Lost is on the Way

Originally published in the New York Mills Herald on 2/20/08 and credited to my alternate identity, Elisa Korentayer.

When I was in New York City, I came to believe that the perfect living scenario was to have a house in the country and an apartment in the city. That way, one could balance out the activity of the city with the peace of the country. I used to dream of having a weekend home in upstate New York. Now that I live in outstate Minnesota, I have begun to dream of having a weekend home in Minneapolis-St. Paul.

I went to the Cities this past weekend to take a class at the Loft Literary Center. I spent three days amid the hustle and bustle of Minnesota’s metropolis, and it reminded me of all of the best parts of living in a city: a wide variety of excellent restaurants, a motley mix of people to watch, never-ending rows of shops in which to buy specialized products. I began to think about how—in moderation—the city makes me feel good.

When I lived in New York City, a yoga teacher of mine explained that living in the city triggers a constant low-level fight-or-flight response, that primitive human response to danger which increases our adrenaline, improves our awareness and reflexes, and readies us to flee. Since city dwellers don’t have the luxury of fleeing the city very often—in fact, many don’t even want to—the heightened adrenaline levels never diminish, and the urbanites are left to cope with the results of a natural human response gone awry. That which served human beings when we were hunters coming upon a lion in the wild, becomes a hindrance when the lion becomes our daily life. I can attest to the fact that when you live in the city, you can never really relax. My shoulders used to live hunched up around my ears, and not even massages, gourmet chocolates, or boutique therapy (purchasing overpriced but aesthetically pleasing items displayed artistically) could ever get them fully back down to proper shoulder-level.

Here in the country, days putter by, meandering through one activity after another. Even when I have too much to do in too little time, my experience of stress here is not quite the same as the stifling pressure of living in a city. In the city there are too many cars, too many pedestrians, too much noise, too much dirt, too much to look at, and too much to do. And this is the norm. Any additional stress, say the subway stalls between stops and you can’t make it to your date on time or the phone lines are down and you can’t call the plumber, any little thing becomes the thing that pushes you over the edge. In the country, our personal stress buckets aren’t regularly filled to the brim in the course of daily life, so small stresses don’t have to drive us over the edge. This is a huge relief on a person and a body. But once it becomes the everyday, then the relaxing effects of being in the country are no longer so noticable.

Once upon a time, I used to look for any excuse I could find to get out of the city. My body thirsted for nature. Leaves. Trees that weren’t imprisoned by concrete. Blue sky not marred by buildings. Ground where you could actually see the soil. When I finally found some nature, I was overcome by my acute sense of ease. Now the country has become the norm. I look out my window to see trees and meadows. There are roads by my house, but few cars seem to drive them. I can often hear a pileated woodpecker in the woods by my house. I enjoy these small gifts, but they have become less of an acute thrill and more of a way of life. As such, I have begun to crave the stress of the city—in moderation.

Here in the country I am struggling with the reverse problem—needing the excitement of the city to shake me up. When I was in the Cities this past weekend, I felt vivid, vibrant, and imbued with urban energy. That which once dragged me down into a malaise of continued overstimulation became an intoxicating treat. I began to see that while living here in the country, I will need to seek out the city every so often. Thankfully, now that I have become used to the rural way of life, even small cities—ones that in my New York City days I would have scoffed at—are booming to my country sensibilities. I have become a fan of Fargo, and can while away many hours there. But my heart is set on the Twin Cities as my personal urban escape. Perhaps one day I’ll find someone with an empty apartment who needs a visitor there one weekend a month. If you know anyone, send them my way.

Originally published in the New York Mills Herald on 2/6/08 and credited to my alternate identity, Elisa Korentayer.

The furnace had been testy for the last day or so. In my inexperience with our new house, I figured it was because the furnace wasn’t capable of heating a house against negative twenty six degree temperatures and thirty mile-an-hour winds. The day before the second floor had only made it up to 49 degrees, while the main floor topped out at 60. That morning, the upstairs thermostat read 43. From yesterday’s experience, I figured it would probably be about ten degrees warmer on the main floor. So I tramped downstairs seeking heat, thinking that perhaps I could dress in the family room. Troubled by the thought of those agonizing moments between turning off the warm water and bumbling into my clothes, I began to question whether a shower was absolutely necessary that day.

As I traveled down the staircase, I first noticed that there was no warmth flowing upwards and then that there was no discernible temperature difference downstairs. I started thinking about whether I needed to get out of my pajamas at all that day and about how many layers one could actually put on at one time. The thermostat had been set to 67. That morning, the main floor temperature read 42. I was slyly impressed with my ability to be in 42 degrees without a coat or much of anything outside of my pajamas. Then it hit me—the furnace must have stopped running, and I became dully aware that this was not a good thing during a Minnesota winter.

