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Her Way

Give my Aunt Trisha this: she knew what she wanted. She was always the rebel of the family, the one prone to a sudden life-changing decision that would leave everyone else scratching their heads. In a family of twelve she lived the hardest of anyone, and her body paid the price. But she remained unapologetic, herself to the end, committed to the paths she chose, and she had plenty of fun along the way.

When I first came into consciousness, Trisha was living with her son Brian at my grandparents’ house in Lombard, Illinois. Not long after, she made one of her sharp turns and picked up and moved to Wisconsin to tend bar, temporarily joining my family in the Badger State. Thanks to that proximity I remember more of Trisha in my earliest years than any other aunt or uncle. I was too young to have many distinct memories; she was just a presence, always there with her big, rolling laugh, free from any pretense.

Aunt Trisha led a different sort of life from most of the family, but her unique path did not stem from any shortage of intelligence or capacity for insight. In those early childhood memories she was very attentive to me, in no way babying, imparting knowledge and logic, the straightforward real talk of someone who knew her course. She had a deep memory and could recall tales from her past with startling specificity, and when she found a willing listener, storytime could last for hours.

As stubborn as she was, the wheels were always churning beneath, maybe questioning, maybe justifying, always moving. I recall sitting with her at my grandmother’s wake some three years ago, not long after Brian had passed, and her poignant statement, offered as a simple fact, that the true loss of her only child had happened years earlier. I do not know how well she coped, deep inside; I’m not sure anyone can, as the mental and physical tolls mounted. In those later years she came back into the family fold after a time of relative absence, a return to those old rhythms she remembered well, perhaps a tacit acknowledgment of the support she needed, that we all need.

In another family Aunt Trisha might have been written off as the black sheep, or her forays met with a resigned shrug. Instead, the most prodigal Maloney always had a safe harbor. When she came home with Brian, her staid and very Catholic parents welcomed her in; whatever judgment there may have been did not leak out into the open. Later, other family members took on thankless work to help a lovable but stubborn soul enjoy some measure of freedom as life caught up with her: the Joneses in her South Bend days, the Downeys when she ventured back into Chicagoland, and everyone else in ways large and small. Keeping the family whole came first.

In the late stages, her deteriorating body did not stop her from continuing the push. Aunt Trisha gutted out last summer’s family trip to Europe despite increasing immobility, somehow surviving an incredibly inaccessible Venice and then mostly parking on the cruise ship deck with margaritas while the rest of us went ashore. (Like her late older sister Kathleen, she simply had to go on that last cruise.) When she came home from that trip she then made one last hard-to-fathom move, this time to Florida. She seemed to know her days were short and wanted to make what she could of them, a fate accepted with typical resolve. The party would continue to the end.

Aunt Trisha’s passing is a blow to our giant family unit, but even though it comes too soon, it comes with peace: she certainly went on her own terms. Somewhere she lingers, parked in a chair, cheap beer and a cigarette at hand, her laugher booming through a crowded room as she spins another yarn for anyone who will listen. She did it her way. The rest of us were along for the ride, doing what we could when we could and hopefully, in the end, finding peace too.

Let It Be

When we find ourselves in times of trouble, the words of wisdom come from the places we know best. I grew up on a block with only two houses, a triangular block in Duluth’s Lakeside neighborhood bisected by an alley that made sure the neighbors in those two 1920s mini-foursquares would know each other well. To my family’s immense good fortune when we arrived on the block in the mid-90s, those neighbors were Bill and Helen Sandwick, and that block was the cradle to which I returned time and again, a second home where we could always drift back into a childhood realm free from the burdens of a world. I knew things couldn’t stay that way forever—in fact I learned this at age eight, and the Sandwicks hosted me the night before that fateful day, with my parents at the hospital with my brother—but back on that block with the Sandwicks, it felt like it could.

