From Glasgow Edina MN

From Glasgow Edina MN

From Glasgow Edina MN

Tuesday 12th May 2009 – Shopping and Telling Jokes Badly

Whenever I take a wrong turning, or, more likely, fail to take a right one, Dulcinea, who is destined to be called 'Dulcie' before long, pauses, then says "recalculating".  Then she picks up directions for the new route.  It's so reassuring to have someone calm and concentrating when I get lost.  I have decided I will do this myself: from now on, instead of  "you've missed the turning, you stupid cow!", I will confine myself to "recalculating".  Of course, they'll know what I mean.

The fair Dulcinea has wafted me from address to address with never a flutter.  I only have to find an address on the web, and I'm as good as there.  Except for Lyndale Avenue, of course, which Hennepin County has turned into a large pile of soil without bothering to tell her.  I know they haven't told her because I spent a whole night last weekend getting her up-to-date on all the changes in North America.  So I have now joined that growing band of hapless motorists who have driven into a roadworks site because some disembodied voice from the dashboard told me to.

Anyway, the result of all this to-ing and fro-ing has Rossey nearly fully (ha ha) equipped for our adventure.  The fair D is poised and ready: a couple more days.

 

I was parked outside the auto parts shop (or so Dulcinea assured me).  I went in, only to find a single reception counter, as in the service part of a garage.  "Have you got a shop here?", I ask.  "Yes, of course we have.  What do you want?"  "I just wanted to look round it, see what there was", I said.  He looked pretty non-plussed.  "No, you can't do that", he said, "it's too dangerous.  There are people working in there".  It dawned on me.  Another language difficulty: 'shop' means 'workshop' in this context.  "No, no", I say, "parts, retail".  "Oh, that's next door: that way".  He looked relieved to be getting rid of me.

 

Later that night, in the local Irish bar (I have discovered a whole locality constructed entirely of Irish bars) I was regaling them with my mishaps.  'They' were a young man, who had been there some time, and the barmaid, who hadn't.  We got onto the subject of jokes, and our language and accent differences.  I had heard a (I thought) terrific joke on 'Saturday Night Live', concerning Reese Witherspoon and Jake Gyllenhaal (the youngsters reminded me of their names).  So I thought I would give it an airing.

I expect you've all, by now, heard 'The Arisocrats' joke: there's a film about it which has been on one of the dirtier TV channels, BBC2 or Channel Four.  It's a kind of test for comedians.  Well, I've got a new test.  My telling of this joke, which I shall refer to as the 'vowel' joke, was excruciating.  The difficulty in telling it across these divides of language and accent (I think I can just about recognise a Northern Minnesotan accent now) became the joke itself, as we staggered from one misunderstanding to another.  I'll give you the bones of the joke: your test, should you choose to accept it, is to tell it slow enough, and drop enough language and accent hints to get an immediate laugh at the punch line, rather than that puzzled look which people have when they want to be friendly and a joke ends before they expect it to.  If you are telling it to old people, there will be the added difficulty of them perhaps not understanding the basic concept in the first place.  Anyway, SNL (as it likes to call itself these days) was going on about Reese W: a whole series of jokes, about her and JG getting married/together.  And it ended with the one about them even making up their own vowels.  Geddit?  No?  OK, Let try this another way: you see, they were getting married, so there would be vows, you see, and young people these days … NO, NO,STOP, STOP!  … and you have noticed how they spell their names … NO, NO, STOP, STOP!  … Oh, alright.  But, he can't stop himself adding, defiantly, I thought it was funny.

Monday 11th May 2009 – Rocinante is Mine

Everywhere here seems to be a vast distance from everywhere else.  And because it always involves some level of freeway, I can never tell whether I'm going north, south, east or west.  So today seemed especially frenetic.

I had to get the money, then get the agent to tax ('get plates for') the car, then get the insurance, then actually drive the thing home.  All of which, with a wrong turning or two, left me feeling I'd driven half way across America.  This is an unnerving thought, since I'm actually just about to drive all the way across America.  There is a different scale of distance over here.  I think petrol costs round about a third of European prices, but journeys will cost just about the same.

