The autumn season, just started officially, is now far enough along to bring the pro football season to an (extra) point where a team as of this weekend could have, conceivably, faced all the other rivals in their division. Depending on which one we’re in. If the division consists of five (teams), they’re still possibly alive, although Black and Blue.
So I continue my nightlife writing anew, even though my favorite NFL team was not showing up as faithfully. So, maybe for now just amble over to the apple orchard and pick some (forbidden) fruit …
Or: In our case, up in the Midwest, it started with those two rivals in states that are adjoining east-west, the ol’ Packers and Vikings, squaring off already, very early in this the season and of course division opener. But first, some history for the pro football league: Only the dreaded Bears, also in an adjoining state, in this case only for The Pack, have been faced more often in NFL action, going back more than a century with well over 100 games played, usually in frigid temps but that will come around later. The Detroit debacles, also in the old Norse Division, in addition would be delayed in this season, giving it overtime status. This foregoing of games is now at play, but that didn’t keep another, more prominent Hudson area online sports commentator, from also airing and sharing recently his links to historic Alary’s (Al’s) Bar in downtown St. Paul and his relationship with its famous founder and player, a late lineman from the south side of Chicago. His prime handiwork after retirement from football, which in the past featured hanging-out from the likes of Al Capone, is on West Seventh Street, but not the Seventh Street Entry stage on the First Avenue venue that Prince made famous. No this is a different kind of entertainment, though related … (Note to self, with my history of the epic venue, but you may want to scroll through, past the name-dropping: It’s been too long since I’ve meandered over to this, The Upper Midwest’s Official Bears Bar and past gangsta hangout, to cavort with a few longtime friends, such as chill for a bit by her beer cooler station with chief bartender Crystal, not to mention banter with coworker Bree manning the main bar, or also with Addi giving thirst aid, all legendary longtime employees who made their mark with a start early in the millennium in trademark skimpy referee outfits, alas now retired from being attire. Just ask another true fan when he’s in town for a concert, none other than patron Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam, with his oft-aired view on where to find the most beautiful women in the Twin Cities, and we all have been occasionally going back to this place, like The House of the Rising Sun “that’s been the ruin of many a poor boy,” for decades. The ladies looked far less grungy.)
So not to further digress and regress and stop dropping names in excess, trying to sound like Motley Crue in their song Girls, Girls, Girls, you think football ain’t fun, even when your team is losing, like my Packers? Back the Bears. Or Vikes? Yikes.
So the gridiron is in the news, and it started the week before the Minnesota-Green Bay game arrived to end it on a Sunday, I made a foray to the local sports bar and within a beer-pour length there was on a pro football station a preview of this grid goliath, from among all the other contests it could have picked. Prepped nationally with all the furvor of a prep game, if it’s the high school championship, on networks like ESPN. As I glanced up at the TV screen for one of the first times, I spied a muscled but still lightweight player lunge with his ball toward a flag — its stripes marking the corner of the end zone. Days earlier, the Vikes made a national newscast with the story line of their vaunted defense, as usual, and that of the Ravens that also may be getting a new look with their new scheme prompted by their new coordinator. Offenses still suck. (Update: Also, in a leap to Lambeau, a totally absent run game again loomed and doomed the Packers on Thursday night, as the Falcons rolled up plenty of points and beat them. And so it goes.)
As it was a bit earlier, when Green Bay bolted to a bigger than usual lead against Minnesota, but couldn’t hold it in the second half, so put their opener in their loss column. One and done, and afterward they had none. So zero and one, plus now a second, and onward … The battle of the century had turned into one, maybe, just of the decade, if that. At least, minus QB Rodgers, who was in a darkness retreat in a hunting shack somewhere north of Green Bay, there was some offense, but mostly by the purple people.
