An Introduction

As my subject matter is my life, I cannot begin at the beginning. To begin even with my own birth would be to start the story in medias res, for there are the circumstances of my parents’ meeting, their births, their grandparents’ immigrating to America from various homelands across Europe, the origins of the wars and famines that made their homelands places to leave, the codification of the governments of modern Europe, the Enlightenment, the invention of the printing press, the fall of Rome, the rise of Sumeria, the invention of agriculture, the inception of human evolution, the emergence of life from the primordial soup, the birth of continents, the formation of earth, and the Big Bang. The Big Bang would be a place whence to begin with some confidence, but unfortunately I was not there at the time and have very little to say about it. Therefore, I begin on September 3, 2008.

I was living with my mom in Minneapolis. The previous year, my first year out of college, was occupied thus: Eight hours a day, five days a week, I sat in a windowless room and counted paper. Timidity, appreciation for excellent health coverage, and our current economic doldrums all conspired, though not alone, in my long tenure at the legal archives where this paper counting occurred. Amusing coworkers and a boss who frequently brought food also played their part. Eventually, however, I decided I had to knock myself free. “Go west, young man!” I decided (or young woman, as the case was) and began to muster my resources for a move to San Francisco.


September 3, 2008

As September begins, and a chill now persists in the air well past dawn, my desperation ebbs. The cold rebuffs my aspirations, chasing all roving thoughts back indoors to be warmed by the slow-burning furnace of a heart inured to five-month winters. I think of anodynes: a mug of tea, a better jacket, movies to rent, nice restaurants, books.

Is this what keeps so many of us here, this chill in the morning air? Perhaps from the very first winters of our childhoods, when that deep cold pressed against the windows of the house and threatened to endure forever, we braced our hearts against such capricious desires as those for adventure and peril, and every autumn afterward, at the first suggestion of the dark, freezing days to come, we settle in a little deeper for the long haul. That is the quality I recognize in some of these lifelong Minnesotans, a settling-in, an adaptation to the pleasures of cyclical time.

They are deterred from rash offensives against circumstance, favoring instead a bolstering and edifying of the lives they have at hand. They are the sort to build a house and fill it with comforts, defying the attacks of history and nature not with stridency but with abidance and slow progress.