La Crosse, Wisconsin is magical. I’ve been here for a month and I am completely won over by the place, the people, and the large portions. Some of this month’s more unforgettable local moments include:
Guns: The local school held a fund raiser where the top raffle prizes were guns. My sister-in-law’s dad won himself a new .22. People in Wisconsin hunt, so nobody here thinks this is odd.
Trust: I accidentally mailed a letter with a name but no address. Realizing my mistake, I immediately went to the Post Office and explained the situation. The woman there asked for my street address and then said, “That address is on the south side, so your mail carrier is Pete”. She called Pete in his truck. He rifled through his stack of collected mail and said “Got it”. He then delivered the unaddressed letter to the Post Office at the end of his day. The kind lady called me. I picked up the letter. I was never asked to show ID or to sign a form. I asked the kind lady about it and she just laughed, adding “Who would make up such a story?”
Service: I spent hours in the Social Security office on behalf of mom and dad. Their case is complicated, and the woman at the counter was new. She struggled with the transaction and I left with many things unresolved. But I did secure a meeting for the following Monday with her manager. The woman from the counter then called me the next day – let me repeat that someone from Social Security voluntarily called me – just to say she did not feel she had provided satisfactory service and she looked forward to Monday’s meeting with the manager to make sure everything got resolved. I nearly cried.
Jesus: We took my nephews to a maple sugar bush. The smell of wood fires and boiling sap were as delicious as the pancakes. We ate on a picnic table in a huge drive-shed filled with tractors, farm implements, fishing gear, mounted deer antlers, bags of fertilizer…and in the corner, a 9-foot statue of the Holy Family. Someone had placed a Green Bay Packers hat on Joseph.
Empathy: In my one and only ten-minute interaction with a local bank teller I discovered the following: she has three dogs, her favorite sandwich is peanut butter and pickle, she competes in 1950s dress-up pageants, she once wept in a cathedral in Ireland, her favorite line from a poem is tattooed on her foot. I learned all this after I disclosed that my mother has dementia. Her mother does too, and so she just opened up.
Character: I picked up a local homeless lady who was hitchhiking. She is in her 70s and living rough. She asked me to drive her to a hamlet 5 miles out of town. Turns out that she is an artist. She keeps her work in a storage locker in the hamlet. As we drove past a roadside bar she mentioned casually that years before she had opened up a guy’s belly there with a corkscrew after he hit a woman. “I was wild in my younger days”, she mused, “But don’t worry sonny. Now I just paint”.
[If you know others who might enjoy a lighthearted story to begin their week, kindly forward them WordsfortheWeary. The more the merrier.]
[Image Credit: The Raven at genesiseightseven.blogspot.com]