It certainly won’t ever feel quite the same now, as Bill passed away this past weekend. Bill grew up in tiny Sandstone, Minnesota, but in his youth a band from Liverpool captured his imagination, and the world opened up to him. The Beatles set him on musical journeys, behind the Iron Curtain and into spontaneous conversation on an Amtrak from Chicago to Minneapolis, where he met the British girl he’d bring back to Minnesota. Bill and Helen raised Sara, three months my senior and a companion through all my school days, and Tim, four years our junior and always right in our neighborhood mix. Together with the Kleins from across the avenue, we formed a little community unit, five kids who turned out alright, helped along by a steady string of cookouts and movie nights and uproarious laughter.

And that is what I will remember most about Bill: his perfectly calibrated humor. He was a master of the dry one-liner, some ridiculous quip that would lead us all to pause before doubling over in laughter. He made an art of gentle mockery, laser-focused but never mean-spirited, an absurdist twist that landed just about every time. We all acquired nicknames, and I remained “Kowl,” as toddler Tim pronounced my name circa 1996, until the last time I saw him, a breakfast about a month before he passed in which I reunited with the whole clan for the first time since before the pandemic. Bill told naughty jokes, he drew marvelous caricatures, and he knew just how to press his kids’ buttons.

Beneath the endless good humor was a man who saw the world with fundamental decency and basic common sense. Their house was one with no hint of pretense: just a cozy place where I have always been welcome to stop by. For all his time on stages Bill was a homebody at heart, and the friendships he made were deep ones. He and Helen could laugh away with visitors for hours and hours, delighted and drama-free. What more could anyone ask for out of a neighbor?

For most of his adult life, Bill made his living doing what he loved to do, playing his bass for local bands, and though I am sure that schedule taxed him over time, it did nothing to diminish his joy in good music, from his beloved Beatles to Elton John to the Moody Blues to Rod Stewart and a long list of other stars (not all of them British!) who they’d play and see on tour. And even though the Beatles have been apart for over fifty years now, they still managed to put out a new song in the final weeks of Bill’s life, and his family was able to serenade him with “Now and Then” as they prayed for a recovery that would not come.

On Sunday afternoon the Kleins and I went over to clean Bill and Helen’s leaf-strewn yard, and suddenly the whole crew was out there again. One of us was missing and at first the words did not come easily, but we were and that was what in fact mattered, our numbers in fact swelled by Sara’s husband and Tim’s partner. Helen was a model of grace, laughing and telling stories, happy to be among friends, finding her way to peace. And if in the days that come that peace does not come so easily, Colorado Street will always be there for her, and for all of us. For though they may be parted, there is still a chance that they will see. Rest in peace, Bill, and let it be.

In Memoriam: Nick Bachhuber

News of a death from one’s high school class trickles in slowly; first from one stray friend and then another, none of us his intimates and all with our own sources, and then confirmed through a dive into the social media world where it sits alongside random minutiae in other lives temporarily untroubled by sudden loss. It is a jarring experience, one in which I trade some laments and feel momentarily helpless and then do what I always do, which is start to write a few things to make sense of it, and in this case choose to share them in the off chance that they help a few others find that sense, too.

It has been years since I last saw Nick Bachhuber, but he lingers in my mind’s eye as a truly genuine human, a piece of praise I do not dole out lightly. He was beloved by his classmates, outwardly easygoing and willing to connect with anyone, curious and thoughtful in all he did. Nick lost his dad while we were in high school, an absence that haunted him. (We children who knew tragedy could see it in one another.) Out of that, I think, came a depth of character that emerges through adversity, a layer of thought that can provide an added well of richness to strengthen certain interactions. With that he set off for college in Chicago, for Teach for America in Detroit, for a series of steps outward and eventually into a life with a wife and a son and a second on the way before it all came to a sudden halt. He packed so much in to so little time, a raw intensity of experience channeled through him and into his works.

