I still remember that first Twins game.  Driving the bus up to the big marshmallow shaped building that was the mecca of Minnesota sports, the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome, or, as we called it, simply the ‘The Dome.’

This was the hay days of the Twins (but then to a true fan, they are all hay days).

As a farm kid, I remember the vastness of the building.  The crowds of people, mainly youngsters like our busload of baseball pilgrims coming in from the hinterlands for a weekday afternoon at the ballpark.  It was a scene of concrete, people, and pavement.  Of the vibrantness and decay of the city – with the people milling about, but also the dilapidated scene of the old mills and eye sore parking lots that seemed to stretch out before us before the skyline was raised to west as it approached the Grain Exchange Building and the Federal Building.

They ushered us into a big side door where ticket takers tried to scan the tickets of our entire rambunctious group.

The wind was amazing as we passed through the doors into the expansive concourse.  The blue and concrete mixing for an industrial athletic feel.  It felt sleek, modern, efficient, and the place that a mighty team like the Minnesota Twins should play in.

Slowly, we wound our way up the concrete ramps that took us up and up into the upper echelons of the Dome.  We were going to be seated in the sections, respectfully known due to their height, as the nose bleed sections.

My brother’s had warned me for the next piece of the experience.  Walking up those concrete steps to our seats in the nosebleed section was like look down onto a little world under the bubble of the Dome.  Thousands of people scurried like ants in the sections below and around us.  The players, little specs on the field, threw the ball in warm ups.  The place was massive, and like every farm boy before and after me, we had the same reaction….

“How much grain do you think you could fit in here?”

Now, I must admit, I’m generalizing a bit.  My older brother’s thought in terms of hay bales, not bushels of grain, but you get the right idea.

It was like a little piece of heaven.  The puffy white ceiling, the dark blue seats, the Cass Clay Creamery sign up on the score board.

Then there were the old baseball traditions – the cracker jacks, the hot dogs, the Seventh Inning Stretch, all of these were read about, heard about – and now I could see the vendors carrying the trays of popcorn and Cracker Jacks.  I could smell the hot dogs in the portable heating units that were being carted around.

I rose with pride as the choir came out and lead us in “The Star Spangle Banner” and I felt lucky and blessed to be in this place, to be watching the Mighty Minnesota Twins play baseball…and should it all fall away, should the Twins go back to Washington, should the smell of hot dogs and the Cracker Jack vendors go back from which they came…well…this place could still hold a heck of a lot of grain…

The number of times that I made the trek to the big Metropolis of Minneapolis-St. Paul before my teenage years could probably be counted on both hands.  The bulk of those trips were with the family, making the journey for some wedding, family reunion, or other such event.  Mom was about as country as they got, but she was born and bred in the heart of South St. Paul and spent the first half of her life living and working amongst the tall buildings of the big smoke.

Those few times when I made the journey without family supervision was with the school safety patrol, during the summer time to see our beloved Major League Baseball team, the Minnesota Twins take on one of their arch rival.

And to hear Herb Carneal announce it on the little radio in our barn, every rival in our division was an arch rival.

Those were heady times for our Minnesota Twins.  The era is one of legend.  Listening to the games as we milked the cows in the evening, we heard the names that still cause the most skeptical fan to melt just a little bit.

I can still hear the famous cry, “and coming up to bat, Kiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiirrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrbbbbbbbbbyyyyyyy Puckett!”  I remember Kent Hrbek and Greg Gagne (the G-Man with some hometown ties).  Then there were the pitchers, Bert Blyleven and Frank Viola.

We heard the names on the radio.  We heard the roar of the crowd.  We could hear the crack of the bat.

Suddenly, thanks to our membership in an elite and professional organization, the “School Safety Patrol,” we would have the priviledge…nay…the honor, of seeing a game in person thanks to the local American Legion Post that bought the tickets and paid for the bus to cart us the five hours from our little down town to the cities and back again.

Which made for a very long day.

In truth, the safety patrol perhaps, just perhaps, wasn’t quite as big of an honor as I make it out to be.  It was more like a draft system.  If you were in the fifth grade, you too were recruited into the school safety patrol.

No ifs, ands, or buts about it.

But at least we got to go to a Twins game.

Somehow, someway, they managed to schedule it around the hay harvest.  And though Dad and the brothers were none to happy to see a pair of hands depart for a day during the summer, it was a baseball, and it was an American tradition.

I still remember that hot July morning back in 1987, the heat and humidity in the parking lot at 5:30am as the cars of nervous parents idled with air conditioners running in the quiet of the parking lot of school.

