The Trouble with Genji

The Tale of Genji, a very long and episodic prose work written in Japanese in the eleventh century, is sometimes referred to as the first modern novel. It’s held in such high esteem in Japan that Yasunari Kawabata, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1968, remarked in his acceptance speech: "The Tale of Genji in particular is the highest pinnacle of Japanese literature. Even down to our day there has not been a piece of fiction to compare with it."

I have long been intrigued by the work, and have been staring at the two purple hard-cover volumes of the Seidensticker translation for twenty years at least. Now, at last, having plowed through most of volume one--four hundred pages--in the course of the last few weeks, I must say that I would rather read a novel by Kawabata himself any day. A Thousand Cranes, The Master of Go, The Sound of the Mountain. These are all relatively short works, but they’re rife with nuances of description, plot, and character that are nowhere to be found in The Tale of Genji.

The novel’s namesake is the natural son of the emperor. He’s a fine piece of work, handsome and gallant, and evidently better at painting, exchanging verses, and playing the various kotos then popular—seven-string, thirteen-string Chinese, seven-string Korean—than any of his contemporaries. His father would like nothing better than to name him successor to the throne, but because Genji’s mother was one of the emperor’s lesser consorts, he recognizes that Genji would have a difficult time of it—he wouldn’t have “strong backing.” So Genji, the shining light of the upper-crust, must go through life as a “commoner.”

During the first few chapters of the book, Genji spends a good deal of his time slipping into the bedrooms of various high ladies, often incognito. At the time, life for even the loftiest aristocrats was little better than camping out; if you were visiting a neighbor and the time got late, everyone merely chose a corner of this or that pavilion to sleep, especially when the weather got hot; opportunities for dalliance were rife.

Genji, adept at window-peeping, seems often to become enthralled by the thickness of an unknown woman’s hair or her skill at the koto. Many two-line poems are surreptitiously exchanged, often tied to the twigs of bushes that carry symbolic overtones. The novel's author, Lady Murasaki, describes in detail the various types of hand-made paper chosen for these exchanges. If the paper, hand-writing, and sentiment expressed are all especially fine, the next step might be a personal conversation conducted through a screen. Making it to the other side of the screen was tantamount to consummating the relationship.

These enterprises present Genji with both tactical and emotional challenges, but were apparently so widespread and conventional at the time that ethical concerns seldom arise. The disinterested reader might come to the conclusion that Genji was not always the best at choosing his playmates. One of his love interests, a poor and lonely (but high-born) woman named Yugao, dies in his arms during a tryst at a temple. She was seventeen. He also forms a brief liaison with one of his father’s consorts, Fijitsubo, who happens to be the spitting image of his mother. Though news of the affair never leaks out, Fijitsibo has a child who is both Genji’s brother and son. (The child later becomes emperor. Fijitsibo becomes a nun.)

Perhaps Genji’s greatest love is with Akashi-no-kimi, a lowly woman (though her father is a provincial magistrate) whom he meets during a time of exile from court on the windswept mountain coast. (Genji was exiled—you guessed it—after being caught red-handed in the bed of one of his brother's (i.e. the new emperor's) concubines.) Akashi has a daughter, and Genji, who is truly fond of the woman, wants the child to be properly brought up. Once he's been invited back to court, he summons mother and daughter to his mansion in the city. The catch is this: his daughter by Akashi will now be put under the charge of his second official wife, Murasaki (Fijitsubo's niece.) In case you’re wondering, Genji had veritably kidnapped Murasaki when she was ten, because she had long, thick, glistening hair, had already proved herself to be a gifted koto player, and reminded him of … but I think you get the point.

All of these comings and goings are told with a good deal of formality—though the nature-writing is good—and I had a hard time keeping track of who was who. After a few hundred pages I began to long for some real action—a battle, a little sword-play, a deed of stirring nobility.

The Tale of Genji is often praised for its psychological insights, and I guess it compares favorably with other literary works of the same era, for example, The Cid:

The message arrives from Count Ramon;
When my Cid heard it, he sent back an answer:
"Tell the count not to take it amiss.
I have nothing of his. Tell him to leave me alone.”
The count answered, "That is not true!
Now he shall pay me all, from now and from before.
He shall learn, this outcast, whom he has dishonored.”

