Memories in Madison (or, Kids, Are You Seeing All This Detritus?)

I almost married someone from Madison, WI. For almost four years, we made regular trips here to visit her family. We broke up in 2012 and after that I did not retain the name of even one restaurant in Madison. I mostly remember the layout of her parents' house and the fact that the cemetery near it is the final resting place of Chris Farley. I remembered thinking that capitol building is beautiful and I remember where her dad's office building is (right across the street from the capitol). Our break-up devastated me, but I still enjoy coming back here. It's a college town and I fondly remember attending a Badger football game against Penn State, right as the scandal that brought down Joe Paterno was unfolding, with my ex and my daughter and doing the "jump around."

This morning I sat outside at the Brunch Club and ordered the breakfast nachos. The waiter was a skinny, friendly, bespectacled and unshaven young man who seemed surprised to learn that I had never been to the Brunch Club before and encouraged me to order their doughnuts, which I did not. Apparently they put meat on the doughnuts, I am pretty sure I saw slabs of bacon on the doughnuts of the next table over. I ordered the breakfast nachos and they were good enough while I had not eaten all of the avocado off it, but once I had, midway through the meal, the rest was unimpressive. The chicken wasn't warm and a bit dry, and the whole thing overrun with BBQ sauce, which is not what I think or like when I eat breakfast.

I wish I knew architectural terms as any attempt at travel-writing feels feeble in the face of my ignorance. I can through around vague color terms, and the words "brick," "modern," "old," "English," and that's about it. Those are all words that came to mind as I wandered the campus of UW-Madison and streets near Lake Mendota.

In the way that a bad day at the beach is better than a good day at the office, I find it hard to imagine a big lake being a bad lake. Lake Mendota tries, though. One scenic overlook was littered with anthills and long flies buzzing around them... I mean impressively, I had the thought that I felt swarmed by a universe of ants and flies, not a colony. Another spot was littered with litter, in good college campus fashion. Empty cans of Natural Ice, vodka, and an old tub of whey protein were among the detritus.

The horizon is not much to look out on, either, from the downtown Madison/campus end, anyway. Again, though, it's a big lake.

Maybe the Minnesotan in me just gravitates towards shitting on Wisconsin. Also, my parents grew up in the stunning Finger Lakes region of New York and I have inherited a little snobbery about lakes.

Really, I still like Madison a lot. It has a vibrant college atmosphere with all the attendant quirky shops and restaurants you would expect and without the big-city claustrophobia. The Wisconsin capitol building is a sparkling pearl of a city centerpiece. The lakes are still lakes.

I believed two things about Madison before this visit which have been dispelled. One was that the Wisconsin state capitol building had been lowered in height because it was once taller than the U.S. national capitol building. It is indeed currently taller than the national capitol building, Wisconsin's capitol building has never been lowered. I also believed Wisconsinites don't eat fried cheese curds. They are non-fried purists who scoff at Minnesotans like me who like our cheese curds fried, fried, fried, baby. No. Nein. My crewmate at at Cooper's and her meal included cheese curds which, unbeknownst to her, were prepared fried. Maybe this is to accommodate the tourists?

I paid two visits to Ian's Pizza on Frances St as it is one of my favorite pizza places to visit in the country. Madison has two superb locations. For my late lunch at 5pm I had a slice of the Vegan pizza and a slice of the Penne pizza. For my late dinner at 11 p.m. I had a slice of the Portobello Pesto Blues and a slice of the Florentine. Despite my recent half-hearted attempts to reduce caffeine intake, I had a can of Cherry Coke Zero with both. I love a good pizza place and in Madison, Ian's is it. My very first overnight stay as a flight attendant was in Madison, WI and we arrived late. It was a pleasant surprise to discover a pizza place still open after midnight and the two Ian's pizza locations in Madison are open until 2:30 a.m.

After my late lunch at Ian's I walked Basset St. to the bay of Lake Monona. I liked it more than I did Mendota Lake earlier in the day. The wind rippled the waters, rush hour traffic bustled down John Nolen Dr., there were train tracks, and sexy people were out jogging, walking, bike-riding, and roller-blading. Though the smaller of Madison's two famous lakes, Monona was compensating well for its (lack of) size, like Dustin Pedroia.


