I’m not known as a baseball fanatic. I enjoy the game — far more when I’m watching it live than on TV — and I’m a loyal Minnesota Twins fan, but I don’t follow statistics or players (though it has become easy to do so now that I have officially “Liked” the Twins Facebook page and followed @minnesotatwins on Twitter). All the same, I read the news about Target Field — the brand new OUTDOOR baseball stadium — with great interest, and when I realized that the Twins would be finishing up their series against the Yankees on the day we were set to arrive in Minneapolis I knew that I had to be at that game.

All props go to Dan for actually making it happen. I tried for tickets via the Twins’ site but the game had already sold out — no surprise, really, but disappointing. I was ready to admit defeat and try for tickets for another time, another visit, but Dan insisted that we be there, and he found tickets on StubHub. This is remarkable not for Dan’s facility with the Internet, but that he was determined to get to a Twins game at all. The Twins, you see, are responsible for Dan’s disillusionment with Major League Baseball. He used to love the game. But in 1987 he picked the St. Louis Cardinals to go all the way and while they did indeed make it to the World Series that year, they were defeated 4 games to 3 by . . . the Minnesota Twins (wonk, wonk). He was utterly heartbroken and couldn’t watch baseball after that. So that he was more than willing to procure tickets to fulfill one of my wishes says everything you need to know about the man’s good nature and generous spirit. Not to mention he got two extra tickets so some family members could join us.

There were two main reasons I so desperately wanted to see a game at Target Field. First, I’d never seen the Twins play outdoors before. Second, I wanted to see the showpiece of the ballpark, the big original Twins logo done up in neon, perform its magic when one of the Twins hit a home run. A tall order — someone would have to hit a home run — and I knew the odds were against it, but I had hopes. More on that later.

My first live view of Target Field did not disappoint.

There’s the neon logo, off the the right of the Jumbotron. When a Twin scores a run, the state outline lights up. For the first two runs I had a Dayenu moment because honestly, that would’ve been enough for me to feel completely satisfied. But it gets better. So. Much. Better.

Our seats were in the waaaaaaay back, all the way up at the top. However, one of the beautiful things about Target Field is that, with one famous exception, there doesn’t seem to be a bad seat in the park. This was our view of the diamond:

Far away, but still able to see everything and occasionally weigh in on whether a pitch was a strike or a ball.

And this was our spectacular view of downtown Minneapolis:

It was wonderful to watch the light from the setting sun play off the buildings.

And when the sun had all but set, downtown Minneapolis was resplendent in deep aquatic blues.

(Apologies for the brightness of the stadium lights. And the tiny dots you see at the top of the screen aren’t stars, they’re bugs. Sitting up at the top by the lights meant we got SWARMED.)

The game itself was wildly exciting. Though the Twins had lost to the Yankees by one run in both of the previous games, they had the upper hand in this game almost from the beginning. I think there was an error in an early inning, but it’s been two weeks since the game and my memory is a little fuzzy. But in the 6th inning, Jason Kubel hit a home run.

And that’s when the neon logo does its thing. It’s not just amazingly beautiful, with the Minneapolis and St. Paul players shaking hands over the Mississippi River. No, no. When the Twins score a home run, the Minneapolis player and the St. Paul player actually shake hands on a job well done. They ACTUALLY SHAKE HANDS. I was too busy jumping up and down and screaming like a teenager in 1964 watching the Beatles (tm Dan) to take a video, but here’s one I found on YouTube:

Tell me that’s not the coolest thing you’ve ever seen.

And I got to see it TWICE that night. After his solo shot, Jason Kubel hit a three-run homer in the bottom of the 7th inning, bringing the score to where it would stay, 8-2.

(I completely overlooked how the T and the s blink on and off to display “win” alternating with “Twins.” And here I didn’t think it was possible to love that logo more.)

We left after the 7th inning — my four-year-old nephew was fading fast and on top of that the bug situation was out of control (which sounds silly, but you have NO IDEA) — and though I normally prefer to stay til the end of a game, leaving on such a high note felt all right. The experience of watching a game surrounded by Twins fans — for the first time since the early 90s, and after eight years of living in New York — is not one I’m likely to forget any time soon, and one I hope to repeat as often as possible.

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My grandmother was a classy dame. So classy, in fact, that she’d probably disapprove of my calling her a dame. She was a lady.

(When she died, and family gathered together to talk to the rabbi about her life, I remember my mom and aunt saying something like, “She never wore pants. Because ladies didn’t wear pants.” And in that moment my mind positively reeled, as though I was flipping through scene after scene with my grandmother from my childhood to the last time I saw her, and by golly they were right. I’d never realized it in those terms before, but that woman never wore pants. Only skirts. Only ever skirts.)

My grandmother wore hats, though, when it was fashionable to wear hats, and even when styles changed and ladies didn’t wear hats on a daily basis anymore, she kept most of her hats, the daily wear hats as well as those for fancy occasions. True, my grandmother was a skirt-wearing lady who never threw anything out, but I like to think she kept these hats not because she thought they’d come in useful someday — like the jewelry boxes filled with paper clips we kept finding in her desk drawers — but because she thought they might some day become heirlooms. Right now I think she held on to them because she knew someday I would have them, and even though they were meant to be worn, that I’d treasure them as works of art.

Because you guys — look at these hats.