So I shift my gaze left and right, noticing on TV screens all the bounty-like circular insignias pasted to the back of the helmets of … what, Oregon? What do those on the headgear of the Buckeyes, south of Detroit, in Ohio, think of this? Or those from elsewhere in that state, where their Little League tourney team was being watched carefully and locally in its World Series play that same night by a handful of visitors, spectators from that other red state and Badger battle-worn, who happened to be in town. At first I thought LLWS stood for Latin Lefty Wins Shutout. Then when more lucid …
Meanwhile, a man across the bar offered me his trademark beer nuts — after also suggesting them to the guy sitting next to him, an offering from the end of his jar that was tipped and slanted with peanut-kind-of-things in the direction of his new friend. I took a few, faithfully with him to the green and gratefully too, but I asked the two of them if the passion would be the same if these were dry, honey roasted nuts. Never! They need to be named so that they match the state beer. And since I was told by my doctor that as my triglyceride count is too high, I need to intake more mixed nuts in my diet, like the ones mom puts out when I visit. Mixed nuts. Like the division? Or was this mindless bar talk?
But maybe this is not, as far as nuts, as was published statewide: It’s a banner year for oaks and their crop of acorns now dropping, like few we have seen, for even beer nuts, and although it might take some doing, these when entrenched with their long tap roots, these might even crowd out the buckthorn. Haha. As both the reds with pointy leaves and the whites with lobes, unlike the elm and ash, are thriving.
A quick game of pool — then a second, but there would be no third period — followed this focus on football and its accompanying nibbling of nuts, with my partner (now a new friend?) saying he’d carry this old sot on his back like a frosty parka brushing off the cold. The man slinged and shot well, but we both noticed that the table was poorly aligned and positioned, meaning there was a machine for cashing out too close to one of the corner pockets, and the jukebox too close to another, so to shoot he had to raise his stick up way too high and arch it (OK, get your mind out of the gutter.) Meanwhile, the machine cranked out the Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald, reminders of the ship’s dining hall in the song, or the pool table in this bar, that were slanted because of blowing in the harsh galestorm wind. “And the lake it is said never gives up its dead, when the gales of November come early.” Like the wind that would blow off the St. Croix River on my walk home, like the great ship coming “from some mill in Wisconsin.” (I wonder if the song should have really referenced a tawdry taconite mine in Minnesota?)
But in addition now on weekends, with the first day of fall just passed, it’s more about eating apples — before they’re frozen into mush — and picking pumpkins to be carved, while the hulls are still crisp. Like a shirt at a boutique down the way from me, seen while walking quickly in the midnight breeze, championing bonfires and campfires, flannel shirts and s’mores, and more. A curiosities store not far from the pool hall had found another way to bee: It had for sale four oversize and otherwise empty, ornamental and cardboard “honeycomb” and other creations, with rolls showing holes about in inch in diameter. Many hundreds of them. Those big bees apparently could not keep up just prior to the close of the season, and thus the harvest.
The next door down was a Dunn Bros. coffee shop, not to open for a few hours yet, that I have referenced many times. It championed pumpkin spice and maple pancake chicken (with I’m sure some caramel nut) creations, for summer they say, and summer I say, comfort. This is noteworthy because McDonalds recently made news, after selling in total billions and billions, by replacing for fall its pumpkin spice latte with new caramel apple pie.
Meanwhile, other places, sale items included a recipe for fudge cornbread brownies, as I will take the liberty of describing them, to go with my now-dug-into apple cinammon muffin mix and custom fudge cheesecake spread I haven’t eaten yet that’s leftover from Christmas gifting (ouch), Oreos of a truffles persuasion, and pumpkin again and New York style cheesecake bites, marked by those little stripes of glaze amidst the white frosting.
Up on the pumpkin-laden hill, a big grocery store had an outside-the-doors sale of three kinds of planted in pots annuals: Fall mums, kale and ornamental pepper. I’d associated these more with August than autumn, and not with eating them up. As those shoppers briskly walking away in the emptier part of the parking lot saw their umbrellas flapping upward in yet another set of wind gusts, and barely could contain their hold on the handles.
(For more of the same, in merchandise, patronize the businesses profiled below.)