Sunday Blog post

 This week felt like a sprint, one thing after another, no real gaps in between.

Earlier in the week I volunteered at Peace House, a soup kitchen on Franklin in South Minneapolis, showed up, did what needed to be done, then moved on to the next thing. I felt a little bit anxious being there, not in a bad way, just aware of everything going on around me, so I ended up writing a story about it afterward to process it.

I kept going to the gym every day, no breaks, just part of the routine at this point.

I made time to sit at the Eagan Library so I could write in between everything else, just plotting myself there for a bit to get words down before heading back out.

Friday started early, dropping my son off at school in the morning, it looked beautiful outside, clear, calm, almost like a perfect morning, and then within an hour the rain started. Later I went to the Eagan YMCA and it got so dark outside it looked like nighttime through the windows. I remember walking through the gym and looking out thinking something was off, like the whole day had shifted.

At some point I picked up a passenger driving for Uber in North Minneapolis, didn’t recognize her at first at all.We worked together at Robbinsdale Farm and Garden (Robbinsdale in one of Minnesota’s most historical towns). We started talking, and I remembered she lived a block away from where I grew up. We weren’t close back then but we knew a lot of the same people, so we just kept going back and forth naming people, remembering things, connecting everything.

We drove through a hailstorm while all this was happening, and I had to pull off the exit ramp from the highway to be safe and we just kept talking about childhood and people we hadn’t thought about in years. She mentioned how Facebook feels like a ghost town now, which felt true.

She was going to her mom’s house, same house, still there on Girard, just a block from where I used to live. I dropped her off and almost immediately got another passenger a few blocks away, took that ride all the way back to West St. Paul where I live(such a coincidence!) . Right after that I got on the phone with my younger brother, he knew the girl from the neighborhood too, and we started connecting even more dots, naming more people from back then, building out the web of who knew who in that neighborhood.

It rained on and off all day, at least five different times, starting in the morning and continuing through everything. After that last ride the weather cleared up almost immediately but I was so wiped out,I picked my son up from school and went to bed.

On Saturday afternoon, I went to the Luminary Arts Center to see Arena Dances, the space is right next to the Minnesota Opera and Acme Comedy, everything kind of clustered together, easy to move between spots, different kinds of energy all in the same area. The event itself was loud, fast, a lot going on.

Then I went to a spontaneous theater event at the Central Library in Minneapolis where we wrote monologues for writers and then watched actors perform them right there, write it, hand it off, see it acted out immediately. I got lucky with timing because I was already downtown, drove over and found parking about two minutes away. Parking downtown can be like a needle in a haystack with metered spots, but this time I got in and out easily and kept the energy going.