Nick is not the first of my high school classmates to pass, but losing that vivacity and richness of soul is a particular hit. That feeling is underscored as I find myself more and more enmeshed in my hometown, where I watch as some other kids at the same high school form those same ties my classmates and I once did. I am now left to wonder how the march of time will flow through their friend groups, which once fond memories will take on an elegiac tint too soon. Nick’s loss now can only be a reminder of how much every passing moment counts and how long these connections last, even when they stem from experiences long ago in a world half remembered, their peaks and valleys smoothed into a few clean, defining moments. Perhaps our minds know what they are doing, picking out the highlights and giving them back to us as fondness for what was and fuel for what can yet become.

Nick’s coronation as Mr. East, 2008.

A memorial fund is available here.

Nick’s high school story was somewhere in my mind, among other influences, when I penned this short piece of fiction a few years ago.

Rest in peace, man, and know we are all still here for you.

In Memoriam: Renee Van Nett

As I got to know Renee Van Nett, I learned the important thing was to listen. She didn’t need my advice, nor to hear my convoluted backstory, at least not unless she wanted to. I was there to learn from her. She had seen things that I never would, had opinions formed in ways that my life would never allow me to do, and through that journey she had become a force.

Renee was a fiercely independent woman. She hid her past pain and suffering from the world, even as she was open and welcoming to others who had endured struggles. Few knew how much she had already been through, how she’d learned to live a life on borrowed time. She never wanted her story to be about her, and always built it around what she stood for, and the often unseen people she sought to lift up.

She accepted political advice but did things her way regardless, her campaign operations lean efforts that relied on a few key allies and her own force of will. A narrow defeat in her first run for office did nothing to dissuade her, and she twice won a Duluth City Council seat over opposition that wasn’t afraid to take serious swings at her. She governed from the heart, building fierce loyalties that led her on one quixotic final campaign to primary a sitting state senator. Her moves unnerved some when she dared to stray from the progressive orthodoxy that some white Duluth liberals apparently expected out of a Native woman, and at times exasperated even those of us who considered her an ally, too. But we knew that this was what made Renee such a genuine politician, such a person who could take a complex collection of facts before her and form an unflinching belief that only made sense from where she was. She was no one’s pawn, nor was anyone Renee’s pawn. She moved through the world with an authenticity of self whose rarity belies the term’s use.

As I came to know Renee, I took that authenticity as a model for how to move through the world, a lesson all the more compelling when it came from a woman who ventured into realms that were far from what she’d known. It was exemplary. I am a better person for having known her, and I trust that her daughters will know they always have supports who are there for them; may they learn to channel their mother’s strength in their own endeavors.

Renee’s death came far too suddenly, a far too abruptly for a life still bursting with potential. But the vagaries of time and life have no heed for such untapped wells, and it is up to the rest of us to find something in what has been lost and turn it into a beginning once again. Her passing is another reminder to never waste one more precious moment.

My Year of Imaginary Thinking

Travel is useful; it exercises the imagination. All the rest is disappointment and fatigue. Our journey is entirely imaginary. That is its strength.

– Céline, Journey to the End of the Night (lifted from the credits of La Grande Bellezza)

I began 2021 with the particular belief of a convert to a new faith. It was hard not to, since I started it by diving into a pool at a mountaintop estate on a Caribbean island, my crash into its depths a burst through the din of jungle fauna and steel drum bands echoing in the distance. A couple months later, I received my second stab of Moderna and penned what I hoped would be a victory essay over the virus that had disrupted the previous year of life. I had grand travel plans, I would see family again, work would move away from the misery of Zoom, and I would find undying love.

I wasn’t so naïve as to think it would be that easy, which is good, because it wasn’t. New variants surged, a dream of optimism curdled into an air of mystery, the general malaise lingered, and while I generally went about my life, the world did not. I certainly have no judgment for those who continued to take strong precautions for various reasons and would always work to reach their levels if need be. But to sacrifice any more of my rapidly dwindling youth to a climate of fear that was unlikely to afflict me in any serious way seemed a high price to pay, and trying to negotiate a world in which everyone was on a different page on this issue added another layer of complexity. To be a conscientious friend in 2021 was to live in a state of hyper-aware caution, and the escape of obstinacy grew ever more attractive.

