Turkey Hunting in Downtown Minneapolis
Or: Frontyard Virtue Signalling
I wrote too many good stories in my head as I drove back and forth across the country in August. Many of them are in notes and I’m going to get to posting them directly. So much happened that I was paralyzed by which story to tell and how. I’m working that out, but I do want to tell you about the turkey.
Kally and I cut short our lazy morning to go to a junk shop. I don’t know if I’d call it a compulsion, but the prospect of looking at what people sell and what they believe it is worth is one of the most interesting things in the world to me. There were scads in Minneapolis, and we wanted to make the rounds more than we wanted a third cup of coffee.
I’d meant to rent a transit van for the cross-country drive but accidentally reserved a kidnapping van, which made Kelly self-conscious if we spent too much time driving around a neighborhood, looking for an address. Beyond being off-putting, the van didn’t handle very well, so that at speeds over 50 it looked like I was a child pretending to drive, spinning the wheel left and right.
After easing the van out onto the street, I kept easing on down the road, admiring home after home replete (I don’t want to say festooned, but I’m tempted) with flower gardens, almost careless piles of color.
Kelly suggested Mineapolitans overcompensated for long, bleak winters by splashing out in the spring, but I didn’t buy it. There were too many spectacular front yards. The gardening had a passive-aggression vibe that I only just put my finger on.
We were in an uncomfortably liberal section of Minneapolis (I love this description in service of a different point). I know many of us, left and right, consider ourselves near the political center, wearied and a little afraid of the fringes.
To avoid self-deception remember that if you lean conservative, you’re more conservative than you think; same if you lean liberal.
I like to think I’m pretty far to the left, but I’m very suspicious of virtue signaling. Like, I’m an “out” socialist but a closeted communist (or something like that).
The neighborhood seemed to be in a silent argument about who was the most open, accepting, and progressive.
I have a huge pollinator garden, ‘cause I’m environmentally conscious.
I have a huge pollinator garden, ‘cause I’m environmentally conscious AND a BLM sign, cause I support equality.
I have a huge pollinator garden, ‘cause I’m environmentally conscious AND a BLM sign, cause I support equality, AND a Love is Love sign because obviously.
I have a huge pollinator garden, ‘cause I’m environmentally conscious AND a BLM sign, cause I support equality, AND a Love is Love sign because obviously, AND a tiny library.
You get it.
Maybe it’s my own bias and insecurity at being out-liberaled at every turn. Or evidence of how skewed living in Delmar has made my worldview. like, I see liberal neighborhoods through conservative neighborhood eyes. The point is, it was a pretty crunchy section of town.
I was still pretty surprised when the turkey ran out in front of the van. This was a wild turkey well on its way to being a full and fat Thanksgiving turkey with the tail and the waddle and everything, darting out of an exposition of color. It all looked pretend.
Kelly snapped a photo through the dinged, filthy windshield and another from behind him as he darted into nearby greenery.
“Thanks for not hitting him!” A woman appeared in the yard. I’ll never get why she thanked us for not hitting him. Had there been threats? A bounty?
She went on to explain that it was her boyfriend’s turkey (“He just started feeding it”) and that it had become something of a neighborhood menace. The mailman had to carry a shock stick to defend himself.
I loved everything about the story.
It also made me feel a little better, the notion of a semi-wild turkey terrorizing a neighborhood of people who would have real moral dilemmas over their gut reaction to a turkey attack.
Keep the Faith,
Tony
Postscript
So I finished the Delmar story, I started writing before I left. I’d like for you to read it (link below) but I have to admit I caught myself tweaking it to death.
Here’s the thing about futzing with a story for me. Any regular reader knows that I never let the perfect be the enemy of the good (or even good enough). For me, when I’m tinkering a story to death it’s like I’m stumbling around looking for the key that will close the circuit. All the points are there. The beginning, middle, and end are where I want them to be, and they’re perfectly fine.
I started it too long ago, I think, and although I know it doesn’t matter to you that this story is more than a month old, it’s still a little irksome. I intentionally put the date in the text. I could take it out and you would never know, because it isn’t relevant to the story, only to how up my own ass I can get.
The story was in the final edit. I wrote the first bit in a fever and it was fine, but bloated and sloppy. I cleaned it up and then got crazy busy and forgot to schedule it. Then I got another look at it and started tweaking.
The problem was I was trying to tie too many points together that needed a lot of exposition. At one point, the 1,800-word story was knocking on 6,000 words. In the end, I cut everything that wasn’t a Delmar story. I gotta tell you, though, that I wanted to make it more about manners. The problem was it just got so stilted.
Anyway, it’s a Delmar story:
Another Invitation
I’ve mentioned before that those of you who get this in an email are already kind of registered for Substack. There’s a whole social component (called “Notes”) that I want to invite you to take a look at. It’s still not toxic and algorithm-dominated, so it’s fun and there’s so much good writing (both fiction and non).
Anyway, here are a couple of my notes for the week.
Other writing
If you can’t sleep without knowing wht I think about goings on in the death-care industry, my weekly editorial is always free, as are the stories I aggregate here.
Finally, I do a short video every week about the funeral industry. It’s podcasted here or you can watch on YouTube.