The top one, with the hearts on the veil, is one of my favorites. I think it’s one of the older hats, from the 1940s maybe? And the bottom one intrigues me as well because I’ve never seen anything like it and have no idea when it’s from. All I really have are the labels inside to work from.

So I know that she purchased most of her hats from Field-Schlick, a now defunct department store whose flagship was in downtown St. Paul, on Wabasha and Fifth. I dug a little and found this photo of the Wabasha St. entrance in the Minnesota Historical Society’s online collection:

Although it’s more likely that my grandmother went to the store on S. Cleveland, since it was closer to her house (the house I grew up in).

I also found out that Field-Schlick used to be D. W. Ingersoll & Co. and opened in 1856. By 1896 it had become Field-Schlick, according to an advertisement I found in the St. Paul Globe. (The ad was for a sale on fancy parasols and something called “crash skirts,” but I couldn’t find any information online about what a crash skirt was.)

I do happen to have one of the hatboxes from Field-Schlick:

And one that might interest other native Minnesotans, from Dayton’s. Look at that old logo:

(Oh, Dayton’s. Now you are Macy’s. It’s a little sad.)

More hats:

This one strikes me as a winter hat. The beadwork suggests it was for nice outings like to the theater, but based on what I know of my grandmother I’m more inclined to guess that she wore it on a regular basis, like for shopping or lunch with the girls, or perhaps to normal Friday night services at the synagogue.

This one I can’t picture my grandmother wearing at all, even though it’s her favorite color. The style looks like it would be suited more for a young girl, so my guess would be that this was my mom’s or aunt’s:

I almost didn’t see this one when I was unpacking everything, but it must be part of a bridal veil.

And this one . . . this one simply takes my breath away.

How on earth did hats like this go out of style?

Ever since my grandmother’s hats came into my possession I’ve pondered the best way to display them — well, best and least expensive. I’m wary of simply hanging them as is because some of them are fragile and they’ve been preserved so well through the decades, I don’t want to be the one responsible for their decay. So I think a sort of acrylic box that could be wall mounted would be the way to go, but that’ll take some scratch, and I’m not there yet.

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The following was inspired by a writing prompt courtesy of Write One Leaf.

My family wasn’t the outdoorsy kind (too much nature), but I don’t think it’s possible to grow up in Minnesota and NOT go fishing at least once. And while ice fishing is definitely something one needs to experience — again, at least once — it’s lake fishing, in the middle of summer, on a 90 degree day, with a peerless cloudless sky, in placid waters, that I remember with such fondness. I don’t remember the first time I went fishing, but I do remember going out one day in North Dakota, during the month I was visiting my father, though my dad didn’t go with us. Again, not the outdoorsy type. Instead, one of his colleagues and friends took me out with his two sons, one of whom was roughly my age, out to some park or another that must have been outside Grand Forks because honestly, there isn’t a lot of natural beauty that I remember in Grand Forks. It’s been a while since I’ve been back, so forgive me if I’m wrong.

We had a picnic-style lunch of hot dogs and chips and pop (I say soda now, but I want to stay true to my Midwestern roots for this story), and then set out in a motor boat, life jackets at the ready. For the purposes of this story I’m going to make this the first time I’d gone fishing, and I’m going to say that this is why my dad sent me along without him, because he had no interest in it but knew that I was keen. And so Ed and his sons whose names I have forgotten (Tom? Mike?) taught me how to how to bait my hook, first offering to do it for me. I took that to imply “cuz you’re a girl” and I wasn’t going to let that happen, so I said, “I can bait my own hook, just show me how.” And I put a worm piece on my hook, remembering at the time how I used to dig up the backyard looking for worms because I thought they were fascinating creatures, and I used to collect them and put them in plastic buckets of dirt and I guess I was trying to start my own worm farm? But then my grandmother caught on to what I was doing and berated me for digging up her lawn, and that was the end of my worm farm enterprise.

We sat in the boat for what felt like hours, drinking pop and eating chips and listening to the water lap at our boat. We weren’t catching anything, and the boys and I were becoming frustrated, and we were running out of worms, because the fish would grab the worms right off the hooks and say thanks for the snack and then rush off again to tell their friends that there were free snacks availalbe if they were careful enough. I’d just lost my last worm but I didn’t want to give up fishing because I liked the experiment in patience, the possibility that at any moment something could happen, and the tranquility that comes with being on the water. (On certain summer days, those around me will hear me openly long to be on a boat. And not on the Hudson or East River. I mean on a lake, far away from anything. Give me a canoe and a paddle and push me off.)

We had leftover hot dogs, so I reached into the cooler, found the uneaten dogs, broke off a small chunk of one, and put it on my hook. The boys laughed at me. Fish don’t like hot dogs, they jeered. That’s never gonna work. I shrugged, because clearly they didn’t get it, and flung my hook back into the lake. Within minutes, I had a bite. A real bite, not a tug that would’ve told me that I’d just lost my worm to a hungry fish. This fish was threatening to pull my fishing pole right out of my hands if I wasn’t careful. I whooped, and Ed was right there to back me up. He told me how to move with the fish as I reeled it in, he held my shoulders down so I wouldn’t get jerked around. I held on, and while the fish wasn’t that big I felt like I was in danger of getting pulled right off the boat. The end of the pole was starting to chafe, my arm muscles were straining, it was all happening too fast and too slow at the same time. But we finally got the fish out of the water, and I whooped again, looking triumphantly at the boys who dismissed my hot dog experiment. I’d caught the first fish. I’d caught the only fish that day.

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