A Post About Sundays

  For the first time in a while, I don’t have anything to write about. Not that this is a bad thing, and not that I’ve finally run out of topics, but it’s Monday evening and I’ve finished exercising and at this point nothing interests me quite as much as lying on the futon or my bed and going to sleep.  Still, the blog must have its entry. So what I’ve decided to write about is a uniquely Midwestern topic—Sunday.

For me, Sundays are not bad. I wake up fairly early, drive an hour to Rochester, Minnesota to practice Kendo for an hour and a half at the YMCA, stagger out at the end, and either have lunch or take in a movie at Rochester’s southernmost mega cinema, then drive back to Cresco and enjoy a Sunday afternoon. It’s rather peaceful, with the exception of the hour and a half of martial arts practice.

The Midwest seems to feel the same way about Sundays, northeast Iowa in particular. Very few shops are open in Cresco and Decorah on Sunday. The chain stores are open, yes, and they close up respectably early on Sunday, but the town grocery store is closed on Sunday. It’s a little jarring if you discover you’re out of, say, chicken for your chicken salad sandwich and decide to make a quick grocery run. The nearest place that resembles a grocery store would be the Wal-Mart in Decorah, about a half-hour away. I don’t mind this, per se—going into a Wal-Mart is the easiest way to feel like you’re in a bigger town than you actually are, and I highly recommend walking through one if you get homesick for your city. Still, the difference between a two-block walk and a half-hour drive is about an hour’s difference. Besides, once I go into a Wal-Mart after driving a half-hour to get there, I feel the need to actually buy some things to justify driving half an hour to get there. I say this to offer a partial explanation for why, in one trip, I bought Romeo Must Die from the five dollar movie bin.

I can’t complain too much about the towns closing on Sundays, though, even though it can be aggravating to have the newest Decorah bookstore always be closed on Sundays, when you most feel like taking the time to walk into a bookstore and browse. Having the town close down, though, gives a sense of peace that urban areas have to work harder to obtain. When you walk the streets of Rochester on a Sunday, for instance, you see people walking with purpose, from one place to another. If you go into Rochester’s mall, you’ll see thousands of people all hurrying to get their shopping in, their meals eaten and the mall’s selected entertainment of the month experienced before the weekend ends. It’s entertaining to see how orderly hectic a mall is on the weekend, but only if you are not a part of it.

Walking down Decorah’s main street, though, is much more relaxing. You have some people parked on the street and you do meet a few people, but they aren’t hurrying anywhere. They’re strolling, which is becoming a lost art not even practiced by parents pushing strollers. These people are going somewhere, and they do feel the need to get to their destination. It doesn’t control them, however. They don’t have a reservation they need to guard like lions guard their kill on the veldt. They don’t place more value on the destination than the journey. Instead, they’re enjoying the walk, looking at other people and smiling at some of the more standalone shops on the main street. You can enjoy yourself walking in Decorah. When you get to Rochester, you just need to be at your destination. Which is a shame, as I think Rochester could do with more people who strolled through it.

Actually, the Mayo Clinic is a fine place for strolling. If you happen to walk through it during the day, you’ll see several people who are patients there, or they have people they know who are patients, and when you are in either group, you have to wait. Wait for tests, wait for the diagnosis, wait for the cure to work or wait to die. The waiting can drive you insane if you aren’t careful, and the people at the Mayo Clinic seem to have recognized this. This is why the hallways are lined with art and sculpture, from abstract streaks of paint on twenty-foot tall canvases to intricately-carved sculptures of children on dolphins. The lobbies even have grand pianos that invite anyone to play, and several classically-trained pianists come along in a week, playing a concerto. Occasionally, they bring friends with other instruments, and the melody lingers in the hallways, encouraging people to continue strolling, until the waiting is done. As a visitor it can be quite pleasant.

I’m not sure which state I prefer.  I love strolling, and I think it’s a shame that people don’t stroll more often.  I do, however, love sitting in a public square and watching people hurry to and fro, leaving somewhere on their way to somewhere else. For me, it’s a calming, comforting feeling, that there are thousands of happy people in this area, busy living their lives and going to someplace that, hopefully, will fulfill them somehow, even if it’s just to the drugstore to buy a soda.

The post that's not about the Rubaiyat

This blog post was going to be about the Rubaiyat—one of Decorah, IA’s finest restaurants. To some extent, it still is. However, I went there with my brother Andy, and afterwards I realized the restaurant itself was actually kind of boring compared to how incredibly smooth my brother is.