All the same, this masterpiece of Japanese literature doesn’t really have much of an edge. I'm not sure it even qualifies as a "novel." Rather, it falls in the same category as Remembrance of Things Past and A Man Without Qualities, of perhaps absorbing, but largely shapeless, thinly-veiled memoirs.

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia

The French film-maker Jean Renoir once remarked (I can’t locate the precise quote) that American film-making tends to focus its attention on a speeding train, oblivious to the fact that a very interesting young woman is looking dreamily out the window back in second class.

That was a long time ago…but I suspect contemporary Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan might agree. “The problem with Hollywood," he remarked in an article in the Guardian recently, "is the audience expects to get the answers like a pill. They expect to know not just whodunnit, but the motives of the characters, the how and why. Real life is not like that. Even our closest friend – we don't know what he really thinks.”

It would be difficult, I suspect, to make a good film about what we don’t know about people, but in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, Ceylan has done the next best thing. He has made a film in which we get to know people almost in spite of themselves.

The big answer is already right in front of us. The suspect has confessed to the crime. The smallish issue—Where did he bury the body?—serves as the focus of what little action there is, as twelve men, including the murderer and his brother, a doctor, the prosecutor, both urban and provincial policemen, and a couple of laborers with shovels, traverse the barren hills of rural Turkey in the middle of the night trying to locate it based on a few hazily-remembered landmarks.

Astute viewers will perhaps guess a few things in the course of the film about how and why the crime was committed, but after listening to two-and-a-half hours of idle chit-chat, we’ve also become well-acquainted with the men engaged in investigating it. Though parts of the film have a ludicrous humor reminiscent of Almadóvar or the Coens, its overall tone might better be described as Chekhovian.

The world these often heavily-mustached men live in isn’t a pretty one. (One can't help speculating it's because the women are too often kept out of sight.) They put one another down in traditional manly fashion, and they all seem to have domestic problems of one kind or another. A fragmentary conversation between the prosecutor and the doctor about a woman who died mysteriously, shortly after delivering a baby, takes on added significance as the movie progresses. And the appearance of a beautiful young woman—the daughter of the local mayor—in the middle of the night to serve tea also acts as a turning-point.

Those who come to the theater expecting a thriller or a shoot-em-up will be disappointed, but anyone with an interest in human nature—or art—is more likely to be quietly enthralled. On the way back to the car after the screening, scenes from early in the film will resurface unbidden and take on new shades of meaning.

California Coast: II

Not wanting to get sucked too deeply into the big-city hubbub, we’d booked a room in Marina del Rey, where Western grebes drift among the tethered yachts. But the next morning, after a stroll down Santa Monica Beach, we headed back into town up Wilshire Boulevard to meet an old friend at the La Brea Tar Pits.

And what more perfect place could there be to meet? The smell of asphalt filled the air, though it was less pronounced inside the archeological museum, where gigantic skeletons of mammoths and sloths, reconstructed using bones extracted painstakingly from the tar, loomed at every turn alongside stuffed mechanical saber-tooth tigers feasting on hapless bears. While touring the museum I occasionally got the impression I’d stumbled into an installation by Joseph Beuys—especially when standing in front of a backlit display of several hundred nearly identical wolf skulls.

Our next stop was the Japanese Pavilion of the Los Angeles County Museum next door. Some very lovely pottery and scrolls depicting misty waterfalls and flowering plum branches. From there it was on to the museum’s modern art wing. It occurred to me at one point that LACMA might have the largest collection of dreadful Picassos in the world. Then again, the Braque hanging on the wall opposite was the finest painting I saw in any museum during our trip.

We soon made a strategic retreat to the museum café and continued our chat with Betty, who lives in Pasadena but seldom ventures into town—well, Pasadena is quite a town in its own right. We talked about jobs, California real estate prices, retirement, her relatives in Kentucky, budget cuts to various space programs at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (where Betty works), mutual friends back in Minnesota, and the high price of gasoline. The lowest she could find on her way downtown was $4.35 a gallon; perhaps I made her feel better when I told her I’d paid $4.89 in Beverly Hills.

It was 4 pm by the time we said our goodbyes and headed west up the coast through Malibu and on into open country. A quick overnight stop at the Clocktower Motel in Ventura (which continues its slow slide downhill, year by year) and we arrived at the harbor in Santa Barbara under blue skies at 8:30 the next morning.

