Bilingual: Fluent in both English and Minnesotan

I’ve lived in da Land of Disgraced Governors (otherwise known as da Land of Lincoln for youse traditionalists) for abowt six years, and I still can’t figger owt da traffic reports donchano.

“Twenty-two minutes out on the Edens, and a crash on the Tri-State has that running 40 minutes,” cracks talk radio on any given afternoon.

Eh?

Oh ya, ya know, dis apparently makes sense to Illinoise drivers traveling 20 miles per over da limit and riding pretnear my bumper, but it’s a mystery to me. Uff-da.

My innerstate highways are named with numbers, as in I-94. Sometimes there’s a modifying letter — as in “35W goes to Dalut” — but dhat Illinoise penchant for naming dere roadways with famous (or infamous) names confuses me.

Who is Dan Ryan far as dhat goes anyway? (For the record, he is a former president of da Cook County Board of Commissioners who, unlike so many other Illinoise politicians, never served time in a federal pokey.)

My abode in Nortern Illinoise is just south of I-90 in this former Minnesotan’s way of tinking, but to everyone here, it’s just south of the Northwest Tollway and in serious danger of being south of I-88, which means da “rest of Illinois” dats not in “Da Loop.” And so.

Though I’ve come to appreciate the milder winners, cheering for perennial losers like da Cubs and deep-dish pizza as an alternative to hot dish, you betcha I’ll never get used-tuv the roadway naming convention.

This post is part of WordPress’ Weekly Writing Challenge: A Manner of Speaking. For more colloquialisms among the world’s bloggers, click here and follow some of the comments.

‘Are you telling me that you built a time machine … out of a life boat?’

This time, I climbed inside.

You know that space ship I saw on New Year’s Eve? The one on the beach, bedazzled with crushed beer cans? It’s been calling my name — yeah, my name was painted on its side like so much inspirational graffiti. It wanted me to come back.

While my Beloved waited on the shore in the Escalade, I explored this strange shuttle and hiked inside. Cluttered and sandy, the thing was cramped but all sound of the ocean fell away as soon as I sat down.

Suddenly, the wind came up and obscured my view of the shore but no sand came inside. Then it was calm and sunny as quick as it had been a sandstorm.

I climbed out and landed on the dune in a splash of sand. My Beloved was nowhere to be seen.

“OK, funny joke, Tyler, where are you?”

Never one to pass up the opportunity for a run, I jogged down the beach — he would catch up to me eventually — and ran out breath in a quarter-mile.

“OK, that’s weird,” I thought. “I ran 2 and half miles this morning without a problem.”

I meandered down the beach for another hour getting increasingly irked then increasingly worried about My Beloved. My cell phone was dead, so it was no help. Finally, a couple in a 1982 Ford pick-up truck pulled up beside me.

“Need a ride?” the woman asked.

“Um, I’m not sure. I somehow lost my husband on the beach,” I said.

The woman shook her head with a look of pity on her face. “Hop in. We’ll take you back to town.”

Tired of walking and figuring I’d have cell coverage further south on the beach, I squeezed in next to the couple and made small talk while the guy driving weaved his way around the waves. George Michael’s “Faith” and Tiffany’s “I Think We’re Alone Now” played on the radio, a quaint thing with turn dials and a tape deck.

I learned their names: Gabe and Mary from, of all places, St. Paul, Minn. They were getting away from winter, too, but they planned to head home the next day.

“Just taking one last ride on the beach before we leave,” May said wistfully.

My phone was still dead when we got into town,  and when they pulled up in front of the condo, I realized I didn’t have the keys to get in.

“Can I borrow your cell phone?” I asked Mary.

“You mean mobile phone? We don’t have one of those,” she said apologetically.  I sat in the cab of the truck wondering what to do.

“Sweetheart, here’s our phone number back at our hotel,” she said as she tucked a slip of paper into my hand. “I’m sure your husband will come back, but if you need anything, give us a call.”

I sat on the bench outside the condo for more than an hour. I was starving by now so I finally decided to walk to the grocery store for a cold pop and a barbecue sandwich.

On my way inside, I absent-mindedly pulled a newspaper out of the bin marked “Free — Take One.”

It wasn’t a headline that caught my eye, but the date: Jan. 11, 1988.

I couldn’t believe my eyes.

“Why do you have such old papers out there?” I demanded of the youthful cashier who was picking at her fingernails waiting for some action at her register.

“It’s a weekly,” she said. “The paper comes out once a week, on Fridays.”

“I’m not talking about the day!” I said, alarmed. “I’m talking about the year! What is today’s date?”

Her eyes opened wide, as if she was responding to someone whose brain was the froth-filled center of a Twinkie in the package behind her. “Um, it’s January 17.”

“No! What year?!”

“It’s 1988.” She didn’t say, “you idiot,” but I could see the words on her face. She shook her head, turned around and began scanning a TV dinner of Salisbury steak for a woman who just appeared at her register.

I stood dumbfounded during the entire transaction. When the woman finally carried out her groceries, I confronted the cashier again.

“I need a telephone. Where is a telephone?” I asked.

“There’s a booth a couple of blocks that way,” she said, pointing.

I turned and followed her direction. As I walked, a whirl of thoughts filled my brain. “Where was I in 1988? Twenty-five years ago, I was two years from graduating from college. I was dating the man who ultimately became my ex-husband. I was dreaming of being a writer.  I was 20 years from taking up running.”

