David Banks: What Ecclesiastes said, approximately

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On Sunday afternoon, I went for a walk in my southwest Minneapolis neighborhood. If you also were alive on Sunday, you know it was a most glorious spring day around Minnesota.

Above all, it smelled like spring. People of this latitude know what that means and how it makes a person feel. It’s promise fulfilled.

Moreover, it was a weekend spring day. There’s a difference. On a weekend there’s something more in the air — a sort of recreational industry, at least for those in a position to enjoy it. Even those who aren’t in that position might at least perceive it, wistfully, en route to their obligations.

Both in thinking and writing about this characterization, I wasn’t sure it would translate, given the ease of the last winter. Memories can be short. But if you know, you know.

I walked through a park along Minnehaha Creek. It was surprisingly empty, except at the tennis courts, which had been restored to perfection a few years ago, in order to begin the cycle of decline anew. I often walk through this area and see few other people, though one part of the park serves as a sledding hill in winter. The ride is brief — first steep, then too steep, then a hard bottoming-out, and lumpy all the way down. But it’s popular. Minneapolis is largely not a city of pronounced elevation, so people take what they can get when what they need is gravity.

It may not matter to the children who are the main participants, but the sledding experience is misleading. It’s one of the rarer cycles in life in which the descent is more fun.

City life was up and coming again when I bought my house. The neighborhood was just close enough for easy access to urban excitement and just distant enough from that for tranquillity. That’s why I chose it, at the turn of the century, with the cycle of decline in its waning phase, waiting to wax anew. You could reverse the order if you’re an optimist. Or something.

My specific part of Minneapolis has been mostly tranquil since then, except for the police killing of Justine Damond — a shot I think I heard fired — and the surreal days after the murder of George Floyd, when the sound of protest wafted at intervals toward my house from the other side of the creek. Why? Because Mike Freeman lived over there at the time, and at the time he was the county attorney.

I’m lucky to live where I do, just as I was lucky to be born when and where I was. I was adopted as an infant and until a few years ago didn’t know my ancestry. Now I do, and figuratively speaking three-quarters of it is at war — my Ukrainian half in a bid for survival against an invading despot, and my Jewish quarter in a bid for acceptance, not just of a viciously rationalistic military strategy but once again of its very existence, after exhausting the limited window it was accorded after Oct. 7 to somehow subdue an enemy embedded among innocents.

The remainder of my heritage, Sweden, recently joined NATO. After years of maintaining what could be called a close distance with the alliance, the country concluded that tranquillity no longer is assured without it.

Amid this, it’s hard to know the condition of my own tranquillity. Being introduced to my ancestry has made both recent and distant global history more poignant to me, but the connections are still plenty abstract. I didn’t grow up with exposure to those cultures, apart from the Scandinavian. I’m a newcomer to them, and a mixed one at that. A mutt. To what extent can I claim identity?

I’m skeptical of identity in any case. So often it seems to narrow and harden perspectives. I also see how it can come to feel imperative.

If I were pressed to declare an identity, it would be as a Minnesotan, since I’ve never lived elsewhere. And so the divisions I feel most acutely are the ones that seem to be growing in this state — that seemed not to exist to such an extent previously.

They did, though. Generations pass, but nature is permanent, to paraphrase Ecclesiastes. To which I’d add human nature. There were race riots in Minneapolis the year I was born. And this city that I aspired to from my upbringing in southern Minnesota was once thought to be one of the nation’s most antisemitic.

These are things I’ve known about, but not things I fully absorbed. I prefer the ideal of progress. It’s taken me three-quarters of a typical life span to accept the persistence of cycles.

In which yet also resides the promise of renewal.