Let me start—we went to the Rubaiyat on Easter morning for a nice brunch. The restaurant serves brunch from 10am—1pm, and they offer dining that either is gourmet, or it’s too close to tell. They’re located on Decorah’s main drag, Water Street, and they have a pretty classy façade. If it’s possible to judge a book by its cover, then you can definitely tell the Rubaiyat has class. I’m not entirely sure what makes it classy, though. It could be the sign above the restaurant that is elegantly understated. They have nice, large windows through which you can see the dining area and the bar, which is fairly impressive as bars go. More on that in a bit.

When you enter the restaurant, two things strike you. First, the bar. I’m not much of a drinker, but when you see thirty some-odd taps mounted on the wall next to the bar I think you have the right to be impressed. They had some of the established brands, like Miller and Busch, but they also had some with odder names, like Blue Moon, Fat Tire, Open Book, Stubbed Toe, Betty Ford, Dirty Sock and Erotic Magazine. This time around, at 11 am on a Sunday, they also had a Bloody Mary bar, where you can mix tomato juice, hot sauce and vodka with a celery stick. Normally, I think if you start drinking before noon you might want to admit you have a problem, but there were people up at the bar, pouring vodka into their tomato juice, giggling as they applied a dash or two of hot sauce, and then going on their way. It seemed only slightly less sophisticated than having a brandy after dinner, and I was thinking maybe I had stumbled onto something, some etiquette of the upper crust. I was tempted to have a Bloody Mary until I remembered that I hadn’t really liked vodka when I tried it, and I’ve hated tomato juice as far back as the first grade. I almost went for a glass of hot sauce and a celery stick, though, which should be a good indicator of how curious I was to try it.

The second thing that strikes you is the definition of “Rubaiyat.” Just hearing the word puts you in the mindset of rubies somehow, but instead it’s a poetry collection written by a Persian named Omar Khayyam, and it celebrates living life to the fullest, with a healthy dose of food and wine. Actually, it’s more about how good food and wine can help you live your life to the fullest. Most people just write about how good wine can help you find the joy in life, but Khayyam went further and included food in the mix. In fact, Khayyam penned the immortal couplet:

                                That is not dead which can eternal lie.

                                And with strange eons even death may die.

No, sorry, that’s the couplet from Abdul Alhazred and the Necronomicon. The actual couplet is:

                                A book of verses underneath the bough,

                                A jug of wine, a loaf of bread—and thou

Granted, when Khayyam wrote these lines, over a millennia ago, he probably didn’t use words like “thou.” The poems were translated from Persian (Persish?) into English in the 1850s by a gentleman named Edward Fitzgerald. I don’t know about you, but dining at a restaurant named for an ancient book of literature is somewhat comforting. It speaks of class and a certain artistic approach to food you won’t find at, say, Big Bob’s Eat ‘n’ Leave.

So Andy and I settled into a booth and were presented with a nice menu with several decent choices. I had hollandaise sauce for the first time in years, and I enjoyed it immensely. Good hollandaise sauce is an art in and of itself. Yes, you can feel your arteries hardening as you eat, but the taste is worth it.

We had a great meal, and when the waitress delivered our bill, Andy said, “Hey, my brother and I were talking and maybe you can help us out—do cute waitresses get tipped more than other waitresses? I’m asking because you’re pretty cute, so do you get more tips than the rest of the waitresses?”

I  should point out that before the waitress came up we were actually talking about Swamp Thing.

The waitress, however, did not know this crucial bit of information, and was definitely caught off guard. She mentioned she hoped personality played a part in the tips she got, too, but was very nice toward my brother. Very nice. If he had written his phone number down on the check, this waitress would have called him wanting to know if he was free at any point during the rest of the year. She smiled at him as we walked out. Not one of those polite, friendly smiles, but a warm, caring, “you made my day” smile.

When we were in the car I tried to imitate Andy’s delivery of the line and came off sounding more like a Brooklyn pimp. “So, my brudder an’ I, we were talkin’ an’ maybe yous can help us out, eh?” (Yes ladies—I am single.)

It was shortly after that my brother had to leave for Pennsylvania. I watched him drive off, and I felt kind of lonely without him. I had a great time while he was here, and I loved getting out and exploring northeast Iowa with him, and just talking about random things, like whether or not Swamp Thing would earn more tips than the other waitresses.

The Magpie—it’s open

Over the course of the weekend, Andy and I ate at two nice restaurants. The first one we encountered was the Magpie.

The Magpie is a coffeehouse/deli that caters to students from the nearby Luther College. It goes out of its way to have an informal atmosphere, from the chalk-drawn menus to the social area in back where you can sit on couches, play board games and read magazines. It takes me back to my college days, when coffee houses were really starting to come into their own, and the stores were trying to figure out the right combination of intellectual appeal and informality to hit the current college demographic.

