I didn’t really talk much about this to a lot of people, so if you’re reading this, you may well not know that for the first day of my Grand Canyon trip, I had planned an unrelated side trip: a nostalgia visit to Morris, MN. I’d been feeling an urge to visit Morris again for months. I think it first entered my thoughts because for a while at work, I was doing payment entry for invoices for the West Central Research & Outreach Center at UMM—so I was paying bills to various familiar business around Morris, like good old Willie’s Super Valu. But apart from general nostalgia, a big reason why visiting Morris became important to me has to do with my ongoing effort to newly come to grips with my own life story, post-divorce. Morris means many things to me, but the fact that it’s where I met Jen, and where we got married, is (after all) certainly prominent among those meanings. So I’d been reflecting on these things, and I found that I wanted a chance to revisit the places themselves, and do some of that reflecting actually in those places. I hoped that this wasn’t a crazy way to kick off what I hoped would be a fun vacation, but my therapist’s take on it was that it could be, among other things, a way for me to honor the continuing significance to me of these parts of my past and of who I am, and to just accept and be present with the thoughts and feelings that I find occupying me. Besides, it would just plain be fun to see old familiar sights/sites again.
What I didn’t really intentionally plan, though, is the somewhat bizarre happenstance that the day of my visit ended up falling on June 24th—i.e., 23 years to the day since Jen’s and my wedding. I suppose that I’m somewhat in the habit, after so many years, of planning summer vacations around these dates…but it also just works out really well with work, since the U of M’s financial system largely shuts down for the final week of June, making it a great time to take vacation. So, yeah, it transpired that my visit to Morris happened on our (former?) anniversary.
Anyway, after much anticipation and preparation, my trip officially began at 7:16 am (that was the time on my dashboard clock as I backed out of my garage). The drive to Morris was uneventful, aside from being, itself, a trip down proverbial memory lane. The old, familiar drive along Highway 28, from Sauk Center, through Glenwood and Starbuck and Cyrus! Upon reaching Morris, it was wild to see a ShopKo next to the highway and realize—holy crap, that’s the old Pamida…the store from which, once upon a time, like half or more of my possessions had come (I surely still have things even now that were purchased there). I had to stop, go in, and walk around. The parking lot, the entrance, felt way too familiar—but when I got inside, I couldn’t cast my mind back to what it had ever been like to shop there, or what it looked like inside, so I had nothing to compare anything to. Getting back in the car, I drove on to the intersection by McDonald’s where you turn left onto Atlantic Avenue, and found that the sight of the grain silos across the street there still flooded me with a feeling of coming home. But the Coborn’s that used to be sort of next to McDonald’s no longer exists. There’s sort of a strip mall there, with a Verizon (not really a thing yet when we left Morris in 1997) and some other stores.
No surprise, really, that these bizarrely clashing motifs of change and continuity were a theme of the whole Morris visit. There were things that have changed and things that are still exactly the same, of course—but also things that my memory is too fuzzy on for me to be sure about one way or the other, and things that are different although maybe I theoretically already knew that because they’d already been different on a previous visit, and things that I’d forgotten about until I saw them again. I’ve been trying to figure out how long it’d been since I was last in Morris. My best guess is about 15 years. How did so much time manage to pass?
I made my way to our old house (rented duplex) on Wyoming Avenue. I found it shockingly bright in color, and shockingly unfamiliar at first. The big trees that used to obscure the front are gone, which makes the existence of the second story much more obvious (big window up there!). I think the house has aluminum or vinyl siding now, which I don’t think it had in our day (?). And…the garage is gone! That’s weird. Some things felt more familiar as I paused to take them in (the tree across the street that I used to look at through the bedroom window while lying in bed; the 6th Street side of house/trees along street), but other things—the weird narrow sidewalk, the generally dumpy-looking impression that the house made on me—seemed very foreign. I took a couple pictures, though.
I drove around town a bit, and eventually made my way to campus. En route, I drove past the house that had belonged to the geology professor who held student gatherings at his home during our freshman year. (At least, I think I identified the correct house.) Here was a big moment of reflection (honoring?); after all, that house was, for all practical purposes, where Jen & I fist met (not quite literally, but it was where we had our first conversation, which marked the start of our friendship). Weird thing to think about as I drove past. But, on to campus: Plenty of changes there, of course, but I think most of them happened years ago (before previous visits). I parked in the lot that I believe we used to park in junior/senior year when driving to campus for class, and reflected on how, even though I clearly remember doing that, it’s waay less memorable than patterns from freshman/sophomore years when we lived on campus, and it doesn’t seem like a “daily routine for 2 years” level memory. Weird. One standout observation was that Gay Hall looks quite the worse for wear (I took a picture). Naturally, I couldn’t really get inside any of the buildings—which was…well, whatever the word is for “disappointing, except not really, because it was what I expected.” Of course, even if things had been unlocked, it’d probably be creepy to go prowling around in the dorms as much I as longed to. It reminds me that the past is irretrievable, which is sad. Kind of the theme of the whole visit, really. Still, I found that I could happily have spent an entire day or more visiting the campus—and it might have been nice to be there when it wasn’t quite so deserted! (Being a Sunday morning in June, it was like a ghost town.) I thought the student center at least might be open, and would be one place where I could actually go in and look around (and I even thought of lunching at Turtle Mountain Cafe), but it wasn’t (too early in the day on a Sunday, I believe). Ditto the library. Overall, the UMM campus sort of still felt like home (more so the more I walked around, in fact)—but in a weird “two or three or four lifetimes ago” sort of way.