What’s the hurry? Well, the whale-watching boat from Condor Cruises left at nine. We never would have found the place amid all the boats if I hadn’t asked a passing stranger.

“Condor Cruises? They’re the best. But they’re over on the other wharf.”

“We usually use Island Packers down in Ventura, but they’re not going out today.”

“Well, drive into this parking lot—you’ll have to pay, of course—and continue on through the second gate. It will open automatically. Park at the far end. You’ll see them half way out on the pier.”

We followed the man’s instructions and eventually spotted a large boat with Condor Cruises painted across the back. The office itself was unmarked. It was ten to nine when we arrived.

“The nine o’clock has been cancelled,” the young woman behind the counter told us. “But we might be going out at noon. Give us a call in an hour.”

So we wandered out across the sand and sat on a bench, looking across the harbor at yet another pier. Snowy egrets were feeding on the beach in front of us and a cluster of orange kayaks appeared in the distance out of nowhere—it was obviously a class of some sort. I suspect Hilary would have been very happy to join them, and we were both disappointed when we called Condor Cruises and found the noon whale-watching launch had also been nixed. (I was on the verge of suggesting that they might get more business if they put up a sign.) Then again, we had just saved a hundred dollars, and we decided it might be a good idea to book a room somewhere near the beach.

But first, a visit to the bird refuge we’d seen on the way into town. We parked along the highway and walked inland alongside the lagoon. A homeless couple came by and the man said, “Did you see the giraffes?”

Not sure whether the man's rungs went all the way to the top, I said, “Yeah, I saw them yesterday.”

“Why do they only come out on certain days?” his companion mused cheerfully.

Trying to humor them as we walked by, I replied, “Tuesday is definitely their big day.”

A few minutes later, as we looked out across the pond, we noticed that there were two giraffes standing in the brush by a chain-link fence just beyond the refuge. The Santa Barbara Zoo!

We spotted a pair of acorn woodpeckers in a tree alongside the path, and there were scads of ruddy ducks in winter plumage out on the water. Black-crowned night herons lurked in the grasses at water’s edge, and we could see cars streaming past on Highway 101 off in the distance. But more beautiful than anything, perhaps, was Santa Barbara itself, with its red-roofed buildings set off against the backdrop of bristly green mountains rising gracefully from the sea.

A Week on the Coast: I

Having just returned from a week on the California coast, I find myself in a state of ecstatic paralysis. Or perhaps it would be better to describe it as paralytic ecstasy. I have been looking at so many beautiful things that I have lost the capacity to engage in any kind of activity that involves the future or the past. This rules out just about everything. Oh, I can make a gingered shrimp dish, pour myself a glass of wine, or go for an afternoon ski around the circumference of Cedar Lake. I can Photoshop pictures of beaches, fishing boats, surfers, blueblossom bushes, or Spanish missions.

But that’s about it.

While I’m stuck on this vaguely pleasant but also slightly bewildering merry-go-round, I might as well revisit some of the highlights of that 560-mile road trip from San Diego to the San Francisco airport, which took us nine days (though MapQuest tells me it can be done in about ten hours.)

San Diego
Bilbao Park, a congeries of gardens, pools, and small museums housed in Spanish Plateresque buildings left over from the Panamanian Exposition of 1915, is a tourist delight. We picked up a half-price coupon at a Macy’s downtown, saved a further $84 by skipping the nearby zoo entirely, and spent the day looking at paintings by Van Dyck, Breughel and Claude Lorrain, studying mummies and Mayan inscriptions, wandering the lush confines of the Botanical Building, and visiting the International Folk Art museum, one of our favorites, where, among other things, an exhibit of Scandinavian design was on display. (I guess you can’t get away from it.)

During the day and a half we were in San Diego, we also made our way to La Jolla beach, the tide-pools at Point Lomo, and across the big bridge to Imperial Beach in Coronado. In the evening we wandered the gaslight district for an hour before settling on a Happy Hour at an outdoor table of an Irish pub.

Los Angeles
The Disney center was sleek and gorgeous on a gray Sunday morning, but I was more impressed by the colorful and aromatic Central Market a few blocks down the street. Three bundles of asparagus for a dollar? You’re kidding me. We ate some shrimp ceviche, bought smoked almonds and salted pepitos, and took the Angel's Flight trolley back up the hill to our car.