The menu, though, reads less like a coffeehouse menu and more like the menu you’d see at an upscale deli. They offer mostly sandwiches, but sandwiches with seven or eight ingredients, the type of ingredients that are so good they have to tell you about how they are cooked on the menu. You know, things like slow-roasted chicken, carmelized onions, chipotle mayonnaise, jalapeno butter, ciabatta roll, Panini bread, that sort of thing. If your mouth hasn’t watered at least a little bit on hearing those ingredients, you might want to call a doctor or a psychologist. Just sayin’.  They also offer some really unique side dishes, like potato salad or macaroni salad. Personally, I loved the iced tea, which was clearly brewed from some good tea leaves. Keep your Lipton’s Iced Tea that gets dispensed at the local soda machine. The iced tea at the Magpie has that very slight bite of bitterness that separates the merely okay teas from the very good teas.

Personally, though, I think the best feature about the Magpie is that it’s open after regular lunch hours. Andy and I had finished touring the Bily Clock Museum and driving around Spillville. I wanted to take Andy to a nice restaurant for a late lunch, since I’d told him about the plethora of nice restaurants in Decorah. We parked the car around 3 pm, then walked down a block or two until we got to the Rubaiyat, which closed down at 1:30, to open again around 5:00. Fine, I thought. They’re a fancy restaurant, they can do this. So we went across the street to another nice restaurant, which was similarly closed. Also fine, I thought. They’re also a nice restaurant, they probably only serve important people who know when to eat lunch and dinner, not two anarchists who think they can dine out at any point in the day it suits them.

I was not beat yet. I would take Andy to the backup plan of my backup plan, the La Rana bistro. We would go there, Andy would be suitably impressed by the menu, and we’d both marvel at how the restaurant was laid out, how it was built, and why the proprietor seemed so much like a Tom.

As we walked toward the La Rana, I could see the restaurant’ s door open. This was a good sign. I’m not ashamed to admit I smiled in triumph as I went in, following Andy, and saw a woman with short red hair and glasses, wiping down the bar. She looked up, and Andy asked, rather sarcastically, if they were open for business. At which point the waitress, either naturally or intentionally missing the sarcasm, apologized to us and said the La Rana was not in fact serving lunch or dinner, but it was offering drinks. Not wanting to drink our lunch, we decided to head to someplace that was actually serving food. One block over, we found the Magpie.

I am very happy to say Andy and I enjoyed the sandwiches we ordered, and the drinks were very good as well (coffee and iced tea, respectively). There wasn’t much in the way of waitresses, but we did have a very nice barista who refilled our drinks whenever we took them up. Seeing as how the distance from our table to the counter could be reached in about three paces, it wasn’t much of a hassle.  I have talked previously about having a cute woman to bring me lunch. A cute girl who will refill your iced tea? You know, I can live with that.

Northeast Iowa and Antonin Dvorak

In my last entry, I talked about Spillville and the Bily Clock Museum. One thing I forgot to mention is that the museum has two floors. Just in case the clocks themselves didn’t blow you away.  Granted, there aren’t more clocks on the second floor, but there is another important part of Spillville’s history. I might even go so far as to say it’s an important piece of Americana, too.

The first part of the second floor showcases the collection of the Bily Brothers, who were serious collectors. They collected money, other clocks (go figure), Native American tools and arrowheads, weapons from the Civil War and World War I, and they have a library of books full of the classics that were still considered the classics in 1920, such as Arthur Conan Doyle and Charles Dickens, not to mention an impressive reference library about foreign cultures and science textbooks. I’d like to repeat that—they read science textbooks FOR FUN. I don’t know about you, but that definitely puts my spare time activities into perspective. 

The rest of the second floor is devoted to one Antonin Dvorak, who is also affectionately known as  “that keyboard dude,” only he had nothing to do with creating the Dvorak keyboard. That was Dr. August Dvorak. Common mistake, really. 

Antonin Dvorak was a classical music composer who lived in the 1890s, when classical music was still a big deal instead of the present, where it’s relegated to either the elevator or the hold music on the telephone while I’m waiting for a customer service representative to inform me that there is absolutely nothing she can do to help and would I like the number to a different service center? Not that I am bitter.

Anyway, Antonin Dvorak was hired as the director of the National Conservatory of Music in America after making a name for himself in his homeland of Czechoslovakia. Dvorak had previously incorporated some Czech folk music into his compositions, and really wanted to get at the heart of Czech music. When he came to America, he wanted to do the same thing. He listened to African-American spirituals, Native American songs, and worked on incorporating them into his music.