I proceed with family and friends more or less as I did before the pandemic, but my social circles have not grown much, and arranging anything with anyone feels like a considerably larger chore than it used to, the serendipity of stray days together now a rare occurrence. My friend group is a busy one, and a lot of them have been pairing off and reproducing while I have not, a divergence that both keeps them occupied and is wont to drive me to brood. I field questions about my house as if contemplating the excitement of a new garage door is a comparable life step to having a child. For that matter, I have been traveling too much and too caught up in my day job when I am home to get around to acquiring the garage door.

The year took its tolls. I lost a grandmother, an aunt, and a cousin, and endured a funerary marathon for all three of them over one week in July. Somehow, this was not the most draining stretch of family time in 2021; that dubious accolade instead goes to a visit, two weeks later, to the other side of my family, on which I will not elaborate much out of respect for my relatives except to say that no human should ever be allowed to own more than three cats. The less weighty but still disruptive milestones mounted: in the hockey world, a man who was an ordering principle for my drive in life lost his job, a complex but significant era drawn to a close; at work, my colleagues and I were too good at our jobs, in short order overwhelmed by requests for help and pushed to the brink by a taxing schedule, a herd of Sisyphean retrievers forever chasing the ball. It took me until some time after that to see that I was slipping into those same dragging tendencies that had annoyed me about the rest of the world, and another period of time after that to correct course.

I sought my freedom from days of exhaustion and low-grade dread through bursts out into different worlds. It started in the Virgin Islands, made its way to some wilderness retreats in my own backyard, wound its way through another grand western road trip, and popped off to New York and St. Louis and Tucson for punchy weekends. I kept the pace going right up until the end: a week of professional development in Minneapolis featured not only full days of classes, but a different form of scheduled programming each evening as I caught up with family and friends, then topped the whole thing off with a 48-hour jaunt to Chicago for the Christmas party that, every year, manages to put every other party I attend to shame.

All this travel is dangerous. At times it makes me ponder other realities, roads not taken and potentialities looming within a kid who is still capable of quite a bit when he puts his mind to it. I come home from these trips a jumbled mess, always in need of recovery, at once enlivened and invigorated and yet sapped by long hours on the road and disappointed by the return to routine and possessed of a poorly directed energy. The magic does not necessarily last. But how I lived on these trips: sweating up slopes and treading blissful waters, fine dining and good drinks, revelry till the end of the night in the presence of delightful people who, consciously or unconsciously, understand what I mean when I quote Joan Didion and say I want not a window on the world but the world itself.

Didion has been my muse for pandemic era reckoning, and 2021 delivered one final blow when it stole her away this past week. Her death saddened me as much as that of any person I never met in the flesh. No contemporary writer had a greater influence on how I think about the art of prose, or gave me a better sense of how to frame my view of the world. Didion learned to write by copying down Hemingway sentences, and I have learned to write by copying down Didion sentences. An essayist adoring Didion is about as original as a classical music buff lauding Beethoven or a hockey person saying there’s something worth emulating in that Gretzky dude, but sometimes greatness is so plainly obvious, so transcendent of subjective standards, that it can stand up even amid the rush of cliches that inevitably pursue it like fame-hungry paparazzi.

It was amid the rush of Didion homages, all consumed breathlessly this past week, that I realized that what sustained me through 2021 was not the travel itself but the opportunities the travel gave me to write. “Her work was her own answer to the question of what writing and living is for. It ought to be ours, too,” wrote Nathan Heller in a New Yorker obituary. There is no personal crisis I cannot resolve, no looming burden I cannot overcome, by taking a moment to jot it into one of several notebooks or clattering away at a keyboard. The act itself, whether it resolves into a single flowing tale or disjointed marginalia, is enough. Through it, I am made whole at the end of every day, and increasingly in the middle of days when I need reminders to escape the tunnel of the mundane.

From a mesmerized gaze at waves on a beach to the solemn donning of a funeral suit, from the hubbub of a brewing party to curling up with some essays as a wintry wind howls outside, here is to the power of the written word. Here is to their power not to exact immediate results but to create the pieces by which, over time, a new idea can assemble itself, word by word and line by agonized line of authorial reflection and search for just the right turn of phrase. The words may or may not capture my reality in full, but that was never the goal. The goal was to change it.