After cruising Sunset Boulevard for a few miles we thought we’d head over to Hollywood Boulevard, and turned uphill on Doheny Drive, which we followed as it narrowed and twisted and turned past quite a few walled estates, leading us eventually to a three-way cul-de-sac. We had better luck on Laurel Canyon Boulevard, but found that Hollywood Boulevard was barricaded a few blocks on, due to it being Oscar night, I guess. Security personnel mingled on the street with men in tuxedoes. We were getting to know Los Angeles.

Later that afternoon we hopped on the freeway and headed up to the Getty Museum, which sits on the crest of a hill northwest of Beverly Hills like a huge hospital complex. A wonderful place to wander, regardless of the art hanging in the four of five white travertine gallery buildings. It reminded me vaguely of the Institute Maeght in St. Paul de Vence, though it’s twenty times bigger.

Run-Up to Oscar Night

As Oscar Night rolls around, we pause to reflect on the year gone by with some potted paragraphs about favorite films. (For a more inclusive and detailed overview, suitable for a Netflix source sheet, click here.)

Poetry
This South Korean film has an unlikely heroine—a 66-year-old woman named Yang who’s on the threshold of the world of memory loss. She’s a kindly, gentle woman who earns money taking care of an elderly man who’s suffered a stroke, and is also helping out her daughter by raising the woman’s self-centered teenaged son. The bright spot in her life of service and sacrifice is the poetry class she’s taking. Though quite sure she has no talent, she scribbles her passing feelings in a notebook and attempts to describe various sights that impress her.

Yang’s life takes a turn for the worse when she learns that her grandson and a few friends are suspected of involvement in a local girl’s suicide. The fathers of the boys have begun meeting in hopes of devising a plan to assuage the mother of the deceased teen by paying her off, thus avoiding a full police investigation. The film moves adroitly rom one sphere to another adroitly—the poetry class, the home of the old man, the meetings of the fathers, her jarring life at home with her grandson.

Certified Copy
The film consists largely of a series of conversations between a British art scholar and a French antiques dealer (Juliette Binoche) who owns a shop in Tuscany. That’s the film: Old World ambiance and cultured talk. It contains one or two further wrinkles involving real and fake that I’ll leave it viewers to discover for themselves. The film is beautifully shot and rich in chiaroscuro. Even the reflections in the windshield of the car are gorgeous.

Margin Call
Margin Call takes us inside the offices of a hedge fund on the eve of the market melt-down in 2008. Half of the staff has just been fired, but one of the departing “risk managers” (Stanley Tucci) has crunched enough numbers to see that far worse news lies ahead. The film takes place during a single late-night panic during which young employees, board members, and honchos arriving in helicopters attempt to make the best of a terrible situation, and “get out” before everything goes south.

The Artist
This black-and-white film has a rich soundtrack and a predictable plot, but it’s a charming vehicle for the stars, who spend a fair amount of time merely grinning at one another. An actor unknown to me, Jean Dujardin, plays the silent-screen idol George Valentin, and a second new-comer, Bérénice Bejo, is equally winsome as the enthusiastic fan who slowly creeps into his life. Both actors indulge in plenty of the “hamming” that takes the place of talk in silent pictures, but they’re very good at it, and the story itself is awfully sweet.

Of Men and Gods
The film follows the daily routine of a group of Christian monks living in the mountains of Algeria, in the midst of a largely-Muslim population that benefits in many ways from their presence. It opens with a quote from one of the Psalms: “I have said, Ye are gods; and all of you are children of the most High. But ye shall die like men, and fall like one of the princes.” Their difficult but purposeful lives become more dicey as a group of Islamic fundamentalists begin to terrorize the region. Shot in an abandoned monastery in Azrou, Morrocco, and the surrounding hills and towns, the film is rich in both landscapes and personalities, and moral issues abound.

