Tag Archives: twentysomethings

Where I Was From

As I mark seven years back in Duluth, my mind is not back on my move home in 2016, but instead on an earlier return, the one some ten years ago that set me on my current path. It would be very easy to write off those two years right after college as misspent youth, and indeed I would not rank it as a time I lived a life I much wanted. I was underemployed, with no budget to feed my wanderlust or appetites, and for a time had no grand plan for what would come next. I churned out large quantities of fiction no one would ever read and hated most of it; I am now thankful I had enough discretion to spare the world these pained missives. My social circles, such as they were, primarily featured high school friends who happened to be around, many of whom have since drifted out of my orbit. My college friends barreled forward with life, but enough of them were in grad school or two-year public service programs that they had yet to accrue much financial advantage that would have put them on a visibly different trajectory. It was not an exciting time. My journey only looked rebellious if I told myself it was.

Which is exactly what I did. Those were heady days in my struggle to make sense of my world. For the first time in my life I had stepped off the meritocratic hamster wheel I’d inhabited in my school years, and I began to poke holes in the system, tread in more contrarian circles. In my early political writing at city council and school board meetings I fixated on the vocal minorities and appreciated the points they made, even if I often thought they made them poorly. My intellectual ferment, thanks to a few Georgetown influences, took on a few small-c conservative flavors as I gained more appreciation for limits and rootedness, two radical words in an era of overwhelming open-endedness that had, momentarily, paralyzed me. In my floundering writings, I wrote stories that reflected that sensibility, and through much disgust at my own words started to find my voice. As I have aged, I’ve drifted away from some of that strain of thought: at the end of the day that restless striver is closer to my core being than some staid, crochety agrarian soul. But that quest is now grounded in deeper core convictions, and with that foundation I can never spend too long drifting in the breeze.

I felt my own past deeply upon my return. Never was this truer than on meandering nighttime walks through Lakeside, when I went block by block pulling out some memory of a friend’s old house here, a passing adventure there, some acquaintance of my parents just beyond, my history spelled out in silent streets. They were once the world to me, but now they were shrinking, dwarfed by other adventures, those intricate details my mind has always had a talent for retaining made less and less relevant to my immediate needs.

And yet my life had broken decisively from that past in key ways, and as a result, my appreciation never romanticized my hometown or consigned it to some realm of paradise lost. I knew there was no going back to the way things had been, and I found new life in Duluth. At the time my mother, back herself after a brief stint away, settled into an apartment on Park Point, a first floor one-bedroom on the lakefront side two blocks past the Lift Bridge. Life on the Point had its drawbacks—the bridgings, the nonstop wind, the steady stream of people strolling through the backyard to borrow the ostensibly private gate down to the lakefront—but if I was to have a quarter-life crisis it may as well have come on a beach, a quick stroll from Canal Park institutions from which an apartment-sitting twentysomething could stumble home at the end of a long night. (Rest in peace, Sports Garden.) There was just enough forward motion to feed that latent ambition, enough for me to marry it all in my mind and create a path for myself that intertwined with that of a city.

Duluth at the time felt born anew after a long, inglorious Rust Belt phase; Duluthians tentatively poked their heads outward, skeptical this city could have nice things. Lincoln Park had new energy for the first time in decades, and there was new investment downtown. The housing market was reasonable. There was a visible, public win over the Last Place on Earth, a triumph of order and sobriety over a manufactured, life-ruining agent of chaos. City politics was a realm of relative consensus carried by all those good vibes; while some of the councilors had obvious broader political allegiances, they were often immaterial to the issues at hand, and not their lens for viewing all things. (The school board was another story, perhaps a canary in the coal mine for broader societal divisions to come.) Outside the national spotlight—and with occasional laudatory bursts in it—Duluth was going about making itself a better place.

The view from ten years later is a bit more complicated. The investment goes on, sometimes at rapid paces in certain places. Duluth’s housing market is spiraling upward while downtown hollows out, and I feel certain malaises intensely. I step around bodies sprawled in the skywalk on my way into the office. Out in Irving Park, a strung-out man screams racial epithets at his dog. A client who works in addiction treatment tells me the normal origin story for an addict has gone from “beers among high school friends in the woods” to “meth with mom at age ten.” Local politics, as a recent shocker of a mayoral primary shows, are unsettled, roiling with certain fierce currents but not cohering into anything like the consensus of a decade ago.

