In the email, she had asked for my time. She wanted to talk to me about a strategy for finishing her degree in anthropology, and she wanted to know whether there was some research that she could do with me. At the end of the email, she said, “Can we please meet at the Hard Times? I’d be more comfortable.”

To this day, even though Lizzie has been my student, then my colleague, and now is my friend as well (and still my colleague), and even though it has been many years since this particular email (how time flies!), I have never asked her exactly why she wanted to meet in the local anarchist coffee shop rather than in my office. But I don’t think I’ve needed to ask her that; I have a sense that I know why.

So I arrived at the coffee shop not entirely sure why I was there or what I was going to do or even exactly whom I was meeting. I had a vague idea of who Lizzie was, but it would be all too easy to get it wrong and mistake her for someone else or someone else for her. She was small, had red hair, and would be wearing black, as most of my students seemed to. Among the young women in the coffee shop, this ruled out…almost no one. So I went to the counter and ordered something, figuring that whatever needed to happen would happen. When my coffee was ready, I paid and picked it up and turned around and there she was. Maybe.

“Lizzie?”

“Yes. Hi.”

“Okay, then, let’s talk.”

And we walked over to one of the tables by the front window and sat down. Almost immediately a young man came over and sat down on a nearby chair and said “Oh, Professor Laden. Hey, I was in your class two years ago. Your human evolution class. I’m sure you don’t remember me, but I just wanted to tell you how great it was.”

I got the sense that Lizzie knew this young man.

“Well, I’m glad you liked it.”

I also got the impression that this young man was a regular in the Hard Times. He was probably one of the local anarchists.

“Yeah, it was great. I couldn’t’ believe the things you were saying. You totally changed the way I think about…everything…,” and as he said this, a young woman came over and sat down next to him, joining our little group.

I realized as this conversation developed that the reason these two kids had come by to talk was because Lizzie was there. Lizzie was with me, so they could come over too. I’d been in this very coffee shop countless times previously, and most of the young anarchist crowd were polite but avoided me unless they specifically knew me. No particular reason for that…other than that I was probably known to most of them as someone who taught at the U, and who may have been a bit intimidating (those of you who’ve met me know that I’m a big, scary guy with a mean face that most people avoid getting anywhere near). With Lizzie sitting with me, unharmed and clearly not intimidated, it was safe to explore, say hi, ask a few questions.

“Your lectures were totally awesome. They made me rethink everything. Everything. In fact, that is why I dropped out of college. Now, I mainly hang out here.”

Oh, great, I thought. I converted a perfectly normal young man into an anarchist. I wondered whether there was a particular lecture that did it…

“Me too!” Suddenly the girl was animated and involved in the conversation. “Some professor I had in some class three years ago. He was totally awesome. He made me realize that I did not belong in school and that I just needed to do my own thing.” Then she looked at me, rather closely. “But it wasn’t this one. It was some other professor.”

“Hmm, I wonder who?” I said, glad that I was not the only one who was busy ruining the entire system of education.

Now, the boy was looking at the girl with a quizzical look, and the girl was looking at me. “He had long hair and a mustache,” she said, remembering her wayback.

A moment of silence. Then the boy said to the girl, “Imagine him with long hair,” and his thumb pointed to me.

Lizzie chimed in, “And a mustache. A big mustache like a pirate.”

And the girl’s eyes widened and her mouth made a big “O”….

“It’s you!” she shouted. “You’re the one. You changed your hair, but it’s you!”

Oh, brother. Turns out I was ruining the entire system of education pretty much single-handedly.

Over the next few minutes, the two visitors wandered off and Lizzie and I were able to get down to business.

…Now, that scene you have in your mind, of Lizzie and me sitting across from each other at a tiny table in a dark and smoky coffee shop on the West Bank in Minneapolis …let it get all wavy and foggy and slowly fade away. Then it fades back in, but it is different. It’s still Lizzie and Greg, but now they are sitting next to each other at a bar, in a different but still darkish location, and the barkeep has just put a plate of Königsberger Klops in front of Greg and a plate of Wiener Schnitzel in front of Lizzie….

Greg had just been saying to Lizzie, “You know, the downside of knowing a blogger is that whatever happens…,” eyeing the Weiner Schnitzel, “…just might get blogged. Like this Wiener Schnitzel. I’ll probably have to blog that.” And verily, the Wiener Schnitzel was huge and impressive. Totally bloggable. “Plus, for some reason, I tend to write a blog post every time you and I have dinner together.”

“I did notice that,” replied Lizzie, with a measure of snark but not taking her eyes off of the Wiener Schnitzel–I assume calculating which parts to eat and which parts to load onto her bike for the ride home.

We were sitting in the Black Forest Inn in South Minneapolis, on Eat Street. The Black Forest is across the street from Azia and is also the location of a party PZ Myers and I threw a few months back for our readers, so some of you know this place. This establishment has been extant for a very long time and has a rich and interesting history.

