It was twenty years ago today that I most likely noticed that it’d been five years since I’d decided to move to the Twin Cities.

Did I remember that booze-fueled night in September of 1985?  My drunken promise to a table of college friends at a homecoming party that I was leaving North Dakota in two weeks?  The madcap seventeen days that followed?

To tell you the truth, I don’t remember. I had other things on my mind at the time.  I was still working – still  – at the sleazy DJ service.  Still spinning records in crappy bars six nights a week.  Still looking for work in talk radio.  Or news.  Or sports.  Or as a DJ, for that matter.  And getting absolutely nowhere.  To the point that the search had more or less tailed off to nothing.

Oh, yeah – and I was getting married in about two weeks.

———-

I started writing this series five years ago.

I took a drive the other day through South Minneapolis – past the house I used to share with the five women, around Lake Harriett where I used to run every evening, past my first apartment down on 37th and Minnehaha.  It’s kind of amazing how changes sneak up on you; the row of dumpy little stores, the Snyder Drug and the greasy old gas station on 46th and Nicollet have been replaced by a gleaming new strip mall.  The old firehouse is now a Bruegger’s.  The dumpy little grocery store is now some sort of “art space”.   The neighborhood bar on 44th and Nicollet is…something else.

The striking part, to me, is how very, very much longer those five years seemed to take, the first time around.