Minneapolis, winter, 1982

I'd been walking after a late winter snow storm so heavy it kept even most native Minnesotans indoors. It was my second year there and though I was from a place where it snowed it was nothing like this and the adventure of it still appealed to me. So did the ways Minnesotans coped. In my Mid-Atlantic state snow was plowed to the sides of the road. Here, there was so much of it they'd load it into dump trucks and dump it in the Mississippi River. High-end hotels and some businesses in downtown Minneapolis had heated sidewalks that melted the snow as it fell. Within a day after a heavy snowfall you could go downtown and see no evidence of it.

A Depression-era man.

On this afternoon I walked to a part of the city I'd never been to before. It wasn't near a lake or anything interesting. A working class area, about as bad as the city got then, which wasn't very bad. There were muggings in Minneapolis, but not many compared to New York or Philadelphia. 

My way of dressing was still the rebellious way I'd adopted in college. I'd wear three or four sweaters and a sport coat over them rather than a winter coat. Layering was not a concept as widely understood then as it is now and the typical Minnesotan wore a thick down jacket. 

I'd been out walking for a few hours and I was headed back to my apartment building. It was a weekday and I was unemployed at the time. When I was less than a mile from my building, two men were walking toward me. It had just gotten dark. One of them looked a me for a moment, then spoke. 

"If you hurry," he said, "I think there's some spaghetti left."  There was a church down the block.

Most would have taken this sincere bit of advice as a cue to step up their fashion game. Not me. I stayed dense about such things until I wasn't anymore but by then time had ravaged my body enough that no one cared how I dressed. I would love to go back in time and learn a little more about how to dress. Nothing fancy, but something.