MEMORIALS

 On the first day of 2021, I went for a walk around sunset.  It is a favorite time of the day for me, especially in the winter, with the sun so low in the horizon.  The light is delicate and enchanting. As light leaves and darkness comes on, it is one of those liminal times.  The border between the past and present, the living and the dead, becomes more of a membrane. We can be fed with what we don’t comprehend.

 

A short walk from our house is Matt’s Bar at 35^th and Cedar, where the Jucy Lucy was born (sorry, 5-8 Club, but it was here). On the semaphore pole are the remains of a memorial to three people, killed by an 18-year old driver who had stolen a car.  The three people were coming from a family gathering; they had no knowledge of the young man, nor of how their lives would connect in that one awful moment.

 

I walked down one block to the Holiday Gas Station, where a small memorial sits in the snow. A 23-year old man was killed by police on the last day of 2020. The police released footage that seems to show he fired first at the officers who had pulled them over.  The young man had had some knowledge of law enforcement, with a few “run-ins” with the law. But none of his family and friends saw this coming.  I don’t know if he knew the officer who shot and killed him.  The gas station is less than a mile from where George Floyd was murdered by police on Memorial Day.

 

I walked a block west, watching the sky, then turned back north on 18^th Ave, the street we live on.  At 35^th and 18^th is the parking lot of the Hope Temple Foursquare Church.  The low sign on the corner of the lot has been fully repaired since a hit and run driver struck it. The same driver, a young man drunk and going close to 70 miles an hour, hit a car at that intersection, killing a young man.  The victim was a scientist, and a musician who played in a local band.  He lived with his wife one block as the crow flies from our house.  There was a memorial for him for a long while, but now that has gone away.  The house he lived in has gone away as well, made unfit by a huge tree that was felled during a storm a year after his death.

 

On the second day of 2021,  I thought about these memorials, and I thought about the places where happenstance or fate or a terrible coincidence brought the lost lives to their end.

 

At Matt’s, a Jucy Lucy is a concoction where cheese is sealed between two thin hamburger patties and then fried.  It comes with a warning to watch the first bite, because the cheese is so hot.  It’s been a neighborhood cornerstone for years.  I remember back in the 70’s, it was so smoky you couldn’t see to the end of the bar.  Since Minnesota outlawed smoking in indoor establishments, it has become a place where families as well as young adults hang out.

 

The gas station has a long pit to the north of the car wash; I assume it is to eliminate stormwater runoff from entering the storm sewers and then onto the river. We’ve bought gas there many times; our Cub Foods reward card gives us 10, 20, 30 cents off per gallon, depending on how much food we buy.

 

The sign on the Foursquare Church parking lot has a logo with white silhouettes on different color squares: a cross on red, chalice on blue, crown on purple, dove on yellow.  I assume they represent the four core beliefs of every Foursquare Church: Jesus is our savior, healer, baptizer and soon coming king.  The members of the church have planted several trees in the boulevard on both sides of 35^th Street..

 

One square block, three memorials to needless death, at three random places. 

 

Our soon to be departing president vetoed the defense bill, not because he wants to limit our death-making machine, but because he didn’t want the part that eliminated the name of traitor racist generals from military bases.  Those memorials of Confederate generals are not outpourings of sorrow, or rage at injustice, or the hope of keeping a loved one’s memory alive.  They are about glorifying terrorism.

 

This is not the blog post I anticipated writing in this new New Year.  But there is still grieving in my soul, for what we’ve lost this past year, and during the life of our city and country.  It is serenity we need to accept our losses; it is courage we need to work to change the things we can, it is the wisdom hidden in the evening winter sky that gives me hope.

 

Be beauty. Be justice.  Be memory.

 

Patrick