Our hometown

Today my friend Cheryl and I met for lunch. It was good to see a familiar face, and it made me vow not to take for granted the camaraderie and kindred spirithood that we share as Hallmark colleagues.

After lunch I asked her to take me through the neighborhood she grew up in. It's universal, I think, that people like to share their history with friends who missed it. I enjoyed seeing the site of her junior high school and think it's so great that members of the community worked together to create a seniors' high rise on the same plot of land. Cheryl said that many of the current residents raised their families in that neighborhood and consequently share a sense of community.

We saw Cheryl's high school, her church, her childhood home, the homes where her sister and nieces live (across the alley from each other, incidentally) and the small neighborhood shops that have withstood developers' greed and franchisers' ambitions...a hardware store, a bowling alley, a coffee shop, a small supermarket. Cheryl and I share a longing for walkable communities where the shape of local commerce is virtually unchanged from 30 years ago.

We drove around Lakes Nokomis and Hiawatha and saw children swimming at the public beach, and we saw a picnic of some sort at Minnehaha Falls, one of the Twin Cities' most beautiful natural landmarks. Somehow we refrained from reciting Longfellow's Hiawatha poem, though I'm sure we both know it by heart,

What is it that makes sharing your old hometown with a friend so satisfying and rewarding? I think it's a way to understand and know people. It made sense to me that Cheryl's neighborhood wasn't too different from my growing-up place way across town. I imagine Cheryl walking to the lake, running an errand to the grocery store, having dinner with her family in a house so similar to mine, and it adds a new level to our understanding of each other.

I should mention that we had an incredible dessert experience--homemade butterscotch pudding, made with Dewar's scotch.Our waitress was interested in our story of how two Minneapolis girls migrated to Hallmark and Kansas City and then returned today to share some time together.