So what does this have to do with Spillville, you might ask? Well, in 1893 Dvorak was feeling homesick for his home country, which was understandable. Trans-Atlantic flights were still a long ways away, and if you came to the United States you were going to be there awhile. However, one of the nice things about the United States is that it has plenty of different nationalities immigrating to it. One of these nationalities is the Czech, who established a pretty nice town called, you guessed it, Spillville. So Dvorak came out here in the summer of 1893. While he was here he wrote two pieces of what he thought were very American music—the String Quartet in F, also called “The American,” and the String Quintet in E flat. These are two of his most famous chamber music pieces, which is understandable since he probably didn’t have a lot of room.  That’s funny, because chamber music is music written for a small number of people, so they can play in small areas, and…just forget it.

As for where Antonin Dvorak stayed? It’s currently the Bily Clock Museum.

The Bily Clock Museum has a pretty decent history of Dvorak, including a bust that makes him look like a prime candidate for the Mad Scientists’ Association of America (motto: Trespassing in God’s domain since 1816). Seriously, he has a ring of hair around his head that defies gravity, and a bushy beard that seriously looks like a separate life form. According to the museum, he used to go on long walks along the local river, and the neighborhood boys would come along with them, which proves looks aren’t everything. He would also write notes about his current composition on the starched sleeve of his shirts, which the statues of him always seem to leave out. Still, it’s one of my favorite images of the man. After all, there’s no telling when inspiration can hit.

As I was reading this history, I could see Dvorak out here, enjoying himself, going to play the organ at the local church, and enjoying what might be the most perfect artists’ retreat ever. For those of you unfamiliar with the creative process, it’s really nothing like how the movies portray it. Just as a for instance, in Love Actually Colin Firth plays a writer who goes to Spain and rents out a house, where he spends all his time writing on a typewriter as an attractive Spanish maid brings him the occasional snack and a meal. It’s an absolutely wonderful vision of writing, and as I’m typing this in my apartment with stacks of books surrounding me, sipping iced tea from an aluminum water bottle and not a Spanish maid in sight, I really want to tell Colin Firth where he can shove his typewriter.

Dvorak, though, seems to have hit the jackpot. The house is nice, although you do have to imagine it without any clocks, and the description of his schedule is idyllic. Best of all, he wrote two pieces of music during his summer in Spillville, the ultimate measure of creative success if ever there was one. I can see him getting up, having breakfast, and then going for a leisurely walk down the riverside (The Turkey River, incidentally), filling his head with new thoughts and scratching them down on his starched shirt cuffs, then returning in the afternoon to make sense of the new ideas that had come to him while walking along the river. Maybe his wife would get him lunch, too. You know, I could really use a maid. Or a wife. Someone cute who would bring me lunch.

The point is, Dvorak had it made in that summer of 1893. I don’t know of any creative type who wouldn’t love to switch places with him, just for a day, to see how it feels to be in that rare confluence of relaxation and productivity, where the work you’re doing doesn’t feel like work at all, just something that you love to do and you’re fortunate enough to find someone who will pay you for doing it.

Two more things I would like to point out, and then we’re done with Spillville. The first is the St. Wenceslaus Catholic Church, the oldest Czech Catholic Church in the United States. If you find this intensely interesting, you may want to move to Spillville. They are very proud of their Czechishness there. When Andy and I drove there, the one thing that amazed me was the cemetery, which surrounds half of the church and easily has as many graves as there are living inhabitants. There are apparently a LOT of people who settled down here and decided not to leave. It’s amazing that such a small town can have that kind of gravitic effect on its inhabitants, and I say this with a sense of awe and a complete lack of understanding that is usually only achieved by Congress. I wanted to leave my hometown at the first opportunity. It killed me to come back. I’m currently in a town where my nearest family member is a good six hours away, and while it’s not ideal, I’m okay with that. But these people came to a small town, counted themselves among the 300, and were content to have their bodies delivered to the soil there when their time came. Given my life so far, I’ll probably be buried in a completely different state.

The second thing to point out is that the town has a public library. This isn’t really a historical landmark, but the knowledge that Spillville gets its own public library makes me very happy.

The Bily Clock Museum

In northeast Iowa, there is a place where clocks, farmers and woodcarving combine. The result is the Bily Clock Museum. I’ve been to see it once about a year and a half ago, and when my brother Andy showed up to spend Easter with me, I thought it was high time to go see it again.

