Choreography & Reflection

If you're paying attention, you'll see amazing things all around you, even in rush hour traffic. Not major miracles necessarily, but small moments of beauty and wonder that are enough to lift your spirits for the rest of the day and maybe into another day.
Headed home from work on a Friday afternoon, I noticed two empty carhaulers next to each other in the lanes in front of me. One of the car dealers along Odana Road had just received a dozen or more new 2005 models and the trucks were on their way back to the factory.
As we cleared the green lights at the intersection and drove under the beltline overpass, I saw the two trucks wheel left into the on-ramp in precise formation, as if they had been practicing all afternoon. The one on the inner left then slowed to let his companion pull in front of him and they were homeward bound down the freeway.
Normally a small moment of beauty like this is a personal epiphany, and if we choose to later share it with friends or family much of the magic is gone. But I got to share this moment with my brother Jim because we have been car pooling for the last nine months, ever since I joined him in working at the Madison office of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. He's been working there for most of the past three decades.
We work at opposite ends of the building and don't see a lot of each other on the job, but by sharing time on the way in and out we've gotten caught up on a lot of conversation time we wouldn't otherwise have.
Our conversation lingered for a moment on this pas de deux and then we returned to what had started to develop as a rich lode of reflection on this trip, some shared childhood memories.
Triggered by a passing comment earlier in the day from someone else, we had started by discussing the Bread and Breakfast Inns of Prairie du Chien, a concept that had not yet been popularized there or anywhere else we knew of when we were growing up. We were more familiar with railroad hotels, having grown up a block from the tracks and the CB&Q depot, although by the time we came along rail passenger traffic was on the decline and so were they.
The truly exotic place to stay, back in those days, was the Hotel San. The Hotel San was like no other building around. Partially constructed out of, I don't know, concrete perhaps, with one yellowish tan sloping wall of a sandpaper texture, I see it in my mind as almost like a sandpile or a sand dune alongside Blackhawk Avenue.
It was probably much more of a conventional building than I remember. I have no idea what it looked like inside. I never went inside, or had a reason to. I occasionally stopped in the shelter of a corner doorway while dodging raindrops on the way to school. Between the hotel and the railroad tracks was a small diner where somehow I discovered ice cream cones were for sale for only a nickel. I did stop in there several times.
The Hotel San burned down, we decided, around 1965 or 1966. Jim had a work-study accounting job at the farm implement dealer across the street, during his senior year in high school, when it happened. The farm implement business too is long gone, both properties are now occupied by banks. We had a fire that routed us out of our own home at around the same time.
I remember hearing a rumor that Police Chief Doc Lyons had rescued a suitcase full of money from the burning hotel for one of its customers and been handsomely rewarded. The Prairie du Chien police force at that time somewhat resembled the Mayberry Police Department, but we didn't pursue that line of reflection. Perhaps another time.
Instead we discussed other accommodations available to visitors of Prairie du Chien, particularly Polodna's cabins, situated on South Marquette Road where the McDonalds drive-in now dispenses Big Macs and Chicken McNuggets. It seems like they were called the Whispering Pines Cabins or something like that. We wondered how much a week in those cabins cost back almost 50 years ago.
We got to stay there, off and on, during the summer of 1959 while mom and dad were fixing up the house we'd bought on North Marquette Road. There were several short stays at the cabins, a couple brothers at a time. The rest of the brothers stayed back on the farm, under the watch of aunts and uncles. Next door to the cabins was an ice house, with a coin operated ice dispenser dealing out coolness in large blocks and smaller cubes in plastic bags. Having little to do and no friends yet, we spent a fair amount of time just hanging out on the steps of the ice house, watching the world go by and occasionally stopping to buy some ice.
It seems like it took several months to make the house livable for our family, although we did a lot more work on it after we moved in. Dad eventually spent years digging out a basement under the house, shovel by shovel, first making room for a wood-burning furnace.
Many years later we had a bait shop in the basement. From time to time fishermen would stop in on their way to some Mississippi River fishing spot and knock on the back door. We'd go down and retrieve a couple dozen red wrigglers and put 'em in a old soup can for them. Red Wrigglers were not as big and juicy as night crawlers, which we also occasionally sold, but they were supposed to be lively enough to attract a lot of fish.
A block away from Polodna's cabins the Memorial Hospital had just been built. The area was criss-crossed with streets. But most of the blocks were empty. Doc Lyons actually had one of the first homes built in that area. With those empty fields still clear in the mind, it seems strange to drive those streets now and see homes on every lot surrounded by mature trees.
But there are much stranger things in this world. Cities that add new homes for expanding populations and trees that grow to spread their canopies across those homes are actually among the more normal things in life because growth is normal. It just seems strange because our memories can take us back to a time when it looked different. The longer we live the more of those memories we have.
But we should expect growth. And we should appreciate and enjoy our nostalgic memories. We may not learn as much from the pleasant memories as we do from the heartaches that are also standard experience in life but they are uniquely and individually ours. And those that we can share with family and friends are even more precious. Here's to car pooling and conversation.
GG