A good man was laid to rest yesterday. You didn't know him and you never heard of him, which is normal for good men -- the ones who work hard, make things, raise families, take to the cabin on weekends to enjoy the water and the sky. He boated; he flew a plane. He played piano in a swing band. He was driving home from his cabin on a Sunday afternoon when he collided with a motorhome and died. He was Bruce Monson, and he was my cousin.
He was a Minnesotan, I suppose -- loved the Twins, loved the Vikes, had a cabin on Ottertail. Ice fished. But if you want to be technical, he was a North Dakotan. There are lots of us here, expatriates who came to the Cities because this was Oz. You stay here long enough and it's home, and you call yourself a Minnesotan, if anyone asks. When you're away from Minnesota you know it's home. When you're here, though, North Dakota is always whispering in your ear: C'mon, who are you kidding?
You may be nodding right now, thinking of Iowa, or Kansas, or New Jersey, or wherever it was you went to grade school, had your first kiss, waved to your parents when you backed out of the drive and headed off to college, radio cranked the moment the folks disappeared in the rearview mirror. You may be thinking now: This is where I ended up, but that's where I began. On funeral days you think about the distinctions, and why they matter. They're not small questions: When I learned he'd been killed, I wondered where he'd be buried. His father and his nephew both died in the past two years, and both are buried in a tiny plot behind a small church on the plains in North Dakota. Even though he'd been here for decades, sometimes you still ask: In the end, where's home?
That plain white church was the last place I saw him. His father's funeral, a few months ago. He played the piano for the service. Afterwards we talked -- hadn't talked in a while -- and I told him I had Grandma's camera, and I heard he'd wanted it. Bruce beamed: so it wasn't lost! He loved gadgets, and this was a potent one: From the '20s through the Depression, Grandma had taken pictures of life on the farm where he grew up, and though the pictures were tiny and faded, they were doors into the world of his parents and mine. Grandma in her 20s on a tractor, Grandpa in a suit standing in the fields, our parents as bundled tots in the snow with the farm dog. Our parents as teens -- his dad with the gosh-it's-a-grand-world grin, my mother reserved, my father on horseback with a shotgun and a cowboy deadpan. I had the camera, and just holding it in your hands made you feel as if you could keep it all from tumbling out of reach forever.
I said I'd give him the camera, and of course we expected there would be a day down the road where it would happen. Who would assume anything else?
The day he died I got out old photos taken by our parents, all from Sunday trips to the farm. He was four years older and taller, the big kid with the sly smile. His brother stayed on the land and farms it still; Bruce went to college, got a master's in agronomy, ended up in the Cities in biotechnology. Both brothers worked the land from different angles.
The only reason one's a North Dakotan and the other a Minnesotan is because of a line drawn down the middle of the river. Really, we're all the same tribe. Minneapolis, St. Paul, Metro, Outstate, NoDak, Wisconsin -- imaginary boxes. He ain't heavy, he's my Cheesehead.
But. There's something you feel when you leave the state, cross the line, something you feel when you head over the border and it's Minnesota again, just as there's something that clicks when you go to the place where you grew up. Being an American means you have a slew of subset identities; being a Midwesterner, even more. You look around the pews in a Prior Lake church, and sometimes think everyone's from somewhere else. But here we are, together, remembering a good man. In the end on a fine spring morning that always binds us together, and in the end, it's enough.