Suddenly, I realized I knew every potential date to turn down, every supervisor to avoid, every investment folly, every moment of indecision and lack of confidence I had experienced in 25 years. I could start my life over. I could do things differently this time.

“No regrets,” I said out loud.

I smiled when I realized something else. “My brother is alive.”

I had 11 years to be a much better older sister to my brother than I had been before he died. He loved movies, I knew, and the first thing I was going to do was  stop at Blockbuster and rent a tape of “Back to the Future” to watch with him.

When I arrived at the phone booth, I half expected Superman to exit. Instead, I inserted a dime and called Mary and Gabe, whom I now considered my guardian angels. “Mary, any chance I can hitch a ride back to Minnesota with you and Gabe?”

Step right up, yessiree, and see the insurance swag

Trade shows are like a live interactive version of the Home Shopping Channel.

Some people end up wandering around among all the vendor booths, like sleepless zombies mindlessly eating bowls of brains in the middle of the night. Some people visit every single booth like they’re shopping the clearance racks at Macy’s, hoping to find The Deal That Changes Everything. Some are like hunters, tuning in at the appointed hour with the intention of satisfying a particular need.

I’ve attended hundreds of trade shows over the years and worked a few of them, most of them colorful scrapbooking related affairs.

Today, I got to see an insurance convention trade show.

Ooh, insurance. Settle down.

I’ve been married to an insurance salesman for four years but I had no idea how one hawks insurance products at a trade show.

Turns out, it’s with a lot of brochures.

But what was really impressive was the swag (when you don’t have fancy new cars or cooking demos or home decorating ideas, swag is where it’s at). In the drive to collect the most business cards, every other booth was giving away some sort of flashy electronic gear: iPad, tablet, DVD player, Kindle. Being October, mini Halloween candy was plentiful. And every booth had some sort of useful or strange takeaway: Reuseable grocery bag (imprinted of course), pens (my favorite was the hairy pen), sticky notes, playing cards, balsa wood toy airplanes, fly swatters, light-up bouncing balls, antibacterial soap, lint brushes, mints and my favorite: Specialty chocolate packaged just for the vendor (“like dark chocolate?” “Sure!”). The margarita mixing machine was the most clever, though. At 10:30 a.m.

My husband is the hunter type of trade show attendee: He had a specific intention and he worked those booths like a man on a mission. I was just the eye candy. Eyeing the candy.

What a perfect haystack means

Symbols remind us of what’s important. A wedding ring symbolizes a commitment. A lushly green, well-watered lawn symbolizes suburban perfection. A signed baseball symbolizes a brush with fame.

For my uncle, a perfect haystack symbolizes a summer’s work.

A meaningful stack of North Dakota hay, circa 1965.

I recently found a black-and-white picture of the haystack in my uncle’s collection of personal photos.

“You’ve had this photo for 40-some years,” I said. “There must be a reason you kept it so long.”

“That hay stack represented a finished job,” Uncle Lee said. “I don’t get many ‘finished jobs’ in my line of work now.”

Nowadays, making hay is highly mechanized. Round bales, created by a machine, dot the rural landscape around the little town where I live on the outskirts of Chicago.

But a century ago, hay was cut with scythes and moved with pitchforks, and haystacks shaped like little houses were fixtures of the Midwestern landscape. Square balers mechanized the process in the 1940s. As the farming industry moved to a more corporate operation in recent years, large round bales have become more common.

The biggest advantage of small square bales like those handled by my uncle is that they can be moved by one person without a lot of machinery.

Square hay bales must be stacked in such a way as to shed moisture and prevent rotting. My uncle estimates his haystack probably had 2,000 square bales in it.

“I probably handled those bales six times each,” he said. “That’s why I was in such great shape! The knees wore out of my blue jeans from hiking up those bales. I could throw them like you couldn’t believe.”

As the saying goes, you make hay while the sun shines. One has to cut it, rake it and bale it first. “Dad [my grandfather] had a brand new baler at the time,” Uncle Lee remembers. “Then I’d go out and put ’em in six packs — that’s the first time I handled ’em. Then I’d pick ’em up and throw ’em on the hay wagon (that’s two), then stack ’em again on the wagon (three), bring ’em home, throw ’em down (there’s four, right?), then stack them like you see here in the picture.”

The stack in that picture symbolized a whole summer of work.

“Wait, that’s five times, I think,” I said.

“Then in the winter time, you have to feed the cattle – I had to throw the bales on the ground for the cows.”

Six.

“I like everything about cattle,” said Uncle Lee, who grew up and made hay in the western plains of North Dakota. “I enjoyed that part of farming. I didn’t like seeding or combining, but one of my favorite times of year was when we moved the cattle to summer pasture. All winter, they were cooped up in the barnyards, but in spring we moved them to the open fields. They were like little kids! They’d kick up their heels and hit their heads together, they were so happy.

“I still like cattle.”

Early on, Uncle Lee left farming because there was no money in it and embarked on a career in education. He started out as a social studies teacher. Now, he’s a school administrator – the top of the stack, so to speak – in a small, rural school district in Wisconsin.

Lee in 1965.

“That’s probably why I prefer rural districts,” Uncle Lee said. “North Dakota built my foundation. It was a hard place to make a living: It’s got a short growing season. It’s colder than hell. Sometimes it doesn’t rain. It can be a very lonely, lonely place.”

But he learned what hard work can accomplish.

And the picture of his haystack symbolizes it.