I could here try to put a neat bow on this essay by relating some personal frustrations with my time back in Duluth, sweep it up in some grand tale of youthful idealism lost. Such literary flourishes, however, would sacrifice truth for art. Yes, there have been challenges here and there in my seven years back, unexpected burdens and hockey trouble and underlying concerns about my project proven accurate, but nothing to challenge the foundational premises of the Duluth that made me want to build a life here. I went back knowing what those Ithakas are for, and am pleased by how well that younger self knew I was making certain sacrifices. (Too many of us, I think, are far too uncharitable to our younger selves.) I work a good job and I have a good house and any sources of great frustration seem fixable.

I can’t say that Duluth is worse off, either. Rising real estate can also mean rising wealth, at least for those of us fortunate enough to get in on the ground floor. Any memory of the Last Place on Earth days, with lines for unregulated synthetic drugs that cause overdoses by the dozen wrapped around the block, does rather dim the nostalgia for some earlier downtown Duluth. The truth is that Duluth has always had some rust on the underside, the spots where the salt eats away after a long, cold winter. They are all the more glaring in a Duluth where Park Point has teardowns and the east side has nonstop renovations and people speak of gentrification on the west side. The paths diverge, and people in my line of work have a lot to do. But this city retains its allure, and whatever ails me, I am only ever one quick jaunt along the shoreline away from a good mood.

There is certainly some intellectual malaise baked into my project: since I moved back in 2016, things have generally gone to shit for localists. Donald Trump’s election radicalized everyone and made every issue national, much to our collective detriment. Local media, already floundering, is now on life support, replaced by people yelling into online voids or a simple absence of coverage. Covid pounded away at opportunities for community gathering, all while compounding a housing crisis, lowering trust, and making it ever easier to drift into rootlessness. It strained schools, one of the deepest bedrocks of community, to a breaking point. Deaths of despair surged, with more lonely people making terrible decisions, often aided by ever more powerful drugs, and in general we seem to be drifting into the medication of problems instead of considering them with any semblance of reason.

And yet none of this makes me doubt that the solutions to the problems are all right here. They are not secrets, simply harder and harder for people to grasp. There are of course the technical corrections: community schools, community policing, a switch in our housing regime that lets us build things; good local reporting, and politicians who focus on the things in front of them instead of the talking points that trickle down from national movements. My work is not my life, and other areas of focus have also emerged relative to any political project over the past several years. (I’ll save that story for an upcoming post.) But more than ever I believe in this agenda, and am need of allies who will also try to enact it instead of nodding along and smiling at what they read but doing little else to get away from staring at screens. It isn’t easy work, but it is a clear enough road that I found, back on those meanders down Duluth’s trails in my early twenties.

The intensity of the feeling I felt in that era is something some people claim fades with time. I have not found this to be true. Maybe they are all fooling themselves and misremembering the long periods of monotony at that age; maybe I am just wired differently, or frozen in an arrested state that will someday pass. But I’m skeptical it ever will.

This past July, at a bachelor party for a grad school friend, two college runners undertook a passionate four AM dialogue on whether they could ever reclaim that shared team bond they once had. The lament was heartfelt, and the frathouse vibe may indeed fade some as we age into creakier bodies and somewhat better judgment. But losing the depth of that commitment, even when resurrected for just one weekend? Not one ounce. The gravitational pull of that homing instinct does not wane. I owe the strength of that pull to the intensity of feeling in those early twenties years, back when I learned where I was from.

A Lament for Liquor Lyle’s

I asked my friend to describe the strangely named bar that he said was our destination for the night. He paused, frowned, and sought out the right analogy. “Well,” he said, “It’s as if a 50s diner met a hunting shack.”