Anyway, everything actually went fairly smoothly, so it's now a matter of fitting her out.  Which will be tomorrow's frenetic activity.

I have decided it's a she, and she is to be called Rocinante, to remind me of the quixotic nature of this adventure.  I know Steinbeck ('Travels with Charley') did the same thing, but I'm not copying from him, I'm copying from Cervantes, which is what he did.  If I'm a plagiarist, I'm in good company.  Anyway, Rocinante will inevitably be shortened to 'Rossey', which will have some Glasgow associations, reminding me of holidays 'doon the watter' at Rothesay, which is normally pronounced much like that.

 

The officious lady American voice is clearly the most suitable for the GPS.  If only I could get the divine voice which tells me which side of the tram to get off, that would be perfect: she could easily replace HAL.  I've tried the English (and I do mean ENGLISH), Australian, and American in both sexes, and somehow officious American female fits best.  Perhaps she will be my Lady Dulcinea.

Sunday 10th May 2009 – Can You Hear Me, Mother?

It's Mothers' Day here, and my adoptive parents took me out to lunch.  A woman at the next table was having a quiet lunch with her daughter.  The daughter went off to the rest room, or somewhere, and it turned out the woman was just bursting to share a story with us.

She woke up thinking it was Mothers' Day, so she would just stay in bed, and wait for breakfast to turn up.  Her son comes in and asks to borrow the car, so he can go and get a bagel.  This sounds good, she thought.  He comes back some time later, having feasted on his bagel, pops into his mother's room, briefly, to tell her that he had met a friend down the mall, and, did she know, today is Mothers' Day.  Then he gives her the keys back and vanishes.  I think she was awe-struck at the self-centredness of it.  I think she felt better having got that off her chest.  Actually, I could just sense that she would have felt better still if she could have showed us a photo and we had agreed to mete out some awful punishment.

 

People are the same the world over, aren't they?

Saturday 9th May 2009 – Auditioning Replacements for Souza

We were talking about music, and my hosts had somehow got the impression that I was a pretty good musician.  They were telling me about a couple of youngsters from the local high school who had recently graduated college and were looking to start a career in music.   It was decided that the best thing to do was to arrange a concert at the new Burnsville Center for the Performing Arts, where the Minnesota Symphonic Winds would play a piece by each of these budding composers.  I asked them to add a piece by Sousa, just for comparison, and they offered to start with a piece by Vaughan Williams, just to make me feel at home.

Souza is one of the wonders of America.  It is hard to think of America without hearing Souza in the background, and it hard to hear Souza without conjuring up visions of America.  So I was looking forward to the concert.  The Burnsville Center for the Performing Arts is quite new, and has a 1000-seat raked auditorium.  It is beautifully designed and fitted out to the highest quality.  A quite fitting place for me to deliver my judgment.  So as not to stress the young composers, the event was disguised as a Rotary fundraiser, with auctions, and local restaurants providing samples of their fare.

Vaughan Williams 'Toccata Marziale' opened the proceedings, and the offerings of our two local composers sandwiched Souza's 'Hands Across the Sea'.  The Minnesota Symphonic Winds is over 80 strong, so there was a lot of sound in the auditorium.  Our young novitiates were in powerful company, but I was able to signal, in both cases, that a standing ovation was in order, which, indeed, it was.  Both young men were present, and seemed grateful, but the applause was well-deserved.

 

Everybody was interested in my upcoming trip.  They were especially impressed by a traveller who could turn up in a tuxedo.  I felt quite Edwardian, which seems to suit me.

Friday 8th May 2009 – Off to the Ballgame

I am now the proud owner of a 2006 Mazda MPV LX. I think. There is still the question of shipping money from the UK, but I've succeeded with the test run. More ominously, my agent raised the question of the Minnesota Department of Transport: this is government again, so I will turn round, bend over and adopt the submissive position until said vehicle has plates on it. It looks like this, except that it's grey:

By next week, I should be on the road with the co-ordinates of Glasgow, MT in my GPS. Or, at least, the co-ordinates of Fargo, ND. I have discovered, to my amazement, that Walmart allow free overnight 'RV' parking at most of their stores. There is a whole atlas devoted to free things RVs can do. If I can add these to the discounts for 'seniors', I'll soon be beyond the merely free, and into them paying me to be here (that won't, I expect, apply to the government).