The big yellow school bus, I think it was Myron’s bus #2 pulled into the parking lot.  About thirty tired and grumpy kids, with pillows and snacks in tow tumbled out of vehicles and made their way to seats on the bus.

I found a spot next to my good friend Matt.  The bus pulled out of the parking lot.  My first foray into the big city and my first taste of the Minnesota Twins, quietly humming, “we’re gonna win Twins” under my breath.

I’m a fan of history.  There is much to be gleaned from the pages.  History can inspire, warn, and entertain.  It is a fantastic way to learn about who we are as a people, as a country, and as a world.  This love of history extends from the very broad and ancient to the very local.

My own personal history, in the timeline of the ages, is fairly small.  But even in that time, I’ve seen a fair number of changes on our little farm where the prairie meets the woods.  The livestock is gone.  The barn and most of the outbuildings have been ripped down.  The fields of barley, oats, wheat, and alfalfa have given way to corn and soybeans.

But just as time moves forward, sometimes history springs up in the strangest places.

When I was back on the farm this last weekend, just as the sun was sinking to the western horizon, I went for a walk.  A peace settles over the landscape during that transition from day to night in summertime.  The activities of the day, and the activities of the night are just starting to fire up.

It was true on the farm too.  It was when the cows would leave the barn and head to pasture, when the tractors would make the last trip home from the fields for the day.

I’m not sure what prompted me to leave the well worn gravel road for points beyond, but I made a turn about half mile down the road, into the little grove that we have called Uncle Hank’s woods for as long as I can remember.  I passed through the stand of oaks, maples, and boxelders and made my way to the slough beyond.

As a child, this slough was part of a big pasture, that today is ringed by tall corn fields, sheltering it from view of the road and the farm.

When it was pasture, the cows would clip the grass down close to the ground.  When the slough was full, they would get into the mud to cool themselves, sometimes even drinking the brackish water.  During the dry times, the slough always had good and plentiful grass – the last of the moisture was locked in the ancient slough bottom and the grass would thrive.

It had been ages since I’d walked back through the slough.  Surrounded by walls of corn on three sides and coming to a point at Uncle Hank’s woods, the little twenty acre slough was reverting back to what the landscape must have once looked like.

Patches of golden rod dotted the landscape.  Prairie flowers scattered the landscape.  Grass, that from a distance looked like it may ankle high, reached waist higher or more in spots.  Ant hills as big as dinner plates dotted the landscape.  Frogs and toads were out in abundance on this cool summer night.

Little saplings, breaking through the grass, could be found on the knolls.  Deer beds and old burrows of fox and other critters could be found under old logs and in the side of old fence rows.  Though I didn’t see them in the thick grass, there must be rabbits, fox…and the one that I feared, skunks…in abundance.

It was like walking back in time, to a time when the bison once roamed the great prairies.  The earth had healed.  The plants and the animals had come back.

Change would come again, but it was good to see a picture of what once was.

Not all of the cabins that we frequented were rustic.  In addition to Uncle Frank and Aunt Marie’s cabin, we also had Aunt Julie and Uncle Omer that had a cabin as well on the other side of South Twin Lake.  Well, we called them Uncle and Aunt, but they were really double cousins, well, actually….nevermind, this is about cabins…

Their cabin, well, their compound really, was a little more extensive.  On the backlot, across the street from the cabin and lake shore, was a small storage shed and a fish cleaning shack. On the lake side of the road was a long garage, perfect for storing all of the things that you needed at the lake, plus the boat in winter.  Then, facing the lake, was a cabin.

More updated and modern…meaning that it had a telephone, running water, and indoor plumbing, it also had a couple of proper bedrooms, a big living room and dining room that opened up to a screened in porch and a back addition that had the toilet, shower, and a small area filled with tools and gear.

It was furnished in a lot of used, but comfortable furniture, picked up and put in over a series of years.  Though it wasn’t used year round, it had an old oil burning stove.  The one that I remember was a transplant from Great Uncle Charlie’s old house in town, small but effective, I remember it because of the story that Aunt Julie told of bringing it to the cabin.

In the middle of cleaning it, she felt something that felt like a rag underneath it, thinking it was stopping an oil leak, we yanked it out to see what would happen.  There was no leaking oil, because it was no rag…it was a bat.  She never said if it was alive or dead, but it was enough to make us cringe.

The lakeshore was rock and the bottom was a muddy sand.  It worked for swimming, but that wasn’t the main purpose.

I should probably explain, this was a cabin whose main purpose was recreation and fishing.  It was designed for fishing.  While Uncle Frank and Aunt Marie’s cabin had a sped boat that you could fish out of, Aunt Julie and Uncle Omer’s cabin had a fishing boat that you could fish out of.  Period.