In the basement, the big metal monster sat motionless and quiet. Looking in to the mess of wires in the furnace’s bowels, one could discern the glow of a small red indicator light—a tiny signal of a very large problem. It was 7am, and I frantically dialed Mike’s Plumbing and Heating. Hallelujah! They could come that morning. For the next hour or so, I busied myself making hot tea and hot cereal. I put on my ankle-length down coat and went outside to gather wood for the fireplace. I was in a state of mild panic, though I was too numb to notice. The heat was gone. There was no way to make more heat. The house would freeze. I would freeze. And even if I managed to find shelter, the pipes in my new house would freeze, and there’d be even bigger problems. This dream house I had just moved into, this place that I had lovingly imagined as my Minnesota refuge, this haven that was supposed to shelter me from all that was cold and hazardous, this house had failed me.

Within an hour or so, Jeremy the furnace expert was over. Cheerful and smiling, he wasn’t at all fussed at what seemed to me to be a small Apocalypse. After finding the fuel tank and the furnace, he got to work tinkering and repairing. A new fuel nozzle and a few adjustments later, I heard the most blessed sound, the furnace firing up and blowing air. Soon Jeremy was on his way with parting words about how it could take a full day for the house to warm back up to a comfortable temperature.

It was my first free day at the new house, and I had intended to use it to unpack my office. I couldn’t face that task in forty-some-odd degrees. But I had made plans, and I wrestled with myself. You must unpack, I chastened myself. You must take what the cold weather gives you and get things done. A saner and more practical side of me spoke quietly. There’s a sale on electric oil heaters in Alexandria. It may be a two-hour round trip, but your little Honda has heat. My heated car sounded like paradise. I felt sick at the thought of staying one more minute in cold that was the sign of a house that had betrayed me. I couldn’t even face changing out of my pajamas. Then I realized that no one can see what’s under my great big winter coat, and I remembered that winter hats are very handy for hiding bed-tousled hair. I grabbed my keys and my purse, and, feeling unfresh and unclean in last night’s pajamas, I piled into my car and cranked the heat to high.

I spent that day purchasing warmth: a down-alternative blanket, two electric oil heaters, rope caulk, door draft dodgers, plastic for my windows, outlet insulators, and even a towel warmer. I returned home to a house that had warmed significantly. Yes! It was finally in the sixties. I had never properly appreciated the source of my home’s heat. It took a cold house in a Minnesota winter to make me understand the importance of being furnaced.

Originally published in the New York Mills Herald on 1/23/08 and credited to my alternate identity, Elisa Korentayer.

You know those psychological association games where someone says a word, and you’re supposed to say the first thing that pops into your head after hearing it? Like, I say “horse,” and you say “carriage.” Or I say “cereal,” and you say “milk.” Well, when I say “Minnesota” to almost any non-Minnesotan, the first thing that pops into his or her head almost inevitably has something to do with cold, if not the word “cold” itself. Mental associations might include: ice, snow, winter, ice-fishing, frigid, freezing, below zero, negative temperatures, dog sledding, frozen wasteland, freeze-to-death, gotta-wear-furs, keep-your-hat-on, don’t-let-your-fingers-freeze, frostbite, and fishing houses.

The first thing people said to me when I told them I was moving to Minnesota was: “You know it’s cold there, right?” Even locals suggested that, until I experienced winter, I shouldn’t commit to a 56567 address. My family spent most of the last year expecting me to run screaming as soon as the temperature dipped below 20 degrees. Well, folks, I’d like to tell you now, it’s official: Winter is here, and so am I. I went out the other morning in negative twenty-four degrees to walk the dog and start my car… without a coat.

One thing that has surprised me about winter in Minnesota is that the cold feels different here than I expected it to. I always used to associate the discomfort of cold with a sense of weakness from the inside. A sense of something missing—the missingness of heat. Cold at the level of negative twenty degrees is an entirely different experience. It’s more like pain. I feel it first and immediately in any area of exposed skin. The exposed skin begins to hurt upon contact with the air. It aches and burns. Then I notice it in my eyeballs as they start to sear. Then my nostrils, as the moisture that generally remains unnoticed there tightens and hardens, pulling at the hairs of my nose and blocking the airflow. Finally, I notice my lungs struggling to adjust to the temperature of the air, icy and frigid and hard, like breathing glass.