Farewell, Aunt Kat

My Aunt Kathleen, aged 69, passed away this past week.

I knew Aunt Kat least well of my mom’s eleven siblings. I’m not sure how different it could have been, a reality that eats at someone ever inclined to probe the depths. She had suffered, her body broken down by some of the demons she’d faced, and she was who she was. I did not know her before any of that. Her story there is not one I know well, and it is not my place to tell it.

By the time my memory of Aunt Kat starts, she had become a steady constant amid the endless party of my extended family. She arrived early to every family gathering and stuck through them, often settling into a corner with my grandmother or a few other confidantes, ever composed and calm, head propped up by her arm as she held forth with her gravelly voice. Even if she wasn’t okay, she probably said she was okay, taking care of things at her deliberate pace, baking her famed brownies and, of course, collecting yet more Peanuts memorabilia. She diligently sent her nieces and nephews gifts and clip art cards for Christmas and for birthdays, her loyalty to her sprawling extended clan unwavering. (The final one I got still hangs in my kitchen, and will stay there for some time.)

Her faith was her solace and her eternal compass through what she endured, her very literal saving grace. Too many people who fall into holes do not have guides back out, but Aunt Kat did, and it kept her going for decades. Perhaps the only memory of her I have away from a larger family gathering comes from a night when I attended a Midnight Mass with her and my mother as a kid. I remember nothing of the service—I was, if memory serves, enjoying a novel excuse to stay up late—but I remember her at prayer.

Aunt Kat got out and saw much of the world, did a few cruises on her own; she kept that going right up until the end, with a perhaps over-ambitious final voyage not long before Covid shut down the world. In her final year she shared some of those memories on what became a weekly family Zoom, putting up past pictures of journeys I’d never known she’d taken. Thanks to those Zooms, I had the pleasure of seeing her more often over the past year than at any other point in my life, and at some point I registered how pleased she was to see me on those calls semi-regularly, perhaps providing a vicarious window after I bought a house or flitted off to St. Thomas. I never tapped it fully, but there was plenty of wealth tucked away in that mind, rich in experience from her travels and the network of friends I knew little about before the stories shared after her passing.

Aunt Kat’s death was not Covid-driven, but the pandemic still robbed us of a vital ritual, that great outpouring of collective grief that has come with other family deaths. I tuned in to the live-streamed funeral Mass from my home office, where I watched the backs of the heads of a few family members scattered about a church in Illinois; after the pallbearers exited, I clicked out of the video and promptly joined a completely unrelated virtual meeting already in progress. This is not exactly what closure looks like.

Thankfully, the family piled on to another Zoom in the evening for a virtual wake of sorts. A few more memories poured out, interspersed with discussions of the estate; naturally, she’d tidied up her affairs and left things in good order. (The tidiness of the house she left her two godsons, on the other hand, is a different story.) There were pleasant drifts in to topics far more mundane. Many were not quite ready to talk, still processing a looming absence in our midst. The eldest of the nine Maloney sisters is gone now, but she is seared into the minds of her clan.

For me, that final image is of her in the Sculpture Garden in Minneapolis. We were in town for a family wedding, passing the time between functions and touring the town I would soon come to call a temporary home. It was a warm summer day, and she’d walked a long way; she was seated on a chair in the shade, resplendent in red, tired, but content. At the end of a road of uncommon perseverance lies grace. She had arrived.

Farewell to the Patriarch

John Maloney, the co-founder of a family that included a wife of 68 years, 12 children, 20 grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren, passed away over the weekend. My grandfather ruled his clan from his suburban Chicago roost, and in his later years from a lake home in northern Wisconsin as well, always a welcome meeting point for the Duluth-based branch of his family. His obituary spends over half its words listing offspring, a fitting tribute to an expansive legacy. He was a true patriarch, a throwback to a now-rare masculine ideal of a father, a breadwinner, a man of faith, and one whose larger-than-life figure left an indelible mark.