Growing up, there were a couple of summers where we boys got to spend a week out with Aunt Julie and Uncle Omer.  It wasn’t a free trip, it usually meant cutting grass and doing some chores, but it meant swimming at the lake and early morning fishing.

Which was a lot for fun to get up for than milking cows.

For hours, we would sit in the little boat, bobbing on the water, pulling in sunfish and putting them into the little metal live trap hanging over the side of the boat.  Uncle Omer and Aunt Julie giving instructions and helping to bait and take the fish off.

About ten o’clock, with the sun high in the sky (or whenever the fish stopped biting), we’d head for shore where the cleaning would commence. 

Us kids got a pass on this chore, with the experienced hands of the masters cutting off the heads, scaling, and gutting them (with the help of the electric scaling machine).  Our job was to dig a hole – about four feet deep, and dump the remnants to keep the skunks and raccoons from digging them up.

It was always a high light of the summer.  Though other kids could talk of their trips to the Black Hills or family expeditions to Washington DC, there was something simple and pure about fishing and swimming and burying fish heads from skunks.

We lived a strange existence.  While most people prayed for a good weather on the 4^th of July – which meant warm and sunny, we did too…kind of…we prayed for it to be warm and sunny to let us get the hay crop in…but if it was going to rain, it might as well be early enough to let us go to the lake.

We were fortunate to have a couple of Uncles and Aunts that had cabins in close proximity to our little home town.  Well, I use Uncle and Aunts loosely, technically they were second double cousins, or probably more accurate second one a half cousins….which is a long story (my great uncle married my grandmother’s half-sister…), but growing up, our families were close, so out of respect, they were always given the affectionate title of Uncle and Aunt.

Uncle Frank and Aunt Marie’s cabin was simple place, built and maintained with a steady stream of hardwork, sweat, and love.  Located on South Twin Lake, about twenty miles from home, right off of the Elk Horn resort, it was a rustic but functional cabin.

I remember two bedrooms, one that was the master bedroom, where Uncle Frank and Aunt Marie called home.  There was also a bunk room where the cousins, they matched Mom and Dad in numbers, called home.  Then there was the big open room that doubled as living room, dining room, and kitchen. 

It wasn’t anything fancy, but it was functional and fun.

Early on, I don’t even remember running water, just a huge passel of jugs of various sizes that would serve as drinking water, cooking water, and water for cleaning.  Later, there was a tank installed outside to provide running water.

Though it wasn’t insulated, there was a small stove for those colder summer nights.

The bathroom was the old fashioned style (though later, I think they added an indoor variety). A small shed over a big hole dug ages before.  I’m not sure if or when it was ever moved, but I do know that the hot summer days stopped a kid from dawdling too long…and the spiders in the corner didn’t hurt the speed of the process either.

It was probably one of the reasons constipation was less of a problem in the days of outdoor toilets.

Plus it also lead to at least on good outhouse joke, like, “Did you hear about the Norwegian Four Seater Outhouse?  Two on the top…two on the bottom….”

It was a simple place, filled with simple pleasures.  And it was also great for us kids.  The beach was a gentle sandy slope out into the clear waters of South Twin, with few weeds and a great beach for building sandcastles.

The older cousins were always willing to play with their little cousin and good water fights usually would ensue.

The folks would sit up on the picnic table, in the shade of the cabin and the trees, watching at us and shaking their heads at our foolishness.

Though it lacked modern conveniences, it more than made up for it in its simplicity, its unpretentiousness, and more importantly the family and the great hospitality.

You almost…almost…didn’t even notice the outdoor plumbing….

You have to have some sympathy for the prophet Amos.  Here he is, approaching the priests and the officials and speaking words of warning, and they are sending him away.  Thinking him like every other prophet, talking about the woes of society.  Today, they would be the pundits and the talking heads, the people on both sides of the political aisle that speak of horrors on everyside…and make a good living doing it.

But Amos wasn’t like every other person that was talking about the woes that were to come.  Amos was no ‘professional.’  “I was no prophet, nor have I belonged to a company of prophets; I was a shepherd and a dresser of sycamores. The Lord took me from following the flock, and said to me, Go, prophesy to my people Israel.”

Imagine Amos, a shepherd probably by birth and training, making claims and knocking on the gates of the high and important people in society.

It sounds quite ridiculous on the surface.  A man with no formal education, no connections, trying to spread the word and do a task that God allocated to him.

Makes you laugh doesn’t it.

So what of the farm kid with no proper education, raised in poverty and a self educated lawyer…named Abraham Lincoln.