To our right, as we sat at the old traditional bar, sipping the custom-made beer and munching on very authentic German food, was the famous Richard Avedon photograph. It seems that some years back, Avedon was a student at a nearby art college and came here regularly to hang out at the bar. At some point later on, he gave the owners of the Black Forest this photograph…a huge, almost life-size blow up of six or seven women, all Daughters of the American Revolution. They were sitting and standing around like they were about to get their portrait taken, or had just gotten their portrait taken, and they looked like a bunch of pretty tough broads. Most people who see this photograph, hanging behind huge sheets of Plexiglas off to one side of the rectangular, centrally placed bar, think it is a group of Germanic royalty. The women are wearing formal dresses with crown-like tiaras, and they all look very Germanic and stern. And their photograph is hanging in the Black Forest, which is otherwise adorned with myriad specimens of Germanic art and kitsch. But no, they are not Germanic royalty, just old-fashioned, upper-crust blue bloods from somewhere in the U.S.

Some time after the photograph was hung, a gentleman who at that time frequented the Black Forest and still frequents the neighborhood pulled a .357 magnum pistol out of his pistol-hiding place and put one bullet into the forehead of one of the ladies and another bullet into another lady’s chest. Bam. Bam. He double tapped the Avedon. The owners got really mad at that dude, and he is no longer allowed in the restaurant. I hear tell Avedon was not too happy about this either. The bullet holes are still quite visible, no repairs having been effected.

Anyway, Lizzie and I had gotten together for dinner very late on this Wednesday evening for a number of reasons. We needed to talk about some science and some personal stuff. We never got to all of the personal stuff because there was so much of it, with things happening in her family and my family and among mutual friends.

One of the things I wanted to touch on was this: We have a mutual friend who had gotten himself into trouble some years back and was now paying the price with an imminent stint in prison. I’ve given the details elsewhere. A few days before this dinner, I had gotten an email from him, and I didn’t think he’d mind if I shared it with Lizzie. For some reason I didn’t want to just forward it to her. That that didn’t seem right or respectful. So I had a printout which I let Lizzie read at the bar, before the dinner had been delivered by the barkeep.

What is relevant to the present discussion about this long letter with many things in it was this one part, which I shall paraphrase: “When I started to take your class, way back when, I was involved in these illegal things I was doing. But in your lectures, you showed me the value of science and scientific thinking. This totally changed my mind about everything, and I walked away from the life of an anarchist and decided that I needed to become a scientist.”

So. Anarchy 2; Science 1.

______________

There is another feature of that night’s dinner that I’ve decided to relate in a different forum. Here.

We needed to talk, to spend some time alone and in a fairly quiet, undisturbed location so we could discuss a mutual friend who had gotten into some very serious trouble. We needed to find out where we each were on the issue, about our respective mutual states; we needed to compare notes and remember details covering several years of time; we needed to talk about what had to happen next. And given our schedules, we needed to eat. Which is fortunate, because it was time for me to write another restaurant review.

It was Lizzie’s birthday. Well, two days before, but close enough. We’re close enough friends, Lizzie and me, but we don’t travel or live in the same social circuit. I’d never be at her birthday party. (Though actually she came to mine…which was only the second birthday party I’d ever had in my life, now that I think about it. But that’s another story.) Anyway, I said, “I want to take you someplace nice because it is your birthday,” and we went to one of my favorite places, Azia.

We’d been there before, and there is a reason this fact is rather strange when I contemplate it. A few years ago, Amanda and I went to dinner with Lizzie and the very same mutual friend I mention above. That fact was not on my mind when I proposed Azia (not consciously, anyway). What was on my mind was the char. We’ll get to that. That dinner, or more exactly our memory of it, would become part of this night’s conversation, because we both struggled to remember exactly why we four got together for dinner that night to begin with and where in the course of our various relationships we all were. Were we all friends like we are now? Or were we just getting to know our mutual friend? Was it a get acquainted dinner or a good-bye dinner? Eventually we figured out that it was a good-bye dinner. Which when I look back at it is rather sad. I’ll get to that too.

Azia is a fusion Asian joint once described as “Sacred Asian art meets James Bond Chic,” owned by Thom Pham. Thom opened this Eat Street restaurant a few years back on the local Corner of Restaurant Death. A sequence of restaurants had previously opened and closed at the corner of Nicollet and 26th, across from the Black Forest. Despite the poor luck earlier establishments had suffered, Azia ended up having great success.

We showed up early in the evening, and the place was pretty empty. I thought about telling the maître d’ that we’d like a quiet corner, that we didn’t want to be disturbed, that we were here to talk privately and eat a simple dinner. But since she was already steering us towards the ideal quiet corner, I kept my mouth shut and accepted the out-of-the-way booth. That made what happened next a little funny.