The Human Resources Manager
Director Eran Riklis’s previous outing, Lemon Tree, was a big hit. His current film is more complicated and also better, though less overtly emotional. In fact, the title is the worst thing about it. It deals with the irritable HR man of a prominent industrial bakery in Jerusalem, who finds himself in a jam when one of his employees (a foreigner whom he’s never met) dies in a suicide bombing. A variety of complications ensue, but the upshot is that the HR man must return the body to Romania, accompanied by an annoying tabloid journalist who’s writing an exposé on the insensitivity of the bakery to its employees. He’s estranged from his wife and eager to return home in time to take his daughter on a field trip, but meets up with unexpected challenges in Romania, turning the tale into an absurdist shaggy dog story. Yet by imperceptible degrees, our hero’s desire to dump the body and get back to Israel is subsumed by a new and stronger desire to “do right” to the employee he never knew, and also to the odd-ball family she left behind when she emigrated to Israel.

My Week with Marilyn
The idea of filming a story with Marilyn Monroe as a central character seems risky. By all accounts Marilyn’s appeal went a good deal beyond her impressive anatomy and glamorously seductive sheen. But Michelle Williams pulls it off, fusing the insecurity, the vulnerability, and also the surprising wit into an engaging and believable character. So much so, that at the end of the film, the huge head-shots that fill the screen behind the final credits force us to stop and say: Wait a minute! That’s not Marilyn, that’s Michelle Williams.

Young Adult
On the other hand, Young Adult is bittersweet at best. Charlize Theron plays an attractive divorcee who writes young adult novels from her high-rise apartment in Minneapolis and drinks Coke from a 2-liter bottle in her pajamas every morning. She’s pushing forty though she looks to be twenty-five, and her life is a mess. Receiving an almost random baby-announcement email from her high school boyfriend, she decides to return to her home town and “rescue” him from what she presumes to be a boring, claustrophobic life.

Theron does an excellent job of making herself continually watchable but never likable. At the same time, director Jason Reisman succeeds in fleshing out the limited horizons of small-town life without undue condescension. Added ballast is provided by Matt Freeholf (Patton Oswalt) who was the victim of a hate crime in high school and now paints model super-heroes and distills whiskey in his garage. Considered all-in-all, Young Adult is better than any brief description could convey. I might almost describe it as haunting.

The Tree of Life
The Tree of Life is a rendering of childhood in the 1950s, in Waco, Texas. It’s also a visual history of the universe. Through much of the film three brother shout, torture frogs, wrestle in the weeds (Can’t you hear the crickets chirping?), hang out with their deviant friends, play the guitar, obey their domineering father (Brad Pitt), fall in love with their charming mother (Jessica Chastain), go to church, go down to the creek, challenge and test one another, climb trees. Malick frames this central focus on childhood experience between two specific events, one small, the other large. The “small” event is that one of the brothers dies. (We don’t see it and we never learn how, and the event comes so early in the film that I don’t mind mentioning it here.)

The “large” event is actually a sequence of events—the creation of the universe and the development of life on the planet Earth. There is extended footage in the first half of the film of cosmic events—nebulae expanding, volcanoes erupting, micro-organisms developing—with ethereal religious music sounding in the background. It all seems a bit like a cross between that BBC series Planet Earth and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

A Separation
A Separation is an unsavory gruel of overheated conversations, long-standing resentments, deep familial affections, hopes for a better life, unshakeable religious faith, and economic desperation. The plot thunders on like an express train that’s jumped the rails, and though the violence, in the end, amounts to little more than a few slaps and shoves, every frame carries an uneasy current. The two-hour film, shot with natural light in apartments and on the streets of Tehran, goes by in a flash. It’s Iranian, but as we leave the theater we’re likely to have Aristotle’s theory of poetic catharsis running through our heads: a sense of purification after the release of pent-up or horrific emotions. Then again, we might have that famous lne from Renoir’s Rules of the game ringing in our ears: “The trouble is, everyone has his reasons.”

The Adventures of Tintin
Although this animated feature is a little short on character development, the plot is plenty thick, and the colorful settings are marvelously rendered. The sea battle between flaming vessels is particularly vivid, and the film gets more interesting when our detective-hero and his companion, Captain Haddock, arrive in a storybook North African city to retrieve the model ship that carries the third and final clue to the location of the buried treasure.

Fans of the comic book character have had a good time pointing out all the ways that the movie fails to live up to the superb genius of the original material. Those of us who come to the film without expectations can sit back and enjoy the ride.