So what of the small town Illinois kid that landed some B-grade movie roles…and went toe to toe with the best of the Soviet Union…named Ronald Reagan.

So what of the little girl whose father died when she was a child, a Christian in a Muslim country…that would move to India…named Mother Teresa.

So what of the actor turned seminary student in the middle of World War II, from an obscure part of Nazi occupied Poland…who would later take the name of John Paul II.

So what of the shop keepers daughter that got her chemistry degree from oxford…and would one day before the first female Prime Minister of England, and nicknamed the ‘Iron Lady’…named Margaret Thatcher.

So what of the poor Iowa farm kid that was playing college football in California when he was spotted by a movie scout…and became an American icon…named John Wayne.

So what of the child that didn’t learn how to speak until the age of six and his parents were told that he was ‘uneducatable.’….who was named Albert Einstein.

The list could go on for page after page.  And while there are people of great reknown that followed the stars in their courses to do great and wonderful things…there is a disproportionate number of people that changed the world that had nothing but a vision, a prayer, and belief in a better world.

David the shepherd.  Peter the fisherman.  Matthew the tax collector.  Paul the Christian hunter.

Paul tells us that we have no more need of men like Amos, or Elijah, or John the Baptist.  By the spirit, we are all made prophets and able to see, hear, and discern the will of the Father.

Two of the men on my list have great words of wisdom, that I’ve found it useful to remember.  First is Abraham Lincoln’s call to action: “Whatever you are, be a good one.”  And John Wayne’s, “Courage is being scared to death, but saddling up anyway.”

In our eyes, we imagine all of the men and women who have made a difference in this world walked forward boldly and with great strength and courage.  The truth is very different.  Mother Teresa talked of the black night of the soul.  Paul wrote of this doubt as he prepared for his execution.  Abraham Lincoln dealt with depression.  All were people of great courage…all are known to have doubted their abilities.  Doubted themselves.  All feared.

But all saddled up anyway.  And it has made all the difference.

Growing up, there was always one constant, one thing that regardless the seasons, holidays, moods, health, wealth, poverty, triumph, failure, fight, festival, sorrow, or joy was always there and was always present.  Chores.

Chores always needed to be done.

Before Christmas Eve supper, with the house and kitchen filled with the smell of roasting turkey, and a host of unimaginable delicacies, we would hear, “boys, let’s go and do chores.”

On family celebrations, when relatives would fill the garage, coolers would be overflowing with soda’s, and the kitchen would stocked and the table overflowing, we would hear, “boys, why don’t you go and do chores.”

In the middle of massive fights between us boys, shouting and cursing could be heard throughout the farm, and either Mom or Dad would shout, “BOYS!  Stop it…and go and do chores!”

Before and after funerals for grandparents, great aunts and uncles, and neighbor, we would hear the words, “well, I guess we should go out and do chores.”

Before heading into school in the morning, “you have track practice tonight?  Well, make sure you are home for chores.”

After a victory at a speech meet, “Congratulations!  But that doesn’t mean you can get out of chores!”

Early in the morning, the cry would be heard, as Dad sipped his coffee by the kitchen table, “BOYS!  Come on!  Chores aren’t going to wait!”

Snow days, those days when the cold winter wind would lash against the windows and sometimes feet of snow would fall, it just meant a little more time and effort, because chores still needed to be done.

In the heat of summer, when the thermometer reached for the top of the glass, when triple digit weather hit and the warm bodies of the cows made milking and chores all the more unpleasant, well, chores still needed to be done.

Before prom night, before dates, the morning after late nights, regardless how good…or bad…the night ended, chores still had to be done.

Even my folk’s way of saying, “why don’t you go out and do chores” had a multiple meanings.  Sometimes it was said with great frustration in a, “quit screwing around” voice.  Sometimes it was with sympathetic pleading, the “I know you are having a good time, but the cows need feeding and milking.”  At times, it was with an urgency, with deadlines (band concerts, football games, church) looming in front of us.  Sometimes it was with a laughter and joy in a, “that was very funny young man…now get out of here!”

But in the end, one way or another, livestock needed to be fed, watered, bedded, and milked. Regardless the joys, the sorrows, the pain or discomfort, our charges counted on us.

And we complained about it.  The early mornings, the cold, the heat, the humidity, the crimp on our social life, and all of the other unpleasantness and discomforts that were associated with it.

But in the end, it create discipline.  It created structure.  It created normalcy.  It created a deep and abiding sense of responsibility.  Chores, work, discipline, and caring have been a part of humankind since man first struck sticks to make fire and warm his family.

As much as us boys might have complained, it has helped to make us what we are today.