PICTURES: A TALE OF TWO LAKES:

Look at the bay of Lake Monona. Lookin' lovely.


Aaaand, then there's Lake Mendota:

Kinda boring...

Lake Mendota shore detritus. Kids, are you seeing all this detritus?

The Chemistry Daniels Building in Madison, WI

The Chemistry Daniels Building

Erected and christened to commemorate the late, great UW-Madison professor Chemistry Daniels, a titan in the field of Literature for over 5 decades before he passed in 2006. Prof. Daniels specialized in the Romantic period of the 19th century, but was well-versed in everything literature. Passionate and charismatic about the topic, he could captivate students for hours with his lectures, while also down-to-earth enough to hold legendarily long office-hours sessions where students could come to him about anything, academics or not. Professor Daniels was an avid jogger to the end, often seen running along Mendota Lake and past the frat houses on Langdon St with his trademark scraggly beard. His son, Hawthorne Daniels, is an engineering professor at UW-Madison who co-owns the popular Ian's Pizza restaurants in the city.

Or... erected in memoriam for child-prodigy Daniel Windsor who enrolled at UW-Madison in 1997 at the age of 11. Known as a whiz-kid on any subject, Daniel's favorite was chemistry. He earned his B.S. at just 15 years-old and would've gone on to pursue a doctorate had he not been stricken with an extremely rare form of throat cancer at 16 and died in 2004, remembered lovingly in Madison as Chemistry Daniel.*

Or... an intentionally abstract and cryptic clause, in true artsy-fartsy university fashion, intended to draw the observer to ponder and appreciate the chemistry Daniel is building, or, now, has built. It cannot be easy to sustain such cinematic chemistry through eight films, starting in early puberty and on into your late teens/early 20s, with famously enigmatic, ginger co-star Rupert Grint. And, yet, Daniel did it. The result is an enduring trove of film that will transport us to another world yet demand that we ponder the state of our own for generations.

Behold! The Chemistry Daniels Building (now, built).*



*UW-Madison is an elite public research university and there is no need to question whether they failed to use the necessary possessive or contractual (as in, to conTRACT or reduce, not CONtract or agreement) apostrophe that would be appropriate for scenarios two or three.

A Brief Encounter with Bismarck

Bismarck is brown, beige, brick and tan and a beer brewer with big brass bins near the window rests beside the Fireflour pizza and coffee joint which turned me away at 10:30am because I wanted pizza and they are only coffee until 11:00am.

My hotel is 9 stories tall and looks like the tallest building in the city. Half of the vehicles meandering the streets are pick-up trucks and half of those pickup trucks have dirt baked into them with love over months. One pick-up truck looks like it was purchased in 1987 and roars down the street with white male anger, a Trump-Pence bumper sticker placed delicately, perfectly, in the top-center of the rear window. The truck’s entire passenger side is mangled yet un-repaired. Dirt and injury are worn on the trucks like badges of honor, just as is the grey in the long dark red and brown beards of the aging white men who populate the McDonald’s I chose after the Fireflour rejection and talk with kind age while Fox News hums in the background on the big TV screens.

The checkout counter moves slowly. An old woman appears to be negotiating with coupons on her smartphone and the fat woman manning the checkout counter behaves with limited familiarity with the cash register. As the transaction proceeds into its third or fourth minute, the old woman gestures about “the people” waiting behind her for whom she is concerned. There are three of us, including me, and we really do not care. It is 10:48am in Bismarck, there is no rush.

Bismarck has a new baseball team this year. Their season runs from the end of May through August. “Baseball is back in Bismarck” blare the promotions.

Bismarck’s shop windows suggest little treasures of humanity, one window said something about “seeds of hope,” another is a thrift shop marketing its reusable wares and suggesting that buying things there helps people in some charitable way. I didn’t pay attention to how. A kind-looking older woman was visible at the checkout counter as I passed by the doorway. I pondered stopping in to look at the book collection and maybe buy sunglasses because it was very bright in Bismarck.


UPDATE: I went into Fireflour around 3:30, sat alone by the window and ordered the Chopped (a salad), the Shroom (a pizza), and a Diet Coke. The food was first-rate, excellent portions and taste.