My grandfather had a certain curmudgeonly quality, the sort that intimidated me as a young kid but delighted me as I grew into a person who had more than a few things in common with the man. We shared strong literary interests, fondness for baseball on the radio, pleasure in hosting large parties in spite of our introversion, enjoyment in holding court on weighty affairs, the occasional need to escape to a lake, and some skinny ankles. At the most profound level we both aspired a quiet but firm sense of righteousness stemming from an intellectual worldview, and a desire to leave something that lasts. I don’t aim to copy him, either in his unflinching faith or in his reproductive prowess, but his life is evidence that something akin to what I aspire to can be done, and he is as much an inspiration here as anyone I know.

grandpa

My grandfather, composed entirely of pictures of his progeny, now hanging in my hallway.

It wasn’t easy to break through the crust with Grandpa. He was firm in his beliefs and set in his ways, a product of both his times and his faith. While he was rarely one to open up or acknowledge that things were not always right, he did live by example, and set a standard whose consistency said what words sometimes could not. Grandpa lost his own family fairly early, and wasn’t going to let the same thing happen to him. The son of an accomplished PR man whose employers included the Museum of Science and Industry before an untimely and alcohol-driven death, he attended the University of Chicago, where he met my grandmother, and married her at age 19. By the time he was 30, he had nine children. He settled into life as an actuary, became an iconic midcentury father figure who put twelve kids through college, and with his wife instilled in so many of them his fondness for letters, music, liquor, and the finer things in life.

Central to Grandpa’s kingdom was the kingdom of God, and his robust Catholic faith was the foundation of his life. That faith produced remarkable marriage, and all of his certainties on family life the he lived out until the end. He savaged me for going to Georgetown—“that’s a Jesuit school, why aren’t you going to a Catholic school?” he asked when I was accepted—but it was all in good fun; perhaps he even hoped Georgetown might guide one of the wayward members of his flock back into the faithful fold. (I think he thought I should have been a priest, which, given my fondness for sermonizing and asking big questions, might well have been my fate in a different era.) The last substantive conversation I remember having with him before his decline was about a former professor of mine who wrote in First Things, a densely intellectual and traditionalist Catholic journal that he read. His belief was profound, both spiritual and intellectual, a totalizing force that left no room for doubt. I never shared it, but I certainly admired it.

The last chapter of his life was not an easy one to watch. Grandpa never did recover from the effects of prolonged anesthesia two years ago, and most traces of his once formidable intellect faded away. His final years were spent slumped in his recliner, or rolling about in wheelchairs through hallways of several homes for the elderly with increasing levels of care, the institutionalized prolongation of desperate dreams that old age has become. I only had glimpses of this life, but it was still a shocking window into this sad decline; a sort of pain and loss of faculty that I cannot fathom and doubt I’d be able to handle without going insane.

Fortunately, though, we can choose what to remember of those who leave us, and with Grandpa, that means focusing on the rich first 85 years instead of the feeble final two. It’s a string of memories that begins with him forcefully squishing his grandchildren, and shaking our hands with his vice-like grip. It has him sitting at the head of the table and carving up the meat at Thanksgiving at the Lombard house, or seated at the piano to lead carols at the Christmas party. It features him heading out on East Twin Lake in his fishing boat or telling tales over drinks and cards late at night to the tune of the loons of the Northwoods. It meant classical music blasting on a Sunday afternoon as he devoured some large tome; Viennese waltzes on New Year’s Day and Garrison Keillor on Saturday nights. Popcorn at four, happy hour at five, bedtime in the little twin beds he and Grandma had side by side. Mumbled blessings before every meal, and the Cubs on a lazy summer afternoon. What a life well-lived. So I’ll toast my wine, pack my bags for an Irish wake and a funeral mass, and bid farewell to a man who built a family to endure through the flux of modern life. We descendants have big shoes to fill.

