Heart of Crystal

After months of dallying, I final loaded the two old tube TVs and a Gateway computer into the car and headed out to the recycling center in Brooklyn Park. I shed a tear, thinking back to what a beautiful color screen the smaller of the two TVs had, and probably still does—though it’s only about a foot square, and the rabbit ears are long gone.

As for the computer, I think I got almost everything of interest off its 30 gigs of hard drive (with the help of a friend) before it crashed for good a few years ago. And for the rest, who cares? Electronic nostalgia doesn’t run very deep.

It’s an interesting part of town, the northwestern suburbs, seemingly stuck in the fifties. Narrow little asphalt highways, heavily patched. Auto body shops by the dozen. Free-standing neighborhood liquor stores like the ones you see in the opening frames of a B-movie, where a crime is about to take place. West Broadway, Bass Lake Road. Surprisingly soon, you’re driving past gravel pits and factories that manufacture enormous concrete storm-sewer pipes. Some people call these parts home, I know, but to me it was a gray November mini-vacation.

Things have changed at the recycling depot. They no longer charge you for dropping things off. Nor was there a long line of cars waiting to get in, though it was a Saturday morning. I showed the man my driver’s license, affirmed that the items I had were from my own home, and proceeded on into the warehouse to container #1.

Three burly gentlemen in white lab coats helped me unload. I noticed that there were quite a few TVs just like mine in the massive bin already. I can hardly imagine the conversations that might go on from screen to screen once the doors are shut.
TV#1: “Football, football, football.”
TV#2: “Well, that’s better than all those religious shows.”
TV#3: “Oh, God, the channel surfing wears you out! Why can’t anyone make up their mind?!”

I left the building without an iota of regret. On the contrary, I felt as if a great weight had been lifted from my shoulders. (Well, at least a moderate weight.) The house will be a little bit roomier, and it will now be much easier to access my Encyclopedia Britannica (the 1956 edition), which was sitting in the back of a closet behind one of the TV sets.

I also felt flush with cash, having escaped without paying any fees. So on the way back I pulled into a shopping center somewhere in the heart of Crystal to check out an Aldi store, and around the corner in the same shopping center, a Half-Price Books.

At Aldi I picked up a can of olives, some mixed nuts, refried beans, marinated artichoke hearts, and an assortment of hummus dips in a circular plastic tray. All the “brands” were new to me. We used to call them “generics”; now they carry names like Tuscan Garden and Casa Mammita. At the check-out I learned that Aldi doesn’t have bags and doesn’t take credit cards.

In the bookstore I made an extraordinary find. “Gerry Mulligan: the Original Sextet.” A two-CD set recorded in New York (also in 1956) with tenor Zoot Sims and trombonist Booby Brookmeyer along with Mulligan in the mix. It’s sort of like “Birth of the Cool,” though brighter and less lumbering. I’m listening to in now.

The shopping center is actually sort-of handsome. The trees in the parking lot, though still youngsters, add a lot to the ambiance, even in November, and the fact that the cross-streets don’t meet at a right angle also helps.

For that fact I guess we can thank Pierre Bottineau. If I’m not mistaken, West Broadway, which cuts northwest at an angle across the grid to define the west edge of the parking lot, follows the footpath he popularized while founding such cities as Osseo and Maple Grove. Bottineau, a Métis, also founded such far-flung cities as Red Lake Falls and Wahpeton, South Dakota, and in 1862 he guided U.S. troops as far west as Walla Walla, Washington.