Photo by Scott Strebel, posted to Facebook May 28, 2020, 11:04 a.m.
When I saw the first car burning in Minneapolis, I thought, “Oh, I hope that’s not Sam’s car.” It was just a car, but it was our son’s car. The car was old, loved, cared for. The car had history. I thought of the streets that car had been driven down under the careful control of our son…Minneapolis, St. Paul, our son’s home for half his 41 years in the Twin Cities he loved…the cities I loved because it was where our son lived.
The Twin Cities were part of Sam. It was who he was. I loved the people there, the streets, the stores, the memories I have because I visited Sam while he lived in Minneapolis and then later in St. Paul…the streets we walked down, the apartments he had rented, the houses across the Twin Cities where he had rented rooms, the motels where I stayed while I visited, the couches I slept on when Sam had a couch to sleep on, one very bad blow up mattress I tried to sleep on, the stores where we shopped, the restaurants where we shared a meal, the coffee shops he sat in with his computer to compose written word and to send us emails, the barber shops, the neighborhood auto repair shops, the Mom and Pop stores he frequented, the gas stations, the resale shop where he bought furniture, the co-op where he had a membership, the lakes he walked around, the dentists offices, the medical clinics, the chiropractic offices that kept our son on his feet and going. I’d been to that first burned and looted Target. I knew Lake Street and Minnehaha…But, Sam died a little over a year ago.
I thought of the young man who bought Sam’s car after Sam’s death. I thought about how the friend of Sam’s who sold his car for us kept the vehicle for the new owner until he could get enough money together to buy it. I thought about how proud he was to have wheels, how comforted I was that someone would be able to take pride of ownership for the car our son owned and we didn’t have to have the car towed to a junkyard because no one wanted it. I thought of people watching across the country who, seeing that first car blaze in Minneapolis might think, oh, that’s just a clunker. It’s just an old car going up in smoke in Minneapolis.
Oh, Sam. Oh, Sam! You would not believe it.
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