So began my first visit to Liquor Lyle’s, an establishment just south of Hennepin Avenue’s corner with Franklin Avenue in the Wedge neighborhood of Minneapolis. A year later I moved into an apartment next door, and for my two years in the Twin Cities, Lyle’s became the hub of my social life, the one place that could summon a crowd with a simple text: “Lyle’s?” It hosted grad school study sessions and end-of-semester blowouts and many a nightcap after a long night on the town. A handful of young alumni turned it into a Georgetown bar when the Hoyas made the NCAA Tournament in 2015. Whenever one of us left the city, Lyle’s was the home to the last party, and after I went on my way, no return to Minneapolis was complete without at least one night in that dark, lovable hole. In town for a professional conference in Minneapolis some years ago, I dragged a group to the bar and blended a few of my worlds. After another day of state hockey, we would decamp there to relax, maybe lure in a few friends who weren’t into hockey to catch up with them, too. My last bar experience before the Covid-19 outbreak took me to Lyle’s after the last night of the 2020 Tourney. At least I know I was one of the last people to enjoy it.

Liquor Lyle’s was the platonic ideal of a dive bar. Its entrance was vaguely tomblike, a descent into an underworld lined by sparkly red vinyl booths. Above one sat a plaque commemorating a proposal from decades ago, a happy couple lording over revelers down the years. The grime from down the ages coated the black-and-white tiled floor. The graffiti along the urinal trough was first-class. The bartenders rarely changed, and the bouncer never did. (Curiously, he absolutely refused to accept passports as valid IDs, ruining one night with an out-of-town friend.) A tray of girl scout cookies always sat on the ledge by the door next to him, free for the taking.

Lyle’s welcomed everyone, and its human menagerie delighted those of us whose own crowds have always contained multitudes. Wander in at 4:00 on a weekday, and a group or regulars lined the rectangular bar, occupying stools they had probably occupied since the place opened in 1963. A grungy, musical crowd often crowded the booths toward the back of the main room. Sometimes the Uptown bros were out in force, or a bachelorette party rolled through near the end of the night. My roommate in the apartment where we lived next door, who had the bedroom in the corner of the building immediately opposite Lyle’s, occasionally enjoyed loud, drunken break-ups that were amusing enough to make up for the lost sleep. Sometimes, stepping out the next morning for an early run, I’d find a few dead soldiers on our front stoop. Never have I looked upon litter so fondly.

No matter how far my friends and I wandered in those years, the night ended at Lyle’s, a return to the homely comforts of its burgers and the Tetris Tots. Also on the menu was a mystery beer, though they discontinued that a few years back. (My friend J., who lived on the other side of the place, took home the last one they ever served.) The mystery beer was, inevitably, a Magic Hat. The bar’s most famous deal, however, were its ubiquitous two-for-ones, which actually proved problematic when the place briefly imposed a $10 limit to use credit cards. Can’t pay for your four drinks with a card? Ah well, what’s two more?

Two-for-one veterans knew always to ask for bottles to maximize volume. Grain Belt bottles, sometimes coated in dust, were my go-to: no other drink quite fit the mood of a Minneapolis dive. Woe unto the visitor who expected a high-end rail drink: the beer list was passable, but no one went to Lyle’s for the flavor. They went for the company. The Otter may have better karaoke and the Moose may have the wackiest crowd and the CC Club may have “Closing Time,” but no other bar quite fit the city like this old windowless gem, or provided the same sense of home.

As urban planners, my friends and I had a lingering fear that Lyle’s might not be long for the world. It was clearly a holdout from a different era, a funny little piece of dated real estate on a corridor that was enjoying a burst of density. The demise of Nye’s on the other side of downtown and the steady conversion of Uptown meant the writing was on the bathroom wall, most likely scratched in with an off-color joke. But we held out hope that Lyle’s would remain Lyle’s. Alas, it was not to be: Lyle’s is for sale now, uncertain whether it will survive in its present, precious form, felled in part by a changing city and a pandemic that has taken far too many sources of beauty from this world, but primarily, it seems, by the simple march of time for its aging owners.