The Help
The story of black maids in pre-Civil Rights Jackson, Mississippi, and of a young white woman who tries to tell their story, this powerful film offers a peek inside a part of America most of us have never seen. It also happens to be a lively and entertaining exposé of white country club life. Love ’em or hate ’em, the characters are sharply drawn and the period atmosphere is convincing.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams
Among the strange places Werner Herzog has taken us to over the years, the caves of Chauvet, in the Ardeche region of southern France, do not rank near the top. Nevertheless, we’re glad he visited them and took us along.

First, a few cold, hard facts. The walls of the caves contain paintings that are 32,000 years old. Discovered as recently as 1995, they’re the oldest works of art we know of by a good ten thousand years. They offer representations of a number of large mammals that haven’t walked the earth for quite some time. It’s impressive.
Today we debate whether to install Wifi among the trees at state park campgrounds. In those days, other large mammals outnumbered humans by maybe 100 to 1, and nomadic bands hunted beasts, gathered roots, played music, built fires. In short, their lives were like our hobbies.

Music plays a prominent role in the film, and some reviewers have found it intrusive. At certain points it becomes a little “churchy” and overblown, yet it also contributes to an atmosphere of awe that would be difficult to sustain through imagery alone. After all, a cave is a font of echoes. And singing came before talking.

Internet Birding

There is no way to go birding on the internet, because birds can't survive for long in the ether. You can look at photos of birds online, or play Angry Birds, and you can find all sorts of info online about what birds people have seen, and where.

The other day, a friend of mine passed along the web link to the Great Backyard Bird Count. Between February 17 and 20, we were all supposed to keep an eye on the feeder or head out into the field, keeping track of our sightings and tallying the results at the official web site. This has been going on for years, and it always struck me as odd that such an event would take place in the winter, when there aren’t many birds around. On the other hand, I didn’t know how easy it was to join in.

On President’s Day Hilary and I left town on a field trip and ended up at Spring Lake Regional Park a few miles west of Hastings. This under-used park occupies a bluff overlooking Gray Cloud Island and the Mississippi. It’s one of the most spectacular panoramas in the Twin Cities, and the drama is enhanced by the contrast between the strips of white ice, blue open water, and gray leafless island trees that drape themselves across the river landscape.

We hiked along the edge of Scharr’s Bluff, where Indians camped eight thousand years ago as the raging torrents of Glacial River Warren flooded past below them. Then we drove down to a second section of the park and took a hike through a hardwood forest past a long succession of archery stands to the banks of the Mississippi.

As we emerged from the woods we spotted a cluster of ducks—scores of mallards, a few golden eye, and four mergansers that I took to be the red-breasted sort, due to the distinctive top-notch on the female. A few minutes later a genuine birding party arrived and one of the men asked us what we’d seen.

“Were they common mergansers or red-breasted mergansers?” he wanted to know.

“My understanding is that the female red-breasted has that distinctive top-notch. Isn’t that so?”

“Actually, the common can have that, too," he corrected me politely. "A better sign in the female is whether the head coloring ends abruptly or in a blurred muddle,” he kindly explained.

“Yeah, I think they were red-breasted.” I held to my story. (Please note the two species depicted here, and decide for yourself which is which.)

As we made our way back to the car, the group was probably ruing the fact that the birds they’d come to see had been spooked by novices who didn’t know their winter ducks!

The best sighting we had was on the way out, when we spotted a pair of red-tailed hawks sitting one behind the other on two branches at eye level, maybe five feet apart, as if they were posing for a fiftieth wedding anniversary photo. Sweet.

Back home, I took a look online at the merganser issue and came across such remarks as

“…Another point is the chin and throat. On the common merganser, there is a well defined oval patch on the sides of the chin. On red-breasted it is more blended as seen here. Also, the common merganser has a larger body with bigger tail, but that can be hard to judge. One point that's not usually mentioned is the extension of maxillary feathering on the side of the bill. It forms a wedge or triangle on Red-breasted. On Common the feathering comes straight down and doesn't project into a point. However, this only works in North American populations.”

Somewhere along the way, I was reminded of the link to the Great Backyard Bird Count, and though we had not been counting or tallying anything, I filled out a report, including a few species we’d seen recently in the back yard: Canada Goose (80), Mallard (60), Common Goldeneye (4), Red-Breasted Merganser (4), Wild Turkey (6), Bald Eagle (4), Red-Tailed Hawk (2), Red-bellied woodpecker (1), Downy Woodpecker (1), Black-capped Chickadee (20)…and so on.