I should say that the service at Azia is usually super-excellent and sometimes not, but when it is not, it is never, ever bad. It is just sometimes a little quirky. This is a big place in a nomadic market, so while there is always a core group of servers, there is a certain amount of variation around the edges. Tonight’s server was a woman I had not seen before, who clearly knew the menu and demonstrated her experience quite nicely with the char. I’ll get to that in a moment.

But her style was not what we were looking for. From the moment we were seated, Lizzie and I engaged in our vitally important conversation. We had a mutual friend who had suddenly found himself in very very deep trouble with the law, and we had just heard about it. I knew he and Lizzie knew each other, but I did not know how well. I did not know if this was going to be a rough blow, a bewildering moment, or a case of serious annoyance for her. And I don’t think Lizzie could have known that for me either. So we needed to assess our states of mind and heart in relation to this important matter. And while we engaged in this opening round of discussion, I’m pretty sure the waitress came by four or five times to see whether we needed anything.

“Okay, we’d better make one decision, don’t you think? Do you want wine? What kind, how much? Okay, may I suggest the Faustino Rioja?”

Now we were ready. Our waitress came back and we ordered the wine. She checked both of our IDs and it was brought to us. I was grinning about having my ID checked when she walked away, and so was Lizzie.

“I think it was my sweater.”

We both laughed at the prospect that my simple black Woolrich sweater (purchased, by the way, in 1988, so the sweater itself was almost old enough to have a cocktail) would make me look decades younger, and then we returned to our conversation.

By this time we had firmly established the details and found much agreement about the basics of all the relationships. Both of us thought well of our friend, and we were very saddened by the current situation. He was going to go to prison for a long time, there was no way around that. And while we knew that it could have been worse, we still wanted it to be better than it was.

But that was not enough. We had to do more than order the wine because we were now on visit nine from our server. Now, you have to understand that we did not find this annoying. She was not being annoying. She was just being very, very helpful, and perhaps a bit lonely, because we were the only table seated at her station. Also, since I’m one of his oldest customers, Thom sometimes gives the secret hand signal to his staff to be extra nice. I think this night Thom may have had a fly buzzing around his head and accidentally gave the secret hand signal five or six times. So we made an important decision.

Pot stickers. Lizzie said pot stickers, and I asked her whether the details mattered, and she said no. So when our server came by, I ordered them pork and sautéed. These are the best pot stickers in town bar none, by the way.

Which reminds me. For one year, not long after Azia opened, I lived three or four blocks to the north of Azia, and almost every week, Julia and I would have lunch here. That was just after I had broken up with my sig-oth, who also lived a few blocks away but to the south. She (I’ll call her Georgia) had said to me “Hey, if you ever go eat at Azia or anywhere else in the neighborhood, let me know so we can avoid the embarrassment of running into each other. Especially if you’re with a girl or something.”

So the first time we were heading over to Azia, Julia (then about 9 years old) and I, I mentioned this to Julia and said, “Here, take my cell phone and call Georgia and tell her we’re eating at Azia. Don’t worry, she won’t answer the phone; just leave a message. We have this prearranged.”

So Julia speed dials Georgia and blurts out, and I was not expecting this, “We are going to Azia. You must not go there. Repeat. We are going to Azia,” like she was calling in an airstrike. So ever since then, whenever I went to Azia with a girl (Julia) I gave her the phone and she made the call.

Anyhow, I mention this only because of the pot stickers. Julia and I had pot stickers for lunch every week, and if we were hungry, we’d split an order of the Bow Tie Pasta, which can be ordered with any of several different “proteins” (as we seem to refer to animal tissue or tofu these days), which is perfect for two people to share.

To continue: Lizzie and I now moved on in our conversation to the more philosophical issues of why our friend would have done what he did. I wanted to know Lizzie’s personal feeling about this sort of thing. Our friend was going to prison for over political activities that would clearly be labeled by any court in the land, or any FBI agent, as terroristic. I hate that word, terroristic. But many people would take such an individual and write them off entirely because anybody who engages in any violent activities that can be labeled as terroristic equals Osama bin Laden, and there are no exceptions. I myself believe that life is more complex than that, and people are more complex than that. So does Lizzie. It turns out that we both feel that our mutual friend should very much not have done what he did, but that did not make us not care about him as a person, or love him less as our friend.

But that was not enough. It would never be enough to merely order pot stickers. Things were getting dicey. Visit fourteen was imminent, and I felt we had to do something about it. Now again, I say we were not annoyed. Our waitress was just trying to do a good job. We understand these things. Lizzie herself has been a server, and in fact for much of the time I’ve known her, she’s had at least a part time job in a restaurant. I’ve done that kind of work too, but not nearly as much and a very long time ago. Suffice it to say that we were far more amused, even endeared, than annoyed. But we had to act, so we did.

