bred, accepted my aid gracefully as a tacit acknowledgement of his refusals.
But I revealed my deep roots in the easy going surf of sunny California. I helped without bothering to make him refuse that one last time.
this is what is up with this.
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