Later, an analogy occurred to me as I pondered that last feeling. In a way, it’s sort of like how I feel about other “old favorite things.” The main example that came to mind was Star Trek: The Next Generation. It was my favorite show, hands down, for years and years, in a category all its own, with nothing else that compared. But then, in time, I discovered other shows—better shows—and I also grew and changed. And while I still love TNG, in some ways I also feel like I’ve sort of outgrown it (which makes me a little sad)…and yet, at the same time, there’s an awareness that despite this, I will never really be done with it. That’s how the UMM campus, and Morris in general, felt. I don’t want to go back to living there, but in some way, it’s still home, and it will always be. (And I’m pretty sure that, in some sense, some of these words are also about Jen…although there are other levels there that aren’t adequately captured, too.)
I left campus and drove around town a bit more. DQ and Taco John’s are still there, though Hardee’s is now a bank. And eventually, I found my way out to Pomme de Terre Park—which, of course, I’d known from the start that I’d be visiting while I was in town…and all the more so given the weirdness of being in Morris on this of all dates. I was a little unsure, at first, which picnic shelter was The One, but I think I figured it out. And…I was reflective. At the risk of sounding bitter, I thought about the promises that had been made on this spot, 23 years ago to the day, that weren’t ultimately kept. I thought about who I was on that day, and the things that happened, the memories that I have. I decided that what I was standing on was as close as anything could come to constituting “sacred ground” to me. I thought about how it marked the beginning of so much that came after, and how I never envisioned its meaning changing for me, and could never have foreseen one day coming here alone.
I walked around the park for a bit. The beach, it turns out, no longer exists. That’s weird. (I found out why before I left; tragic story, but not important here.) I thought about leaving, and hesitated indecisively…but ultimately decided to have lunch at a picnic table at The Shelter, weird though this felt. So I hauled picnic stuff out of the car and set to it. (Not lost on me was the fact that my picnic basket had been a wedding gift, received on this very spot 23 years ago.) As I ate, I realized that I was feeling a desire to make some kind of human connection—to not be entirely alone, to share some piece of my reflections, or at least just my sense of the significance of being in this place, on this day, with someone. I’d write about it later, of course (hello!), but… Ah, well. Then, halfway through my first sandwich, a UMM van hauling a trailer with canoes on it pulled up, and a guy got out and greeted me and told me, apologetically, that he had the shelter reserved. Heh. 23 years ago today, I thought, I was the one who had this shelter reserved… But I hauled my stuff to another picnic table away from the shelter, and finished my meal there. When I was finished eating and had packed up, I strolled back over and asked the guy what he had going on. He turned out to be a geology professor (Cotter) who’d been at UMM at least since my time, and he had some kind of student group/event going on. We chatted a bit, and I went ahead and mentioned that I had gotten married under this very shelter 23 years ago to the day. And it filled that need that I’d been feeling, just to share the moment with another human. I never knew Professor Cotter, but connecting with him nevertheless increased my feeling of UMM as still being “home”; it made me feel like something other than a relic or a stranger in town. (I did mention the one-time colleague of his in the geology department whom I had known. I somehow did not think to mention that besides, obviously, being a UMM alum, I was also a current Univ of MN employee. But it doesn’t matter; he was UMM folk, and it was a nice moment.)
It was time to be getting back on the road, but I wanted to make a bathroom stop first, and I chose Taco John’s (where I once worked) as the place. It looked, to the best of my memory, exactly the same on the inside as when I worked there 21 years ago.
I intended this post to be mainly about Morris, but briefly, as to the remainder of the first day of my trip: It was a long day of driving, much of it on putzy back roads feeling like I was not making much progress—yet in the end, I turned out to have made good time (in spite of some backtracking and rerouting in South Dakota due to a flooded road). On I-29, having been munching on strawberries (from my garden!) and collecting the leaves on the lid of the green plastic bowl that I’d brought them in, I rolled down my window to dump them off, and lost my grip on the lid! So, alas, said lid is now lost to me, somewhere on the interstate in SD. This will be impacting my kitchen routines in a lasting way, I fear (and also, I am officially a litterbug)… Argh. In Nebraska, besides not existing (if you don’t know, I have denied the existence of Nebraska since I was a teenager; just accept it and move on), I drove through a brief torrential downpour that included hail. Also, a surprising amount of Nebraska seemed to reek god-awfully of manure (or would have, if it existed). I stopped at another (albeit nonexistent) Taco John’s for supper. I finally crossed into Kansas, and was pleasantly surprised by how short the remaining drive to Salina was from the border (coming down US 81). But when I arrived at the Econo Lodge where I had a reservation for the night, I ended up waiting for what seemed like as long a time as that entire last leg of the drive, just for the desk clerk to check in the group ahead of me (and then to check me in). Still, after getting into my room, I quickly changed and then went and relaxed in the hot tub and the pool, and felt…like I was on vacation. 🙂