We consulted the menu, or should I say Lizzie consulted the menu (I have it in my head pretty much), and she was interested in the char the server had mentioned. So I urged us on in that direction. Lizzie also liked the looks of the Hot and Spicy Lemongrass Grilled with Field Vegetables. She wanted it with Tofu. She likes Tofu. This is a person I love and admire and think very highly of. So I overlooked the Tofu thing and agreed that this would be good. It turns out that Thom makes tofu taste good somehow. Who knew it was even possible?

With the pot stickers delivered and consumed, we made our order on the next pass of the server. Just then Lizzie excused herself to visit the ladies’. By the way, when you eat at Azia, the men’s is on the left, ladies’ on the right. It is hard to tell, so now you know and won’t be confused.

While Lizzie was gone, the server came by and folded her napkin for her.

The next step in our conversation was remembering details. For reasons I will not elaborate on here, I needed to have a pretty good picture of what everyone was doing, where, and when over the last six or seven years. It was helpful to speak with Lizzie about this. I became pretty certain that I knew each of them before they knew each other and learned how they initially became acquainted. I was very interested to hear that Lizzie had had dinner with our friend and his parents. In reconstructing events, I remembered that I was supposed to have dinner with him and his parents one day, and they called it off a the last minute. This was the same parental trip, so I guess I was jilted in favor of Lizzie Well, I can’t say that I blame them. I’d rather have dinner with Lizzie than myself too.

So the char came, and this is a big deal. The server is required to fillet the fish right there at the table. There are servers as Azia who do this in seconds, and it is brilliant to watch. Our server did not do it quickly, but she did it very skillfully. Everybody takes off the head and tail first.

“Do you want the head?”

“Of course. Best part, really.”

So she does not put the head in the discard pile. Other servers slice the top half off the fish clean off, then take out the bones, then fold the top half back on. Instead, our server opened the fish like the hood of a car and pulled the bone out. Interesting, and well done. Then the fish gets chopped sagittally into chunks.

At this point, most servers are done. They check whether you want anything else, and move off. Not our server! No. She placed some char on Lizzie’s plate. Then joined that with the excellent Wok fried veggies that come with the char, and applied the absolutely incredible to die for glaze. Then she opened the bamboo box that the Lemongrass was in and served some of that to Lizzie, opened the bottom of the bamboo steamer and gave her some rice. Then she gave me some rice, some lemongrass, some wok veggies, and my piece of char, thus reversing the order and making the mirror image of the two plates, on each side of the table, work perfectly. For the next several minutes, we ate and ate and ate. Lizzie quite literally dived into her food, she was clearly starving. That was fun to watch for a while, then I ate the eyeballs out of the fish head and started into my plate.

The rest of the meal, the rest of the conversation, was more mundane. We talked about other matters, we heaped more food on our plates, we got the check, we were introduced to a second server who had just come on duty, just in case we needed him, and as always, Thom came by to see if all was well. And we said, of course it was.

One of the nicer meals I’ve had. It turns out that the char and the lemongrass is a perfect combination. One of the saddest evenings I’ve had. It is not pleasant to contemplate a decade in prison for a person you care for. But all my time with Lizzie is good. I’m lucky to have her as a friend, and I bothered to tell her so that night.

Azia is on Eat Street in South Minneapolis. It is also the home of the Caterpillar Lounge and the Anemoni Sushi and Oyster Bar. Here is the web site.

I was up visiting my dad last week in Hallock, Minnesota. The county seat of Kittson County is in the far northwestern corner of the state. With a population of 1200 people, it is not a big town. It is, at that, still the biggest town in the county. I grew up in Hallock, but my parents’ roots are in a far smaller town. Orleans is 10 miles north and, during its heyday, peaked at some fifty people.

How to get into and out of Lancaster

Fifty people is not a large enough group around which to build a full social circle. My parents had friends and family in both Humboldt to the west and Lancaster to the east. While I was growing up, my grandparents lived in Lancaster. Lancaster had, at that time, 462 people according to the sign outside of town. With a K-12 school, a few churches, a grocery store, dentist and some grain elevators, it was almost a self-contained town.

Dad still has friends in Lancaster, even though he’s lived in Hallock for nearly fifty years.  His best friend is Richard, and they got to know each other when Dad worked part time for my uncle after Dad retired from the U.S. Customs.  Richard works for my uncle, too.

Last Monday, when the kids and I arrived in Hallock for their spring break vacation, Dad suggested that we go to Lancaster to eat.  Dad doesn’t have much of an appetite these days, so this was kind of a surprise but a welcome one.  There are two restaurants in Lancaster.  The End of the Line is on U.S. Highway 59 on the north end of town.  Dean’s Diner is the other one, right on Main Street.

Susan built the café in the 1970′s.  It’s a steel building, rectangular and architecturally unremarkable.  When I was in high school, my social circle was a small group of kids from Kennedy, Hallock, Humboldt and Lancaster.  We gathered at the different restaurants in our respective hometowns.  Kennedy and Humboldt didn’t really have “hangout” places, so we were either at the Mileage Café in Hallock or Susan’s Café in Lancaster.

