Surf’s Up...in Milwaukee

I think the thing I love most about travelling, though it’s hard to pick from the long list, is being en route. People grumble about airline travel, the lines, the waiting, the bad food. I get happy when I smell jet fuel from the 101. It thrills me to be on layover at strange airports, people watching and wondering how everyone lives in this place and what they do.

But I have to say that visiting an old friend from Ireland is the icing on the travel cake. Opinions differ as to how long it is since we have seen each other. Andrew swears we met for at least one pint on South Anne Street in Dublin either 7, 9, or 13 years ago. I have no memory of the occasion and think it’s about 25 years. Either way, we can all agree that Lauren and I last saw each other on the Haight in September 2000 when I was about six minutes pregnant with Jessie. And a further point of agreement is that it’s brilliant I have come to Milwaukee to spend a few days in their excellent company some 7, 9, 13, 25, or 18 years later.

Andrew, suffice it to say, has not changed one bit since we were 19-year-old undergraduates in Trinity College Dublin back when the Temple Bar was still a collection of grimy warehouses and he worked for 2 days as a waiter in the Bad Ass Cafe. His comment on the experience: “They basically hired people on a daily basis because the pay was so low and the conditions so shitty that at the end of the day you’d be out of there.” I had a better time serving chips and pulling pints in the Buttery Bar, the dank cellar pub under Trinity’s dining hall: at the end of my shift I could just come out from behind the bar and join my friends for a couple of quick Guinness before closing time.

Andrew and Lauren live in a sweet yellow Milwaukee house in the leafy suburb of Shorewood with their two daughters and I’m getting a 4-day peek into their lives. They keep me in their basement, a dark and freezing experience as the A/C has to be on full blast down here since it’s 107 degrees the day I arrive and really hot at the top of the house. My body thinks I’m hibernating in a cave and I sleep better than I have for months. At the ice-cream social a neighbor throws on Sunday afternoon across the road, everyone keeps asking me which house on the block I live in. Oh I don’t live here, I say, I heard there was ice-cream so I stopped by. Nobody wants to be the first to get ice-cream, so I start spooning it out and soon the little gang of kids are lining up. I feel like I live here now.

Andrew is a Professor of English Literature at UWM, a job he was born to do. In his spare time, he gives tours of the socialist and cultural history of Milwaukee, plays darts under the Tricolor he hung in the local Legion bar, and hosts visiting authors and artists that he wangles faculty funds to invite. The last one was the chap who discovered Caravaggio’s lost The Taking of Christ in a Dublin Jesuit dining room. He authenticated it by taking a needle biopsy of the paint and travelling to Italy to verify the materials from which the pigments were made.

We sit in their living room and swap stories of all our college friends.  (“He has some girlfriend in the West of Ireland.” [Long pause.] “I think she’s real?”) Then we try to fill in all the missing years: we have a lot to cover: how he met Lauren, their marriage; my two; all the kids; Lauren’s three novels and the fourth she is feverishly not writing much of; my books and the day job as a hospice nurse that actually pays the bills. I watch how they work as a couple, the comfort of it.
“Wait, Lauren? If you happen to be swinging by, could you come in here?”
“What, tea?”

Andrew takes me on a tour of the city, and treats me to a nonstop history of the place, from its 1848 German founding through the waves of immigration and the Wards with their distinct characters. You can see where the Hispanic taco joints are layered over the old German funiture stores and how the streets of the Irish neighborhood were cut in half to make room for the highway. We stop to pay respects where 7 workers were shot at the Bayview Massacre in May 1886 that led to the 40-hour work week we take for granted now.

Lauren’s under deadline and worried because her book is short. I’ve read the first three: I know she’s a brilliant writer and this book will be even better, but I also know what it feels like to be writing the thing and have outsiders tell me it will all be fine. Shut up! You want to say. You have no idea what you’re talking about. This one sucks and will never sell and I’ll end up feeding my children from dumpsters.

While they’re working, I take a walk around Shorewood. Down on E. Oakland, a surf shop, possibly the last thing I expected to find in Milwaukee. I’ve swum twice now in Lake Michigan from the sedate Atwater Beach and it’s about as flat as the Mediterranean. Wondering how brisk business is, but admiring the optimism.

I’ve barely spent any time in the Midwest, so the impressions come crowding in: humidity like a warm blanket, fireflies, wide leafy streets, lush green gardens. The sense of a good life in a place that isn’t overrun with traffic and skyrocketing property prices. Real basements. And oh yeah, a winter that goes from October to April. With snow. Loving that I came in June. And because I’m a sucker for takeoff and the 33,000-foot view, loving the thought of the journey home and touchdown at SFO.