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Other Minneapolis Road Trip Posts:
Mall of America: What the Log Chute is Really Like,
and
an Inspiring Aerial View of AmericaMall of America, Sea Life Aquarium: The Awed Perspective of One Canadian
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With border crossing
rules the way they are, we hadn’t been able to bring much food across. Fruit
and vegetables, meat and dairy were all either not allowed to be brought across
the border, or were questionable depending on their ingredient, so we decided
to buy most of what we needed once we’d arrived, which left our cupboards bare
of breakfast food that morning.
But first, coffee. Priorities, you know?
Mark and I sat in the living room on the big, beige
microfiber couch. Soon Ethan and Abby joined us, all four of us now squished in
a row. Then the complaining began.
“Ethan, move over.” “Abby, you’re scratching me.”
“Ethan, move over.” “Abby, you’re scratching me.”
“Well, it WAS nice,” I said, and exited the squishy row to
sit in the available recliner across the room.
“Now it’s not?” Abby asked.
I settled into the recliner and smiled. “No, it is still.”
They spread out on the couch, and we each had space now. It’s funny to me how these little everyday things require management and direction, even now, at eleven and twelve years old. I thought of my mom. How long did she have to manage our sibling quibbles? Into my late thirties she was still peacekeeping between whoever of us was fighting at any given time. My grandma had watched her children, my aunts and uncles, quibble and bark into their fifties and sixties.
I sighed. Maybe it was the kind of thing that would
never end, and I just needed to stop expecting it too. That was hard,
especially on vacation, when I’d hoped for a break from such things. Still, it
was easier here. The laundry and chores didn’t call me, at least. I knew at the
end of the week, we’d leave, and someone else would clean the microwave and
wash the toilet. That was a vacation in itself!
Soon we headed out, Mark driving, me holding my phone that
told us in a robotic voice where to go and how to get there. After a brief internet
search, we’d decided to try Uptown Diner. We’d wanted to go somewhere we
couldn’t find in Canada and it seemed the least pricey of the options.
We seated ourselves in a corner booth, ordered our food, and
waited. The diner was unremarkable. Windows, booths, tables, uniformed
waitresses, and an absent looking busboy who yawned wide and long as he cleared
tables. Our server was extremely bubbly and fussed over us all. She called me
Mama and the kids “baby”. She didn’t call Mark anything.
“What are you folks up to today?” She asked, locking her
eyes on me.
I shrugged. “We don’t know yet.” It was true. We had a list
of sights we wanted to see, but hadn’t decided which would be first.
“We’re from Canada.” Mark told her.
Why did he have to out us to people all the time? And why
did I feel the need to hide it? The moment she heard that, she excitedly listed
places we definitely must go. At one point she came over with her phone and
showed us photos from a recent trip she’d made to Duluth, somewhere we should
also definitely go. The photos of railway tracks, shipping containers, and
abandoned docks didn’t do anything for me, but I smiled and didn’t let on. She
was so kind to help us, and I was grateful. Plus I kind of liked the attention
anyway.
The food arrived and, just like the website reviews had
said, the portions were huge. The kids’ pancakes were as big as their faces,
and Mark’s omelette was the size of two man fists. It also came with a fist of
hashbrowns and a several links of sausage. The omelette glistened like I’ve
never seen eggs glisten before. He and I looked at the shiny omelette and the
oily stain beneath the hashbrowns, and looked at each other.
“Food sure is greasy out here, eh?” he said.
“Yeah, no kidding.” I said. Canada has greasy food too, but
not such that it pooled in the plate.
“It’s tasty, though.”
“Sure is.” I smiled, and ate a piece of greasy breakfast
sausage.
As we ate in relative silence, (no eating while talking
please) I scanned the room. So these were Americans. They looked like normal
people for the most part, though there did seem to be some intentional
ambiguity about gender in this place, which I didn’t understand.
One of the
staff was a tall thin person with light purple hair. Neither build, nor
hairstyle, nor voice gave a clue about whether it was a young man or a young
woman. I wondered how much of that was intentional. I also wondered how, in the
modern debate about gender identity it could possibly be less clear which
gender people were. With all the jostling for recognition and visibility,
wouldn’t it become more clear? Maybe I just didn’t know what each
“looked like”. Maybe the point was that gender didn’t have “a look”. Who knew.
I rarely understood debated topics. Why did everything have to be so
complicated?
I tried not to stare at a short young woman who sat
diagonally across from a very large man. Her head was shaved and she hunched
over the way people do who are self-conscious or submissive. She had a
beautiful face with a large smile. I never saw the face of the large man she
was with, only his long ponytail of red hair and the red bristles on the side
of his bulging cheek and neck. They’d sat together like a couple, I supposed,
her leaning over her phone, occasionally leaning toward him flashing that
beautiful smile about something she’d seen on the small screen. It was only when
they rose to leave that I noticed the young woman’s legs were covered in long,
black, manly hair. She was a he?
Another
two men ate together and, on their way out, wrapped arms around each other’s
waists. Then there was the table with two super-fit, super clean-cut guys that
seemed too metro to be straight. In short, I never knew who or what I was
looking at, and wasn’t sure how I felt about it.
It was only our first morning out in the big city, and I was
definitely feeling the truth of what people had been saying all along; we lived
in a bubble, somehow magically abnormal and unaffected by the ‘normal outside
world’, which apparently this was. I suddenly missed my hometown where I knew
at a glance whether I was looking at a male or female. At least, I thought I
knew. Maybe people made more of an effort to hide it there.
After breakfast, we went shopping for much needed groceries. After calculating the rough cost of eating out, we had decided we would cook at the house (which was one of the reasons we got a house instead of a hotel in the first place). Without the familiar Real Canadian Superstore, we opted for whatever chain store was closest. Cub Foods it was.
It took us longer than expected to find our short list of
groceries; things weren’t quite where we’d expected they would be. Some things
didn’t even exist.
“Can you tell me where to find the farmer sausage?” I asked
a stocking clerk. His eyes went blank.
Apparently farmer sausage wasn’t a thing around here? Home-grown farmer sausage
was a staple at our place. It was on the meal plan every week, including this
week. I hoped we’d find it. “Or breakfast sausage?”
His eyes registered. He
smiled a wide and toothless smile and gestured for me to follow him. The
selection of breakfast sausage was small, and no farmer sausage was to be seen.
Apparently it was something we would not enjoy until we returned home. I missed
Canada a little just then.
I rejoined Mark and placed the frozen meat in the cart. He held
up a pink folded tube of something. The label claimed it to be sausage, but it
looked pale and sickly, with a skin that reminded me of raw fish. I suppressed
a look of disgust.
“What do you think?” he asked.
Maybe it wasn’t as bad as it looked. “I don’t know…” I
scanned the cooler and found nothing better.
“I guess we could try it?”
He
tossed it in the cart. It was official. We would roll the dice. I made a mental
note to have a Plan B the day we cooked sausage for supper.
After we’d returned to the house with our loot, we cooked up
a mid-afternoon lunch (of anything but sausage) and then headed out to the long
awaited Mall of America.
(Next up... LegoLand and the first time we slapped eyes on the Mall of America)
Oh - and driving through the "Indian Reserve" as a Canadian (we don't say "Indian" up here - it's not nice, you know), was awkward and interesting ... especially while listening to the Little House on the Prairie audio book and listening to the narrator read, "the only good Indian is a dead Indian" (!!) Wow. That story to come...)
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