I probably wear more layers than most of the rest of the New York Mills population. On top: a long-sleeve silk long-underwear shirt, then a polyester-cotton-blend long-sleeve T-shirt, then a wool turtleneck, and a wool sweater. On the bottom: silk or polyester long underwear, leg warmers, and a pair of thick corduroy or wool pants. My feet need wool socks—nothing else will do—and a pair of sheepskin or thinsulate boots, rated to -40. Before heading outdoors for any extended length of time, I put on my ankle-length down coat. It’s a mustard-yellow color and leaves me looking vaguely like Big Bird. I slip on a wool hat, and then surround myself with a wide wool or cashmere scarf to cover my neck and chin.

For shorter ventures, I run outside in only my indoor gear, gleefully triumphant that I, an east coaster, have managed to go outside in a Minnesota winter without a coat. As the temperature gets colder, the consequences of my uncoated forays into the frigid outdoors become more severe. In single-digit temperatures, I am able to go outside, start the car, wait the long minutes while the dog sidles up to every post and mound—taking his jolly old time sniffing and deliberating over whether this is the post or mound for today’s morning activities—and then return to the house, feeling invigorated by the cold, but still warm enough. Once the temperature drops to negative single digits, I notice that my hands will not tolerate time outside my sleeves, and my inner core cools to levels of discomfort I would otherwise choose to avoid. In the negative teens and twenties, I find that within seconds of being outside without a coat, my body begins to shiver. The searing skin pain moves quickly to numbness, and the inside of my body quakes in protest as it yearns for more heat and seeks any reserve of warmth there is to be had. It is not possible to touch metal with bare hands at these temperatures, and I only remember that once the moisture on my skin begins to bond with the doorknobs. I never knew how many pieces of metal I touched without thinking about it till this weekend when doorhandles became obstacles and car doors became weapons.

I will not pretend that I’m impervious to cold. Far from it. I find continuous cold unbearably uncomfortable. Thank goodness for furnaces, which make indoor room temperatures more tolerable. Since indoor temperatures don’t differ much from place to place, changing winter temperatures mostly seem to affect the amount of time needed to get the car warmed up and the number of layers I need to put on between the car and the store. I have to say that I’m still not too pleased about the outdoor nature of gas stations. Why hasn’t anyone invented indoor filling areas for Minnesota gas stations? The wind coming off of the Red River Valley flats can really mess up a person’s hands when filling up the car. Speaking of hands, it’s in my hands that I feel winter’s rigors most. Today my hands sport three bandaids from winter-related injuries including cracks in overdry skin and inadvertent scrapes unnoticed due to numbness.

I understand, from other transplants to Minnesota that one becomes more and more comfortable in lower temperatures over the years. A woman I spoke to in Fargo told me that only transplants wear long underwear. “Give it another year,” she said. A friend who has been here longer than me, but who spent much of her time in deserts in Arizona and the Middle East prior to Minnesota, told me that she leaves her down coat in the car these days to be used only in emergencies. I hope that in years to come it will be me walking outside in short sleeves when the temperature hits the high twenties. That one day I’ll be able to keep my house at 60 degrees and be comfortable. I write you this as I sit here in my 70 degree house, wearing multiple layers, and enjoying the ceramic space heater at my feet.

I am pleased to be surviving the Minnesota winter with only a few minor scrapes to speak of, but I sure am looking forward to the glorious time in June when you can say “Minnesota” and I can say “swim.”

Originally published in the New York Mills Herald on 1/9/08 and credited to my alternate identity, Elisa Korentayer.

Many people are surprised to learn just how unglamorous the life of a singer-songwriter is. Before I started pursuing a career as a singer-songwriter, I had no idea what that life involved. Like some, I had the vague impression that it would involve writing songs and performing them. But that’s as far as my insight went. I was very surprised when I started living the daily life of a singer-songwriter.

I find that most people who are not involved in the arts are surprised at the amount of work and effort that goes into being a professional artist of any stripe. There is an idea, among some segments of society, that the life of an artist is easy and, along the same lines, that many artists are lazy. Some may be, but many professional singer-songwriters I know are among the hardest working people I’ve ever met. Most surprising of all is how little time is spent on the part of the career that most people associate with it. In fact, some of the skills professional singer-songwriters need are generally not associated with the arts.

A successful independent singer-songwriter has to be able to do the following: write press releases, book gigs and media events, coordinate multiple venues with multiple dates, make travel plans, budget, interview well, market to existing fan base, build new fan bases, and manage multiple contacts in multiple industries and locations. If the singer-songwriter does not have these skills, he has to find someone else who does. In the competitive marketplace of the arts, that means that the singer-songwriter either pays someone else to do these things for him or makes enough money as a musician that 15% of his income is a good-enough salary for a booking agent or manager.