For some reason, Susan didn’t seem to like me very much.  I have no clue as to why.  I was as agreeable as a kid as I am now as an adult.  Whenever we would go into her restaurant, she would smile at my friends and then give me a disapproving glance.  It didn’t seem to matter how nice I was.  It might have had something to do with some mischief my cousin had created, or perhaps my older brother.  I had certainly never skipped out on a meal without paying for it.

Susan’s Café had a jukebox.  One Sunday we were in the café, and a guy from Lancaster I barely knew put in a quarter and picked out “Walk This Way” by Aerosmith.  It was a song that I didn’t really care for when it was new, and only later did I learn to appreciate it.  I asked who the guy was, and they told me his name is Dean.  I said, “Hi,” and he just kind of looked at me and gave me a disapproving glance.  Sometimes I just can’t win with people.  So we left and drove around Lancaster, talking on the CB radio with truckers.  (Seventies, remember?)

I saw Dean here and there over the years.  I never really said, “Hi,” to him again, and he never really said, “Hi,” to me.  I just knew him as the guy who liked Aerosmith but not me.

He took over the restaurant in 2006.  Several people had tried to make it work since Susan sold it to enjoy her retirement, but nobody could replicate the cooking and the magic until Dean took over.  Now it’s a going concern again, and it is Dad’s regular restaurant.

Monday night we sat down at a table; Dad, the kids, Richard and me.  We ordered dinner, or “supper” as they call it in the rural areas of Minnesota.  Ella ordered a California burger, Bing a bacon cheeseburger, Dad a hamburger, Richard a cheeseburger with fries and me a patty melt and a bowl of chicken wild rice soup. Dean’s Diner has a full small-town restaurant menu, but we all wanted fried comfort food.

If  I may digress: Earlier that day the kids and I had stopped to eat at a Culver’s Restaurant in Grand Forks.  I had ordered a sourdough bread patty melt, but it was the single blandest-tasting piece of meat I had ever had in my life.  I couldn’t taste the meat, couldn’t taste the “sour” in the sourdough, couldn’t taste the cheese and could barely taste the fries.  The only things at Culver’s that had any flavor were the ketchup and the salt.

At Dean’s Diner, the patty melt had flavor.  The meat tasted like fresh ground steak.  The “Swiss” cheese tasted like white American cheddar and the onions tasted like onions.  I didn’t need to add ketchup or salt in order to enjoy my meal.  The soup was rich and tasty, too.

As we were eating, a family walked in.  Six girls and their mother.  The mother looked somewhat familiar. She is a person from my distant past.  I wasn’t sure who she was, so I asked Richard.  He told me it was Kelli Hewitt.  When she was younger, and she is the same age as I am, she was Kelli Porter.  Kelli had married my friend Jimmy Hewitt.  I kind of knew Kelli, but never very well.  I decided to go talk to her.

I had to remind her who I was, but after I did, she remembered me.  I found out that Jimmy had just returned from the War in Iraq the prior Thursday, and that their daughter Ashlee is headed back from Nashville to welcome him home.  Kelli and I didn’t have much to talk about, so Katrice (click the link to find out who Katrice is) and I talked about music for a few minutes.

I went back and sat down, and enjoyed my meal.  Dean came out from behind the counter and looked my way, but he didn’t say anything. Not even, “Hi.”

If you find yourself in Lancaster, Minnesota, stop in at Dean’s Diner.  Don’t tell Dean I sent you.  Just enjoy the meal.

Dean’s Diner is at 123 Central Avenue S. in Lancaster, Minnesota.  Daily specials until the food runs out. Map to Dean’s Diner.

But of course, I deeply disagree.

Fat Lorenzo’s is actually in a stunning location and has an outstanding ambiance, and I’d like to tell you about these things. I am, however, going to say nothing about the name. I mentioned to an Australian colleague who recently had a sufficiently long layover in the Twin Cities to grab a bite to eat that we could run over to Fat Lorenzo’s from the airport and grab a beer and some food and he said “Sounds gross, but okay…” So we’ll just skip the part about the name.

Fat Lorenzo’s is in one of my favorite neighborhoods of Minneapolis. It sits just across from the park at Lake Nokomis. Lake Nokomis is part of the Hiawatha, Nokomis, Minihaha Falls park system. Do you know Nokomis? No? Nokomis is the grandmother of Nanabozho and Hiawatha (who, in turn, are probably roughly the same person). You know, like this:

By the shores of Gitche Gumee,
By the shining Big-Sea-Water,
Stood the wigwam of Nokomis,
Daughter of the Moon, Nokomis.
Dark behind it rose the forest.

That is a tiny fragment of the poem by Longfellow. It goes on much longer than that. Which, had I not already known, I would have discovered one day in a very surprising manner.

