Tag Archives: Minnesota

The Birds Have Flown the Coop

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With apologies to Adrian Peterson, Walter Mondale, and Prince, I’m really starting to hate Minnesota. Saturday it swallowed up Second Born. Now instead of aggravating us one minute and entertaining us the next, both our daughters are college students inside Minnesota’s borders. Now, the house seems too large for My Bethrothed, the Labradude, and my sad sack self.

I laid in bed too long on college move-in day, so after a 1 mile warm up, I decided to run a timed 5k on the school track. For those keeping score at home, Dave and Travis, after a 1 mile warmup I posted a 21:51, 7:10, 7:00, 6:51, :50. I had to hurry because the fam was loading up the college’s Zip Car with Target largess. Bright and early we drove to the dorm to meet the roommate, move-in, and start independent semi-adult life.

The roommate was nowhere to be found, the room was small even by college dorm standards, and it was hella hot and humid. When no one was looking, I slipped out, choosing instead to hang out in some shade in front of the dorm. It was a great perch from which to reflect on life changes while watching Second Born’s dormmates and their parents enter and exit with hands full.

I loved Knee High Black Socks neighbor’s look. Sun dress, knee high black socks, thickish glasses. A wonderful mix of independence and eccentricity. And then there was The Athlete, 6’2″, slender, perfect posture. She walked out, grabbed a road bike leaning against a Subaru, and took off. She returned five minutes later, tossed it back against the car and said to her family, “Okay, now I feel better.” The swim-bike-run sticker on the car made her my front runner for fav dormmate. Another had cross-country skis in her room, which puts her in the running too.

I was parent watching too. Amazing how all of the moms and dads looked so much older than me. The veggie burger and M&M cookies at lunch were great, the dean of student’s talk (“you can find it on the website”), not so much.

Who knew moving in was a marathon? I returned to my front porch perch and met Amy, one of Second Born’s Resident Assistants. Amy is a junior from Sioux Falls, South Dakota, but she spent the summer as a counselor at a fine arts camp in Michigan (not the most prestigious one). She’s a music education major who plays the clarinet. Bright, personable, genuinely interested in Second Born and myself, a pure delight.

Eventually, I headed for the Den, the student lounge where I watched Premier League soccer with several loud 18 year olds. Always a trailblazer, once I broke The Den age barrier other sports-starved dads followed course. We outlasted the youth, as the defacto leader I commandeered the remote, and then switched to the US Open and college football.

Finally, the roommate arrived from forty minutes away. Nice family, positive first impression, a sigh of relief from SB.

A college official made us say goodbye at 4:45pm CST. Tears were shed.

Tight-Knit Extended Families Require Vision

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There are only three types of families: 1) physically distant ones; 2) physically close, but emotionally distant ones; and 3) physically and emotionally close ones.

I realized this while sitting next to a man my age from Egan, Minnesota at a college swim meet recently. He was watching his son—along with his wife, brother, daughter, parents, and in-laws—a good freestyler at the University of Wisconsin LaCrosse. We talked swimming, college decision making, and Gopher football. The state cross-country meet was taking place on campus at the same time, so the GalPal and I had to take a shuttle bus to the pool from an overflow parking lot on the periphery of campus. The bus was filled with three generations of family cheerleaders too.

Physically distant families have to drive or fly for several hours to see one another. According to one writer I’ve recently read, in the U.S. at least, this family type predominates in urban centers on both the East and West coasts. My family is this type—mother and in-laws in two different states, aunt and uncle in a third, siblings in a fourth and fifth, cousins and nephews in a couple of others. Physically distant families may enjoy one another’s company, but they don’t see one another with enough regularity to truly know one another which compromises closeness.

Physically close, but emotionally distant families live within a few minutes or hours of each other, but they don’t get together with any regularity due to unresolved conflicts and/or prioritizing work and material pursuits. Despite their proximity, everyone mostly prioritizes their own nuclear families in the same manner as physically distant ones.

Physically and emotionally close families not only live within a few minutes or hours of each other, but they prioritize getting together weekly or monthly. Minnesota may have a disproportionate number of tight-knit extended families.

Modern Family, the outstanding sitcom about a physically and emotionally close family is atypical because most families today are spread out over long distances. Which probably explains the show’s appeal. Viewers enjoy inserting themselves into that physically and emotionally close family not just because the writers make them funnier than our own family members, but because they’re an affectionate and loving community of mutual amusement and support.

My dad, like most post WWII execs, always took the promotions he received even when they required him to criss-cross the country. I wouldn’t have traded for anyone’s dad, but by choosing successively better jobs that paid more money, he sacrificed a physically and therefore emotionally close family because my siblings and I followed suit, deciding where to live based upon work opportunities, personal preferences, and other things besides physically proximity to one another.

Another variable in some physically distant families is eighteen year olds going away to college. Second Born, next in line in our fam, wants to go “out of state”. When asked why recently, she initially Rick Perryed (couldn’t answer), and then finally said, “The weather.” What are the odds of me having the first teen in the history of the world to base a life decision on weather patterns? Our family, like every other one, is a subculture. She’s simply following the lead of her parents, her cousins, and her older sissy. What would be surprising is if she wanted to stay close to home.

I plan on being more intentional than my dad about prioritizing family closeness. I can’t control where my daughters go to college, take jobs, or end up living, and I can’t control the fact that twenty percent of Americans move every year, but I’m hoping that living in one community for a record-length of time increases the odds of them settling down somewhere close. This is the only home they know. We are Pacific Northwesterners.

If all goes well, ten or twenty years from now, I’ll be just one of an extended family of crazies cheering wildly for a grandchild at a pool or piano recital somewhere nearby.