Farewell, Uncle Jack

This weekend, my Uncle Jack passed away.  He was always a welcome presence in my life, even if I never got to know him half as well as I should have. He was a man of great wit, and always a steadying presence in the midst of Maloney family holiday bedlam. Whenever one needed a breath of fresh air, one could usually find Uncle Jack tucked away somewhere, safe from the crush of humanity and at ease. And when he did move to insert himself into the middle of it all, it was often memorable: I remember the one year when, to everyone’s surprise, he was the life of the Annual Family Thanksgiving Political Debate, and had us all rolling in laughter. He passed with much of his extended family on hand, there for him in the end. He took his final breaths while wearing his bunny slippers, which he will also wear at his funeral.

My heart goes out to my Aunt Mary Beth, my cousin Paul and his wife Laura, and their children Luke and Emma, who didn’t get to spend nearly enough time with their grandfather. I wish I could have offered up more than a farewell card, send along with my mother as she hastened south to be with him this past weekend. This blog also lost a loyal reader, even though I’m sure that Duluth politics and high school hockey were never topics of great interest to him. He was dedicated to his extended family in his quiet, reliable way, and his absence will loom over future family gatherings. We’ll miss him, but we have much to remember him by, and he left a proud legacy.

Rest in Peace, Uncle Jack.

Tales from Across the Alley

Yesterday, I learned of the death of Carl Oveson, who lived across the alley from me during my childhood on the east side of Duluth. Big Carl (with me being Little Karl), who lived to the ripe age of 87, was an anchor in the neighborhood, that guy who kept to his routine with a classic Minnesotan sense of decency, staying on his feet with little projects in his garage and always seeming younger than his many years. For a time his son’s family lived with him, but even after they moved away, he soldiered on at home well into his 80s without losing a step. He tinkered around and fished and kept his lawn more meticulously than most golf courses, most likely shaking his head (though always with a pleasant, if mystified, curiosity) as our yard across the way was swallowed by an ever-growing collection of trees and shrubs. His eventual retreat to an assisted living home had more to do with a search for community than any declining faculties, as he spoke mischievously of the numerous old ladies who baked him cookies.

Carl grew up in Roseau, Minnesota, that hockey mecca in the northwest corner of the state. He graduated in 1944, meaning he missed the inaugural State Tournament by one year, and his obituary informs me that he played for a senior league team named the Roseau Cloverleafs after a stint in the military. Sadly, we’d lost touch by the time I was old enough to think of grilling him for some serious hockey history, but I suspect that Carl wrote his name into some of those early Roseau and Minnesota hockey histories, and given his sharp memory, he would have been the ideal source. Just a couple of weeks ago, after a surprise visit by Carl’s son’s family for the first time in years, the thought came back into my head. I can’t help but think I’ve lost a great opportunity to collect some stories.

And what stories they would have been: Carl was a relentless storyteller. The man could talk for hours on end, to the point that my parents sometimes hurried their walk from our back door to the garage lest they be waylaid for twenty minutes while trying to run a simple errand. He’d always be there, ready to opine on this or that or not much of anything at all. This made him an excellent interview subject for those childhood assignments in which one had to interview an old person; all I had to do was prompt him, and he’d talk for so long that my essays would write themselves.

Most of the stories Carl told me in my middle school days, though, were not of hockey, but about the Second World War. (A Google search on Carl revealed, to my pleasant surprise, that a chunk of one of those interviews has been preserved by the Duluth Veterans’ Memorial Hall.) While he didn’t see combat in the war, he did set out on a boat that would have invaded Japan in the absence of an A-Bomb, and spent a couple of years in the Philippines with a U.S. Navy refrigeration unit. There, he was part of that unglamorous task of rebuilding from the ravages of war, and was a witness to Douglas MacArthur’s fulfillment of his prophecy that he would return to the islands. His time in the Philippines left an indelible mark, and the memories poured forth: humorous cultural clashes, grueling conditions, and the occasional stroke of poignancy. He brought that little bit of history home to us, making real a world far beyond that carefully guarded lawn.

