Well, four days and forty-three years. That’s how long it
takes to get to Minneapolis. Mary Richards’ home. I will restate that I know
she’s not real. Let her be my icon. Let this be my ComicCon.
If I went with the “facts” of the show, Mary would be 75
now. (Indeed, the woman who played her, Mary Tyler Moore, is 78.) But time is
suspended in TV Land. Let Mary Richards forever be thirtysomething. (I'm
blocking out that TV movie, “Mary and Rhoda” filmed in 2000, wherein we learn
Mary is a widow living in New York City. Not part of the series; doesn’t count.)
Just as Mary was welcomed and shown an upper floor apartment
during the pilot episode, I was greeted by Peter, my Airbnb host, and ushered
upstairs to the room where I’d be staying for the next week. There was no Rhoda
vying for the same space; instead, there was a smoky gray cat curled up in the
middle of the bed. Low purr translation: I
called dibs.
“She’s friendly,” Peter said. Great. I’m not a cat guy. I
just smiled politely and nodded. This was
a mistake. A week in a stranger’s house. With a territorial cat. And there
was that thing about Mary not being real.
Reality is overrated.
I hadn’t planned it, but the character home where I was
staying resembled the place where Mary supposedly lived. Smaller, but the same
style. I wasn’t trying to mimic Mary’s living arrangement. Didn’t even give it
a thought. Booking a place in my price range had been tricky. One Airbnb host
rejected me as my week-long stay dug into two Saturdays, prime booking days. I
was just relieved to have a place that was affordable, at least before
computing the costs in relation to my weakling Canadian dollar. Shrug. I’d live
in denial until returning to Vancouver.
I set my things in the closet, away from the cat, and
decided my Mary tour could wait. It was Saturday evening and my road weary legs
needed a jog.
There is nothing like discovering a new place on foot. I
make a point of jogging ASAP whenever I’m in a new city. Sometimes I can’t find
my way back as my routes meander from Ooh-look-at-that to
I-wonder-what’s-over-there, but getting lost is part of the adventure. I headed
north—or, at least, that’s the direction I assumed I was going; I have a faulty
internal compass—and assumed I’d soon come to one of the bike paths for which
Minneapolis is known. I’d jogged less than ten minutes—really, five minutes of
jogging and four minutes of waiting through red lights—when I stumbled on the
other reason I’d come to Minneapolis. (It’s the reason I gave to my friends
about my summer destination. Some people, I reasoned, might be a tad judgy
about a Mary Richards pilgrimage.) Several months ago, I’d read about an
international Pop Art exhibit at the Walker and I was eager to expand my
conception of this movement beyond Warhol and Lichtenstein.
How fortuitous that the Walker was within walking distance
of my temporary home! Even better, I stumbled upon an outdoor sculpture garden
associated with the museum. I flitted from oversized “Spoonbridge and Cherry”
to “Bronze Woman IV” to “Hare on Bell on Portland Stone Piers”, my jogging pace
severely compromised but my heart rate increasing rapidly. Good public art
makes you laugh, scrunch up your nose, tilt your head for a different
perspective and/or want to go back for another look. Let’s just say I found the
Walker’s sculpture garden very, very good!
I managed to move on and just a few blocks away found some
wonderful cycling/jogging trails that took me around Cedar Lake. This is the
place of 10,000 lakes—one down 9,999 to go!
I wound down again on the grounds around the Walker Art
Museum. Away from the rest of the sculptures, three large boulders were
arranged in a cluster, each of them partially coated in colorful metallic
paint. Three men approached me to ask about the Walker building. “We are
visiting from India,” they said. “What is that?”
What are the odds? It was the only question about the city
that I could correctly answer. Then one of them asked about the big rocks. “Is
that a grave? Did someone die there?” Okay, two questions, two bang-on answers.
It seems I was an established Minneapolitan. That song from “The Mary Tyler
Moore Show” played in my head once again: “You’re gonna make it after all.”
And as the men went their way and I went mine—yes, in the
right direction “home”—I looked up at the cloudy sky. There was one small
clearing, and in that space of relative blue, my official welcome. Though it hadn’t
rained, there was the band of a rainbow. The long trip, through Oregon,
Washington, Idaho, Montana, North Dakota and a good chunk of Minnesota, was all
worth it.
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