For the topic of this week’s blog entry, I have two options. I could write about the dead fox in my garage, or I could write about my mom’s birthday party. On the off chance that someone from my family might actually look at my website, I thought it better to write about the party.

My mom turned ninety on October 12. She was one of sixteen kids, and she is one of five who are still alive. She has outlived my dad by more than forty years. She is healthy, her brain works fine, and she lives independently with my stepdad.

As part of the celebration, my siblings and I chartered a trolley and toured Door County. With thirty of my mom’s family and friends, we climbed the tower in Peninsula State Park, we painted our names on the Hardy Gallery building in Ephraim, and we sampled wine at Anchored Roots Winery in Egg Harbor. Only half of us did the tower, as the other half were as old as my mom and had mobility issues that kept them from even using the wheelchair ramp.

For me, the winery was the highlight of the day. We chose it because it had live music on an outdoor patio. I expected a folk singer, but it turned out to be Cathy Grier, a bluesy guitarist who was more Bonnie Raitt than Kate Wolf. She invited my mom on stage and asked her the secret to a long life. The question would have stumped me, but my mom, without skipping a beat, said, “Having fun and enjoying an occasional drink.”

After the tour, we returned to my mom’s house in Dyckesville, where the number of celebrants more than doubled. Tables and chairs had been set up in the three-stall garage, food and drink lined two of the walls, and a giant tv screen was put in one corner so guests could catch glimpses of the Packer game.

The trolley tour and garage party took place on Sunday. On Monday, the celebration continued on a much smaller scale. My sister Diane had invited Charles and Irina, friends from Belize, to the celebration. They run an open-air beachside restaurant on Ambergris Caye, and they brought with them lobster and hogfish* for a seafood barbecue. Charles showed me a different way to clean fish, a technique that bisects the skull and leaves half of the head on each fillet. He then grilled the fillets on one side only (skin-side down), and we spooned the flesh off of the skin when we ate. 

Ninety is a big turn on the odometer. It signifies beating the odds. I don’t expect to live that long; I am not sure I want to live that long. I was, however, happy to celebrate my mom’s ninetieth, largely because she was happy to celebrate it.

* An interesting factoid about hogfish is that they cannot be caught with hook and line. They won’t take a bait and must be speared.

Every October I Skype with a class of graduate students from Western Carolina University. My book Rediscovering Dewey is required reading for their course, and the instructor welcomes the chance for his students to have a conversation with the author. Before our meeting, the prof sends me a few prompts on subjects that the students would like to talk about.

This year some of students must have taken the time to look at my website, because they asked questions not only about the book, but also about some of my blog entries. They’d read my short personal essays about the Mississippi River and wanted to know what I thought contributed to a strong sense of place.

I am glad that I received the prompts in advance, because I’d never thought about sense of place in exactly that way. For as much as I value sense of place, for as much as I wallow in its presence whenever I feel it, I’ve never tried to break it down into its component parts. In some ways it seems better to leave it whole, just as I would never kill and dissect a frog to better understand amphibian ecology.

Rather than deconstructing my relationship with the Upper Mississippi River, I mentally ran down the list of the places where I’ve lived the longest and grouped them in terms of feeling at home. I realized that I feel closely connected to Green Bay (my hometown), Madison (my undergraduate years and my first time away from home), the redwoods of La Honda (my strongest immersion in nature), and La Crosse (my home on the Mississippi River and the birthplace of my daughter). I feel far less connected to Wausau (my home until I was seven years old), Boston (a rough patch in my life), Iowa (not sure why I never connected with Ames), and Taipei (where I always felt like a well-cared-for guest).

Two places defied categorization. The first was San Francisco. Even after living in “the City” for two years, I never got past it being some kind of fantasyland. Ed, one of my very best friends, has never lived anywhere other than the Bay Area. He and I should compare notes on this subject.

The other un-categorizable place was Minneapolis. It is an anomaly in that I’ve lived there three different times, and each time felt different. My first stay was 1974, and I didn’t last a year. I’d transferred from the University of Wisconsin to the University of Minnesota, then dropped out of college altogether to become a cookie maker for Pillsbury. When it was time to go back to school, I immediately returned to Madison.

In 1979, I moved back to Minneapolis for a masters degree, then five years later returned one more time for my Ph.D. Each residency became progressively better, to the point that when I left for the last time in 1986, part of me wanted to stay. Without doing too much analysis, I realized that the difference might have been that I’d made a home not of the entire city, but of Dinkytown, the small neighborhood adjacent the East Bank campus of the University. For most of the time I lived in the Twin Cities, I did not own a car, but my various Dinkytown apartments were all within walking distance to my favorite restaurants, bars, movie theaters, and live music venues.

Also one border of Dinkytown is the bank of the Upper Mississippi River. In terms of the River, I’ve come full circle.