Carl was never one to order anyone off that lawn, though, and his driveway was often the center of neighborhood chatter as we kids raced about. He was a Minnesotan to the core, but he’d traveled far enough to have a sense of perspective about it all, and counted his blessings. Even his final days were well-ordered, as his family from Pennsylvania got one last quality visit in before the end. He is one of those figures who will always hover in the pleasant haze of childhood, and while I’ll keep the trees in my yard, I can only hope my later years will be so well-tended.

Exit Jim Oberstar

Jim Oberstar passed away in his sleep on Friday night, ending a 79-year life of political service. Love or hate his views, the Chisholm native was a giant on the northeast Minnesota political stage over the past forty years, and his impact spans generations. The eighteen-term representative and former Transportation Committee chairman was arguably the most powerful Minnesotan congressman of the last half century, though unlike some of his better-known contemporaries, he did most of his work behind the scenes. His time was not a happy one for the region he represented, and most of that for reasons beyond his control, as the mines shut down and the manufacturing jobs dwindled, a decline that was followed by a long period of stasis. Like any good long-tenured congressman, he brought home the bacon and did some work to stop the bleeding. Many of the little factors that have helped spur Duluth’s burgeoning optimism, from its emergence as an aviation industry hub to its networks of trails, have their roots in Oberstar’s work.

Oberstar began as a classic northern Minnesota DFLer, a proud member of that generation of Minnesota liberals who gave the state its national political face. As the son of an Iron Range miner, he captured the DFL’s base with his emphasis on labor and taxation on the wealthy. He traveled far beyond the Range in life, though, studying in Belgium, Quebec, and at Georgetown, and was fluent in French. Never much of a revolutionary, by the time I came along Oberstar had the air of a patrician doing what he could to gently steward his district. Still, he never entirely abandoned his working class roots, and there were wrinkles in his platform—most notably, his consistent pro-life stances—that cut against the grain of the liberal elite. His ability to balance his ambitions and worldliness with his Iron Range core was perhaps his most admirable trait, and he made that balance work for a very long time.

Oberstar’s political career came to a stunning end in 2010, when he was taken down in one of the greatest coups of the Tea Party wave election. With its population in decline, Minnesota’s Eighth District had slowly leached south into Michele Bachmann territory, and political rookie Chip Cravaack took advantage of the changing demographics. The real nail in Oberstar’s political coffin, though, probably had more to do with his declining support in his home territory up on the Range. His patient, piecemeal approach and congeniality clashed with growing frustration over decades of economic stagnation, and there was a notion that his balancing act had finally fallen, that he had lost touch after so many years in Washington. Setting aside Cravaack’s own hypocrisy on that front, it was a critique with some merit: every political era must come to an end, and 36 years is quite the tenure. The time for fresh blood had come.

His passing is just another in a slow but steady series of markers of the end of an era. Northeastern Minnesota’s influence on the state political scene has dwindled some—witness Gov. Mark Dayton’s apparent “suburban strategy” for re-election—and the current congressman, Rick Nolan, a DFLer of Oberstar’s generation, is probably only a placeholder. It’s possible that someone of a similar disposition will come along, much as Amy Klobuchar has taken up the torch of Hubert Humphrey and Walter Mondale in the Senate. But the man best positioned to fill that DFL vacuum, Duluth mayor Don Ness, has taken the cautionary tales of Oberstar’s disconnect to heart. As a profound family man, he seems unlikely to run.

Beyond Ness, the regional DFL machine is in a complicated place in the post-Oberstar era. As the name implies, it’s a coalition with some unusual constituents, from Duluth’s east side elite to the fraying but enduring big labor camp, from the environmental activists to the working-class Rangers who support new mining projects. There might be a window for some new coalitions to emerge, though the inertia of the existing parties may be enough to hold things together, and any challenge from the right will need to develop a coherent policy agenda to gain any traction north of Hinckley. It’s hard to know quite what will come next for the politics of the region, but whatever happens, it will all be somewhere in the shadow Jim Oberstar.