The first thing to know about the Bily Clock Museum is that it is located in Spillville, Iowa. I firmly believe this is one of the greatest names for a town ever imagined. Keep your Truth or Consequences, which is pretty good, and your Fairviews, the most generic name for a town ever and coincidentally the most popular town name in the United States. But Spillville just sounds as though it was the result of a tanker truck accident, where a bunch of volunteers gathered to clean up a toxic waste spill and then when they were done said, “Screw it, we’re staying here.” The real reason, unfortunately, is that the town was founded by a guy with the last name of Spiel. Spiel’s Village=Spielville=Spillville.

You can’t exactly get to Spillville from Cresco, at least not directly. Yes, you take Highway 9, which runs through my experiences in northeast Iowa as surely as supermodels run through Tiger Wood’s golfing experiences. You go east until you’re halfway between Cresco and Decorah, in a little town called Ridgeway, and this is where things get weird. You have to turn down a sideroad, one that seems to be maintained with less frequency than a Brigadoon appearance, and the sign that directs you clearly says “Spillville, 8 (miles).” After you go down the expressway you come to a fork in the road with a sign that points you in the direction of Spillville. It also says, “Spillville, 9 (miles).” I’m not entirely sure how you can move physically closer to a point on a map and have it be further away. I personally think some quantum physicists should study this, as it could be invaluable in figuring out the true nature of the universe. I would also like to suggest, just to cover my bases, that the northeast Iowa road commission take a look at what their sign painters are doing.  I think it’s heroin.

The first thing you notice about Spillville is that it is a tiny town. It has a population of around 300. Normally a town with 300 people in it almost qualifies as a suburb or a bedroom community. But Spillville soldiers on, probably because there’s no other town for about nine (ten) miles. It’s impressive to see such a small town with a car dealership, even if there are only two cars in the dealer lot, both used. Spillville also boasts a gas station and mini mart, a nice restaurant, a bed and breakfast, and a bar called the Farr Side that easily had more customers in front of it than the other businesses combined.

Another point of interest is that Spillville actually has a town square, a stone gazebo right dead in the middle of main street that you have to drive around. You can look at it and think, just for a moment, that men in top hats and women wearing bonnets will be walking out to the gazebo, along with a small marching band playing the Spirit of ’76. Then you see the car dealership and get taken back to the twenty-first century.

The Bily Clock Museum is in a brownstone building that contrasts with the rest of Spillville like a red dress in a black and white film. It’s almost a perfect rectangle from the front and side, with no bits sticking out. It was built without decoration or pretension, simply meant to provide shelter. Even so, it stands with a quiet kind of majesty, something that would puzzle anyone who happened to zip through the town. Of course, anyone who did zip through town would be taking the highway four miles over. Most people who come to Spillville know what the building is.

Finally, there are the clocks themselves. Now, when I say “clocks,” please do not think of anything that can be hung on a wall. These are more like sculptures, with intricately carved panels, moving parts that activate when the hour is struck, and in one notable case the entire clock is carved from wood, including the clock gears.  In most of these sculptures/clocks the themes are similar—religion and science. One clock has the twelve apostles parade through a door, displaying themselves on a track for you before going back into the machinery.  Another showcases their version of the influential figures of the age, including Franklin D. Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt and Thomas Edison. Yet another has fifty-seven panels showing the history of America and the progress of the pioneers. There are some smaller pieces, but by and large they are the exception to the rule.

It is impossible to look at these clocks and not be awestruck. The Bily brothers were farmers, after all, who only did woodcutting as a hobby in the winter months when the lack of crops to tend left gaping holes of time to fill. They also only had a fifth-grade education, but they were avid readers. They put together a library that would shame most people who consider themselves academics, and in other circumstances it’s not hard to see them being university scholars. Also, they only traveled about thirty-five miles from their farm in Spillville. Most of the time, they were content to be farmers, and when they had some spare time they’d design and carve these clocks. For fun. Not for fame, and not for money—Henry Ford wanted to buy one of the Bilys’ clocks, and they turned him down, even when he offered them one million dollars. This is usually the part in the story where people say, “and they spent the rest of their lives in the loony bin, the end.”

 I take away a different moral from the story, though. If you are a farmer in the middle of nowhere, and despite your impressive book collection have never been more than thirty-five miles from home, you might be perfectly content with where you are and what you have. You might also have some project that you’re proud of. If you have all those things, then let me ask you, what good will a million dollars do you? You’ve already got everything you need, or want. It’s a peace of mind very few people have, or even understand. I could evangelize here, say that it’s because we have commercials telling us what we need next or that it’s because celebrities constantly flaunt their wealth and success, but I don’t think that’s the case. It’s more having peace of mind, being happy and content, is worth more than being able to buy something. It’s a state I think everyone is aiming for, and it may say something about how few people ever manage to achieve it.

It’s also worth noting there’s a lot you can do if you have a hobby you like and some free time to practice it.