Merv Griffin died yesterday. His was a fascinating life. His new game show - Crosswords - sounds like it would be worth a look.
I was thinking about the bridge that fell in Minneapolis. It got me to thinking about that portion of the Mississippi River and its eerie (to me) history. Just south of the 35W Bridge is the Washington Avenue Bridge, one I walked and drove across so many times I stopped noticing its beauty. This bridge is famous for being the site of the poet John Berryman's suicide in 1972. He jumped off of it. Berryman's death was the catalyst for one of my favorite books from the early nineties (the out of print Three Nights In The Heart Of The Earth by Brett Laidlaw) and two of my favorite songs from the past year (Stuck Between Stations by The Hold Steady and John Allyn Smith Sails by Okkervil River).
I remember a day in the spring of 1985 that I walked across the pedestrian bridge portion of the Washington Avenue Bridge. I passed someone with whom I shared a very strange brief history. We looked at each other and silently and mutually agreed that the story was over. And it was.
I remember another day in the spring of 1997, walking away from that same bridge. I saw someone I knew walking toward the bridge. She was a girl I had a crush on. She worked in a copy store that wasn't Kinko's. She had scars on her wrists that you could see when she wore short sleeves which was always. This wasn't the reason I liked her. Anyway, as she walked toward the bridge, I thought "I hope she doesn't jump into the river." We said hi to each other. She didn't jump. She's still around; I saw her Myspace page.
Later in 1997, I went to the apartment of one of my University of Minnesota professors. It's the tall foreboding apartment building visible in news accounts of the 35W Bridge collapse, just to the west of the bridge. You can see it here. The professor was having a dinner party for all of the students in our graduate seminar on ethics and morality. Her husband was a retired professor. He was twice her age. He was her mentor, in a way. I say this not to detract from her skills and credentials - she was a great professor.
Anyway, the husband was dying. But he enthusiastically co-hosted the Thursday night dinner party, telling stories of his own research and interest in ethics and morality. He spoke of the suicide of the leader in his field. It was a strange claustrophobic night of wine and cheese and grad student drama and drunkenness. It was one of my favorite educational experiences. I'm writing a novel about it. I'm six pages into it. The novel is also about the river and the university, the bridges and the streets. Here's a short story about the same things.
The professor's husband died a few months after the party. The professor left Minneapolis shortly after that. I think of them every time I see that building, which is often when I'm back in town. I saw it a couple of weeks ago, just before the collapse. I've been in the stairwells of that building. It's called Riverview Tower.
I'll end with a John Berryman poem:
The Traveller
They pointed me out on the highway, and they said
'That man has a curious way of holding his head.'
They pointed me out on the beach; they said 'That man
Will never become as we are, try as he can.'
They pointed me out at the station, and the guard
Looked at me twice, thrice, thoughtfully & hard.
I took the same train that the others took,
To the same place. Were it not for that look
And those words, we were all of us the same.
I studied merely maps. I tried to name
The effects of motion on the travelers,
I watched the couple I could see, the curse
And blessings of that couple, their destination,
The deception practiced on them at the station,
Their courage. When the train stopped and they knew
The end of their journey, I descended too.
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