A few years ago, when I lived walking distance from Nokomis and Minihaha Falls, my good friend and colleague Sir Dr. Francis Thackeray of South Africa was visiting. So Francis and I went over to the park, because I wanted to show him an example of a glacial lake, as well as the Mississippi river channel and some of the local hard rock geology, as well as an interesting glen loaded with native carnivorous plants, which are all in this park. And as we were walking in the general direction of the carnivorous plants, we passed a large stone and concrete open-air monument thingie, and Francis leaped up on top of the monument (about a foot high, big wide flat thing) and started reciting the poem with his eyes closed.

By the shores of Gitche Gumee,
By the shining Big-Sea-Water,
Stood the wigwam of Nokomis,
Daughter of the Moon, Nokomis.
Dark behind it rose the forest,
Rose the black and gloomy pine-trees,
Rose the firs with cones upon them;
Bright before it beat the water,
Beat the clear and sunny water,
Beat the shining Big-Sea-Water.

And so on and so forth. And I’m thinking, “Wow, how does he know that? And why is he saying it now?”

I recognized the Longfellow poem because I grew up five city blocks from a location that was said to be the Vale of Tawasentha…

“In the vale of Tawasentha,
In the green and silent valley,
By the pleasant water-courses,
Dwelt the singer Nawadaha.

It turns out, of course, that every other creek and vale in New York and New England and much of the Upper Midwest is linked to such a claim. Also, I also used to walk by the Longfellow house (where he was born or died or something) every day when I worked in Cambridge, MA, and a friend of mine lived in a house (in Maine) that sports the stairway from one of his famous poems, and of course the local subway went across the Longfellow Bridge, and so on and so forth. You can’t swing a dead stanza in New England without hitting a Longfellow reference.

But why Francis, why now? And why are his eyes closed like that?

Then I looked down and saw that the monument was actually the poem he was reciting. The low circular wall had the poem, The Song of Hiawatha…

“There he sang of Hiawatha,
Sang the Song of Hiawatha,
Sang his wondrous birth and being,
How he prayed and how he fasted,
How he lived, and toiled, and suffered,
That the tribes of men might prosper,
That he might advance his people!”

…carved in it, and Francis was doing this with his eyes closed to demonstrate that he knew it by heart and was not just reading it off the giant cheat sheet made of stone and concrete that otherwise resembled a 19th century alien landing strip.

Anyway, Nokomis, Hiawatha and Minihaha Falls parks, include some of the finest glacial geology and a bit of nice hard rock (sedimentary) geology, as well as some very nice walking paths. My ex (well, not my ex at the time, but…oh, you get the picture) and I used to walk around this lake once or twice two or three times a week. Then she got a real job and we could not do that any more. Once for old times sake we walked all the way from home to the park, about three miles, with the intention of eating at Fat Lorenzo’s then walking back home. So we worked up this huge appetite, gorged at Fat Lorenzo’s, then could not move for the next hour.

Walking three miles to your lunch sounded like such a great idea at the time. In retrospect, I do not recommend it. It’s like this:

Ye, who sometimes, in your rambles
Through the green lanes of the country,
Where the tangled barberry-bushes
Hang their tufts of crimson berries,
Walks too far before some dinner
To eat too much homemade pizza,
Can’t stand up when it is over,
Wants to take a cab back homeward,
Should have had a different plan for
Getting exercise and food while
Sitting by the park so green and
Wetly lush by Fat Lorenzo’s,
Waddle to the park nearby and
Read the writing on the ground, so
Full of all the tender pathos
Of the Here and the Hereafter;
Stay and read this rude inscription,
Read this Song of Hiawatha!

So, getting back to Fat Lorenzo’s and away from Longfellow…

The restaurant is clearly in a good location, on Cedar just by the park. There are a few parking places in the lot in back, but you can park on the residential streets nearby if necessary. The tables are medium size and the pizzas are huge, so they solve this problem by placing a huge can of tomatoes in the middle of your table, and propping the pizza pan on top of that. The beer selection is not impressive but is quite adequate, and the various Italian sandwiches are all excellent.

And the ambiance is fine, and they are expert at takeout.

Specific recommendations: The artichoke dip appetizer is outstanding. I’ve never had the salads. I have had the Steak and Cheese, Italian Sausage and Meatball hoagies, and all are top notch. I’ve seen but not tried the pasta, and it looks fine. But people go there for the pizza. The first two or three times you eat there, this is what you should do. Try the pizza.

Oh, and the building is painted with locally famous murals, inside and out.

Bon appetite!

My plan was to trick Lizzie into determining where we were going to eat.  This was going to be difficult.  Lizzie is a quiet, unassuming and thoughtful person whose first inclination would be to accommodate my (or anyone else’s) preferences in matters such as this.  It would be totally out of character for her to start out by telling me where we should go for dinner.  But I wanted her to pick, partly because it was her celebration and partly because of a quirk I have.  Sometimes I like to experience the preferences and choices of someone that I care for.  I wanted Lizzie to suggest where to eat, and I wanted to try her favorite selections off the menu and probably drink what she was drinking and so on.