.

Meanwhile, my hosts have been in a state of dejection as a result of a steady stream of pastings being handed out to the Twins (baseball) at Baltimore. I decided it would be a kindness to intervene, with the Seattle Mariners coming to town for a series (they seem to play three games in a row). I don't usually have to take the field on these occasions, usually my presence is enough. So teatime found us on the tram (they also call it a 'light railway') heading for the Hubert H Humphrey Metrodome. (You will no doubt recall that Humphrey was Lyndon Johnson's VP, and the man credited, in 1948, with moving the Democrats from 'states rights' to 'civil rights', but you may not know he was the Mayor of Minneapolis at the time. You certainly won't know that he was one of the heroes of my 1960's.) This is an inflatable sports stadium. Going into an indoor sports stadium as the flock are gathering for a game is very exciting.

Dinner was, of course, beer and hotdogs. The beer here is just a different world from what I knew 30 years ago. The hotdogs, on the other hand, are just as good, although better-wrapped. All rounded off with popcorn. The popcorn is provided in quantities so large that we have to take turns going into the stadium, since it is not big enough to hold all of us and all of the popcorn simultaneously.

The Twins were obviously affected by my presence: they inflicted an 11-0 humiliation on the hapless Mariners. So duty done, then: everyone on the tram home was happy. I felt no need to point out that it had taken my intervention to get to this.

Thursday 7th May 2009 – The Land of the Free

I always thought that 'Land of the Free' meant the people thought they were free, but recently, it has begun to seem as if it's the goods that are free.  Maybe that's why they're in such financial trouble.  I had a splendid night out on free (and almost free) beer the other night.  Now sorting my phone out turns out to be essentially free too.  They can't keep this up.

My cell phone has been a constant problem since I arrived.  I thought I had to have a local phone for reasonable-priced contact straightaway.  So I popped into the nearest phone shop in NYC and bought the cheapest SIM card on offer.  But I couldn't quite manage it the way I expected.  A nice young lady in a Chicago phone shop helped me understand it a bit better.  After that, I could check after a call how much it had cost me.  It was surprisingly expensive.  A young man in a Minneapolis phone shop told me this was because I was on the wrong tariff, and changed it for me at very little cost.  But it was still costing more than I expected.  Finally, it dawned on me that I seemed to be paying for people to call me.  When I checked, this turned out to be true: If you're 'pre-paid', ie pay-as you-go, you pay for called time as well as calling time. 

So my hosts decided to take one step further in their slow-but-inexorable process of adopting me by putting me on their 'post paid' contract.  The young man in the shop was a delight to deal with.  He was a typical mobile-phone salesman, who knew everything about everything, and was not prepared to allow anything to get in the way of the deal.  He had the added attraction of speaking in the rhythms of the black inner city argot.  I was tempted, at one point, to caricature him, but it would be quite unfair, since he actually spoke the same proper English as me: he just had this, not accent but rhythm in the way the spoke.  This added considerably to the conjuring trick which turned out to be going.  The deal was thick with phrases like "that'll be $18, but I'm gonna take care of that for you", and one that foxed me for a while, about giving us a (I think) "mailer for that".  At the end of the 'deal', which took quite a long time, my host ended up with a new phone, I ended up with a new phone, the new phone cost me nothing to use, particularly when someone called me, and none of this cost anybody anything at all.  The young man stood back looking quite pleased with himself, as well he should.  In addition, in the midst of this conjuring trick, he had thrown in a master class in how to deal with a call center when he called the phone company to get the numbers swapped.  As they twisted and turned and tried to pass him off to other departments, he gave them slack, then reeled them in until they were in his keep net.  The whole thing was really, truly, uplifting: commerce as an art form, pure theatre: quite made my day.

 

So now I've got a phone, and a bank account, and money has turned up in the bank account.  I only have to get the van now.  And this is in process, and quite a long way down the line.  Things are looking up.  I shall be off soon.  I wonder if I could hire the young salesman as my 'fixer'?  All those Edwardian explorers had one.  Except, of course, poor old Captain Scott: and look what happened to him!