For years from now, though, I will return stray nights at Lyle’s in my mind, trace back those old paths of a younger self. You and your crew toss open the door, wait as the bouncer whips out his mini-flashlight and strains to find some defect in your ID. Some football game is on in the bar, and the crowd erupts at all the right times. The bar overflows, its stools packed deep and a ring of thirsty standing around the edge. In the area behind the divide, a large group has pulled the tables together, may be midway through a game of Jenga with the set that required embarrassing or expensive tasks on each block removed from the tower. (If someone tried to pick you up at Lyle’s, there was half a chance your suitor would have a Jenga tile in hand.) Tish, the server in dreads and chains, fetches your beer at the table that forms your temporary home. In the back room, someone who has never shot a gun in his life is playing Big Buck Hunter, while the pool sharks put the rest of us in our places. Someone cranks Toto’s “Africa” on the jukebox and follows it with a string of bands from your youth. Two of your friends suddenly disappear, later to reveal themselves as a couple, love born at two for the price of one. Right there, on a barstool amid the cacophony, you just might find yourself spilling out your soul to a friend as you never have before. At closing time, the lights slowly come on, and your party works its way out to the sidewalk, where stray groups linger and jaw at each other in the night, awaiting their Ubers or readying their plods back down the streets of Uptown.

I’ve used this Nathan Heller quote on this blog before, but when I did so, the night I had in mind was most certainly one I had at Lyle’s:

The shock of the twenties is how narrow that window of experience really is, and how inevitable it seems both at the time and afterward. At some point, it is late, too late, and you are standing on the sidewalk outside somewhere very loud. A wind is blowing. It’s the same cool, restless late-night breeze that blew on trampled nineteen-twenties lawns, dazed sixties streets, and anywhere young people gather. Nearby, someone who doesn’t smoke is smoking. An attractive stranger with a lightning laugh jaywalks between cars with a friend, making eye contact before scurrying inside. You’re far from home. It’s quiet. All at once, you have a thrilling sense of nowness, of the sheer potential of a verdant night with all these unmet people in it. For a long time after that, you think you’ll never lose this life, those dreams. But that was, as they say, then.

Twenty-Something

The shock of the twenties is how narrow that window of experience really is, and how inevitable it seems both at the time and afterward. At some point, it is late, too late, and you are standing on the sidewalk outside somewhere very loud. A wind is blowing. It’s the same cool, restless late-night breeze that blew on trampled nineteen-twenties lawns, dazed sixties streets, and anywhere young people gather. Nearby, someone who doesn’t smoke is smoking. An attractive stranger with a lightning laugh jaywalks between cars with a friend, making eye contact before scurrying inside. You’re far from home. It’s quiet. All at once, you have a thrilling sense of nowness, of the sheer potential of a verdant night with all these unmet people in it. For a long time after that, you think you’ll never lose this life, those dreams. But that was, as they say, then.

–Nathan Heller, The New Yorker, “Semi-Charmed Life” (January 14, 2013)

I turn twenty-nine this week, so I have just 365 more days to enjoy life as a twenty-something. The sensation Heller describes here is one I’ve known intimately over the past nine years; it’s that sort of vague feeling that is especially alluring to us writers and aesthetes with good memories, and drives us to wax nostalgic at every possible turn. The experience of life is so rich and vivid that reaching ages when such spontaneity seems harder and harder feels like a genuine loss, even as we tell ourselves we’ll be able to bring it back on command. (If my New Year’s rotation of friend groups from every stage of life through my apartment is any guide, it’s something I can indeed do.)

I won’t pretend otherwise: I idolize youth. It may seem an odd fixation for someone with a risk-averse, intellectual bent and a mild Luddite streak. But it’s undeniable, and courses through my fondness for a high school sport, through my fiction, through the commitments that keep me at my work each day, believing in better options for the kids in the communities I work in. I don’t think the inevitable march of age is any reason not to revel in youth for as long as possible, and perhaps because I picture youth as a state of progression through stages of awareness and not some static state of innocence or naïveté, I’m not one who thinks it must be cast aside with time.

Those who know me well wouldn’t find it hard to concoct some sort of Freudian theory as to why I might think all of this, but I also just like kids. I’m drawn to the energy of people who haven’t been beaten down by routines, who still can see the potential of the future; for that matter, give me angst-ridden explosions of emotion over the resigned apathy of people committed to their paths in work and in life any day. This joie de vivre lies somewhere at the heart of my idea of the good life, and I will always be happiest around people who share it.

As I bring this mad, wandering past decade to a close, I have plenty of lost time I could lament; at twenty-seven, a birthday that left me oddly depressed, I did plenty of that. This time, though, I can take some time to marvel at it all, and know that I’m taking the best of it and putting it to some use. So here’s to twenty-nine, and to that thrilling sense of nowness, and to everything that may yet come in moments like that, even as I age. May those dreams continue for years to come.