I’m still grinning at the conversation.

“So, where do you want to go?”

“Oh, anywhere, I don’t care.”

(And so on and so on…via email, in person, for three or four days. Then, finally, we’re in the car about to drive off to…somewhere.)

“So, have you eaten anyplace good lately?”

“Yeah, I like this new Japanese restaurant off Lake Street.”

“Oh. So when was the last time you ate there?”

“Two days ago.”

“Oh. So you probably don’t want to eat there again right away.”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“Well, there’s Greek.”

“I could do Greek.”

“We could just go over to Eat Street and see what happens.”

“We could.”

“Maybe Azia or some place.”

“We could.”

“You want to eat in your Japanese restaurant, right?”

“It’s my favorite place. I want to show it to you.”

“What will we order?”

“Eel. It’s my favorite.”

“And what will we–”

“Sake. Of course.”

“Okay, lead the way.”

And thusly, we proceeded to Midori’s Floating World Cafe on 27th Ave in South Minneapolis. At the time we ate there, it was right across the street from the old Resources Center for the America’s building, and next to The Real CMF’s favorite restaurant (to which I had not yet been). Subsequently, Midori’s has moved a couple of hundred feet away.

We had one of the noodle dishes, a biggish bottle of hot sake, and some sushi.

As we were ordering, I remembered that neither of us had brought along our List of Endangered Fish: Do Not Eat wallet insert, but we tried to do our best by staying away from sea mammals and anything that was really expensive.

It turns out that Lizzie and I have pretty much exactly the same taste in sushi: It’s all good, but there must be eel.  We figured eel would be safe from an environmental point of view, but we later learned that we had that totally backwards.  Eel is one of the worst things you can order from the menu if you care about the planet.  Oh, well.  We learn.

I liked the fact that we were drinking hot sake.  I had not had that since being in Japan a few years ago.  In fact, I regaled Lizzie with a story about a fairly intensive foray into the world of hot sake at a bar in Kyoto.  Apparently, the custom in Kyoto is for young men to hook up with a particular small neighborhood bar.  These bars are all owned and run by women, who develop bonds with these young men and have a sort of motherly relationship with them.  So we went to the bar where two colleagues, both of whom work in Central Africa, had “grown up.”

Now, you have to understand that my Japanese is nonexistent, and my colleagues have hardly ever spent time in the English-speaking world, so their English sucked.  My host, a woman who had lived for years in the U.S., was with us, and her English was perfect. But the main point of this gathering was for us Africanists to spend some time together.  So, as it developed, Mother Bar Owner and my host (Hitomi) had a nice conversation about who knows what, in Japanese, while my two colleagues and I spend the evening reminiscing in KiSwahili. Much to the amusement of the occasional customer who wandered briefly into this tiny little establishment.

What was really funny was also too subtle for almost anyone to have noticed:  We learned our KiSwahili in very different contexts.  So, I was speaking with a Pygmy accent, one of my colleagues was speaking with a Chinese accent, and another was speaking with an Italian accent.  That was funny.

I have three things to say about Midori’s Floating World Cafe. 1) It has a very nice atmosphere, a small establishment with a simple lineup of unpretentious tables and a sushi bar, family run, staffed with excellent servers. 2) The food is quite good. And 3) the prices are very reasonable.

Lizzie is living in what we used to call a “crash house”…the sort of place I misspent a fair amount of time in my youth.  Her stories of life at home reminded me of my own stories, which made good comparisons, so I think we ended up making each other laugh a lot. Maybe we were a little boisterous, because when we got around to leaving, we were the only customers and the proprietor seemed really happy (to see us go?).

I highly recommend dinner with Lizzie. But since most of you can’t have that, I recommend that you try Midori’s Floating World Cafe in South Minneapolis with someone who makes you smile.

Midori’s Floating World Cafe is located on 2629 Lake Street, Minneapolis, which is a new location.

And speaking of sushi, this is the video of the famous Japanese Frilled Shark.

What sushi to eat, what sushi to avoid.

It turns out that Greek restaurants in Minneapolis are to the citizens of this area what operating systems and political candidates are to computer users and activists. You’ve got one you love, and the rest suck. Although I’ve lived here long enough to be mistaken at times for a native, this particular form of Greek love/hate is not one I’ve assimilated. I’ve been to all three of these restaurants a number of times, and in my view, they each have their strengths and weaknesses. Mostly strengths, actually. Even my friend Lizzie, who normally has a solidly rational view of the world, has a somewhat all or nothing view of the Greek Cuisine in the city. (The fact that she served at one of these restaurants for about a year may be a factor in this case. I’m not sure.)