Here’s where the internet begins to strut its stuff. Once I’d submitted my list, I took a look at what other Minnesotans had seen. It’s a fascinating collocation that you can reference by species. One birder in Duluth had seen 10 red-breasted mergansers. That was it. On the other hand, observers in Hastings, Rosemount, Fridley, Burnsville, Minneapolis, South St. Paul, and Bloomington (all Mississippi towns) had seen common merganser.

The handwriting was on the wall. I resubmitted my tally, changed red-breasted to common…and downgraded my skill level from “excellent” to “good.”

Tourist St. Paul

One of the under-appreciated benefits of living in the Twin Cities is that on any given winter weekend, if you’re hungry for vacation or escape, you can simply take a drive across the river to your sister city—whichever direction that might be.

Yesterday we hopped into the car at 9:45 and were pulling into one of those coveted street-side parking spots near the Como Park Conservatory by 10:10. A few minutes later, having slipped a fiver down the donation slot, we entered the steamy glass confines of the place. Ferns and bromeliads and banana tress everywhere in the central court. The moisture and heat hit you immediately. It’s like stepping off the plane in San Diego.

Like everyone else, we made a bee-line for the south wing, where all the colorful flowers are now in bloom. Lilies and cyclamens. Coy in the pools, lily-pads, parents with their toddlers, and huge SLR cameras everywhere!

I whipped my Canon PowerShot SD1200 out of my shirt pocket, and not to be outdone, I switched to the “macro” programmed setting for a few close-ups of the blossoms. That was a mistake. The camera also happened to be programmed for tungsten light. Well, let’s settle back and enjoy the blooms themselves.

Hardly less interesting, in my view, is the opposite wing of the conservatory, where spice-bearing plants from the East Indies and South America, Borneo and Brazil, are on permanent display. All-spice, black pepper, ginger, all of which conjure thoughts of lunch: Indian? Thai?

We moved on to the brightly-colored frogs in the tropical rainforest, and then the anaconda. Lovely ferns, dripping springs, yellow and orange birds flittering in the rafters, and a wonderful exhibit of intimate black bear photos by long-time local expert Lynn Rogers.

As we departed the building Minnesota suddenly felt very cold again. We returned to the car and circumnavigated Lake Como in a clock-wise direction—not as easy as it sounds. Then we headed down Como Avenue toward downtown St. Paul, through semi-industrial neighborhoods that I hadn’t traversed in ages. Spotting a spire to our right, we veered down Western and pulled up in front of the notoriously conservative St. Agnes Church just as some characters were emerging with violin cases in tote. We stepped inside and caught the tail end of a Mass from the lobby. Rather airy paintings on the ceiling. I grabbed a brochure on the way out; it might be worth attending an evening Monteverdi service someday…in Latin.

Our thoughts were of neighborhood spaghetti for lunch—was Costello’s on Snelling still open, or maybe a joint on Payne Avenue?—but we ended up in the Wild Onion on Grand. I thought it might be a “family” place, they had spaghetti and meatballs on the menu—but when we stepped inside it looked like Chammps. I asked the hostess, “Is there anywhere we can sit where a TV won’t be visible?” Her frank response was, “Actually, no.” She gave us a booth by the window, which was the best she had…but we were out of there in no time.

We wandered across the street to Brasa, and I’m glad we did. I like the food at the Minneapolis Brasa, but find the interior unpleasantly cramped and drafty. The St. Paul Brasa is warm and spacious. Same tasty soul food. I’d go back in an instant.

Re-energized by the pulled pork and huevos rancheros, we took that long drop down Grand Avenue to West Seventh, then snaked past the hordes heading to the Wild hockey game, and arrived at last at Mounds Park, where the view is superb and the artifacts are 1500 years old. (But I forgot the shovel.) Mounds Park is one of the few places where you can see St. Paul and Minneapolis at the same time.

We arrived back home five hours after having set out, and felt like we’d been on a vacation. We took a nap on the floor with the sunlight streaming in from the west and woke up to find a flock of wild turkeys wandering through our back yard.