I used to live around the corner from Christos, and as an Eat Street restaurant, it gains extra Neighborhood Brownie Points for many people, including me. Eat Street is a section of Nicollet Avenue in Minneapolis in which a large number of mostly “ethnic” restaurants and grocery stores have sprung up with encouragement and help from the local neighborhood associations and the broader business community, as an effort in socially progressive mixed use development. The very existence of a restaurant on this street is a political statement, a statement of solidarity among thoughtful people trying to make a positive difference in a world of selfish greed.

I’ve had interesting and generally very good experiences at the other two Greek restaurants as well. Memorable experiences. At Salonica, I had dinner with a friend who chose that moment to tell me all about his new inflatable penile insert, and about the joke he played on the nurse in the hospital after the surgery. (Which involved some special sound effects and a balloon, but I’m not going there right now.) One of my first dinners out with Amanda was at It’s Greek to Me, so I have special fond memories of that place as well, although not as funny. (Actually, we were trapped there for a couple of hours during a blizzard.)

Almost every meal I’ve had at Christos was with a large group, because it is the kind of place that handles large groups very well, and the most recent dinner was with a set of visiting relatives from my side of the family. Oddly and unexpectedly, we arrived at Christos to find another large group already seated, consisting of about a dozen of Amanda’s relatives, chowing down on moussaka, spanakopita, and tabouli. I know where these people live, and most of them had to drive past both of the other Greek restaurants to eat here. To Christos, which is the one that they like.

And this is where I encountered my first bona fide Sarah Palin convert.

This was a cousin who has always been active in liberal politics, especially related to GLBT issues, women’s rights and feminism. She supported Clinton during the last primaries. I remember seeing her early in the primary season, when she said, “Minnesota will be irrelevant.” (Oh, I should mention that she lives in a Rocky Mountain state.) “By the time the primaries get to Minnesota, it will be pretty much settled. Hillary will be the candidate.” And so on.

I myself supported Clinton over Obama in the first part of the primaries, but I was reasonably happy to shift into an Obama mode once the turnover happened. But you will recall that this turnover was not simple, easy or gentle in any way. There was a fairly long period of time, of several weeks, during which Obama supporters were inappropriately asserting that the race was over for Clinton, and there were Clinton supporters who were inappropriately asserting that the Obama camp was anti-women because they wanted to claim victory. Neither side was willing to refer to history or basic political realities as a guide to what was happening or as a guide to how one might react to what was happening. Indeed, it turns out that Obama was a sufficiently powerful candidate to overcome this period of infighting and Clinton a sufficiently strong person and powerful politician to join the power structure in the White House as number two or three most powerful official (depending) on the planet. But during those weeks including and following Super Tuesday, things were a bit tense.

So we ordered lunch, and as we were eating various Greekey food items and making plans for a museum visit later in the day, Cousin C. came over and we were for some reason talking politics. This was during the interim between the election and the inauguration, and as far as I knew, most of the deeply disappointed Clinton supporters had made peace with the reality of Obama winning the primary, and in many cases joined Obama’s campaign efforts and were now pretty happy that he had won the general. Cousin C., however, a liberal, Democratic, lesbian, activist, feminist living in a progressive liberal enclave in a Rocky Mountain state, was telling me that the Democrats had treated Sarah Palin badly and unfairly because she was a woman, that Bill Ayers and Barack Obama were in bed with each other, and this makes Obama a terrorist, and that Ayers should be in jail now and forever for what he did to this country, and Sarah Palin was the cat’s pajamas, and so on and so forth.

I kept my mouth shut. I like Cousin C. quite a bit, and I figured she’d need to vent, apparently, for a few more months and I would just let it pass. My sister did not keep her mouth shut, and a low-level shouting match ensued. Gentle, less-political cousins were embarrassed and started apologizing for each other, and of course, Cousin C.’s children were mortified, but those of us more political waved them off. This argument was not a bad thing but, rather, an airing of feelings that probably had to happen. An outsider might have been shocked—people at all of the tables in the restaurant had stopped eating and had turned to watch. But this was East Street in the Whittier Neighborhood of Minneapolis. This was what happens here. People come from all over the country to have Greek Food and shout at each other about politics.

My contribution to the discussion was small. I merely noted during a lull that I went to Bill Ayers’ school when I was a kid, and we never learned any terroristic methodology or anything. My snark was duly ignored by the primary combatants. Something was said about Prop. 8 in California (whence my sister), and I think that was a bit poignant. The gay community and the African American community need to work out some important details here.

The politics are real. These distinctions, between candidates and positions, are important. Progressive communities need to get better organized. And it really is true that Linux Rocks and Windows Sucks.

But the big three among the Greek food establishments in Minneapolis are all good, even if different. At the very least, you should try them all before you decide. This is one case where you should not listen to the locals.

Christos Greek Restaurant is located on Eat Street, in the Whittier Neighborhood. More information here.

Gardens of Salonica is located in Northeast Minneapolis. Here is their web site.

It’s Greek to Me is located at LynLake, in South Minneapolis, and the web site is here.