To illustrate my point about the daily life of a singer-songwriter, I thought I might write about my process of preparing for a concert I’m performing, under my stage name Elisa Korenne (www.elisakorenne.com), at the Holmes Theater in Detroit Lakes on Thursday, January 10th. This, by the way, is a blatant plug for that performance. The performance will be from 5:30pm to 7:30pm. It will be an informal and relaxed atmosphere, and audience members can come or go as they please. $5 per person to enter. Everyone is welcome.

Now that I’ve done my official ad for the show, I can tell you about what else I’m doing to prepare for it. This concert is the first I’ve performed in some time, so it has required more practice than a gig in the middle of a tour might. My old vocal coach used to quote the great guitarist Andres Segovia about the importance of practice. He was purported to have said, “When I don’t practice for a day, my fingers know it. When I don’t practice for two days, I know it. And when I don’t practice for three days, my audience knows it.” When I haven’t practiced in a while, even my cats know it. As a professional performer, I owe my audience—whoever they are and however many show up—a professional caliber concert. Every person who has walked through the venue door has paid and taken the time out of their lives to be there. This means that I owe them something in return for their investment.

A two-hour concert requires that I perform somewhere between twenty-two and twenty-seven songs, plus verbal introductions. The great majority of songs I play in concert are ones that I’ve written, but that doesn’t mean I remember them all. I have written hundreds of songs in my career, and, when I haven’t played one in a while, I usually have to consult my lyric sheets to remind myself what line comes next. Along with lyrics, each song has its own melody to remember and its own set of guitar queues to go along. Getting lyrics, voice, and guitar in sync requires a good bit of practice for each song. There are some out there for whom music comes more naturally than for me. There are others who spent so much of their teenage years playing guitar instead of doing homework that playing is easier than breathing. Unfortunately, that wasn’t me. So, I have to practice, and practice diligently. I placate myself by remembering that even the best performers, some of my heroes, spend time practicing.

Practice is only one piece of the concert-preparation puzzle. The other equally important pieces are booking the gig, publicizing the gig, and preparing gear and myself for the gig. Booking one gig can take many hours of work. As an independent performer, this is work that I must do if I want to perform at all. For the Holmes Theater concert, I got lucky. The executive director saw me film a live television performance, and offered me a Holmes Theater gig some months later. If she hadn’t, I might have had to go through numerous rounds of emails and calls to venues in the area to find one that was willing to host a performance.

Once the performance is booked, there’s no getting around the need for publicity. Without publicity—this column included—no one would know about the show, and therefore no one would come. In the case of this gig, the Holmes Theater did a lot of the publicity outreach, but before they could, I had to create a press release giving out information about me and my history. After word is out to the media about the performance, then I must follow up with interviews and appearances and work with the venue to coordinate promotional events. Last week I had a telephone interview with the Detroit Lakes paper. On Tuesday, I will spend the day in Detroit Lakes doing a live performance on the radio, a live performance for the Kiwanis club and an after-school workshop at the Detroit Lakes Community and Cultural Center. Once the word is finally out, then what’s left is to prepare my gear, and myself, for performance.

To prepare my gear for a performance, I need to think about a variety of things. First, I need to consider the readiness of my instruments and other gear. Before Thursday, I will need to change the strings on my guitar and make sure the batteries in my tuning pedal are working. I will need to be sure that I have enough cables and guitar picks along and that I bring a guitar stand, microphone, and other sundry sound items in case they are needed. Second, I need to think about my merchandise. A large portion of a performer’s income is made by selling their merchandise. Some artists sell T-shirts and stickers. I only sell my CD Favorite. I need to be sure I have enough copies of the CD, and that I have the marketing materials that go with them: a flyer with reviews, a CD player and earphones so people can listen, and the metal lunchbox that I display the CD’s in.

Finally, on the day of the gig, I need to prepare myself mentally and physically to perform. Ideally this starts with a couple hours of peace and quiet during which I can meditate and center myself. About two hours before I need to leave for the venue, I will dress and make myself up. Then I will spend an hour warming up my voice and hands. I make sure to leave enough time to travel safely to the venue, including a cushion for a mistake in directions or that wrong turn that can’t be undone for miles. I make sure to arrive at the venue at least an hour in advance of the show, with enough time to set up my merchandise table and my gear and do a good sound check to get the levels correct.

I added up the hours I will be spending on what may seem to the audience to be only a two-hour performance. It came out to about 60 hours. For this time, I will be remunerated solely in my percentage of ticket sales and the money I make on CD sales. Yes, my father was right long ago when he wanted me to be a lawyer because there’s more money in it. There’s not a lot of money in being an independent artist, but there can be a lot of satisfaction.

Originally published in the New York Mills Herald on 12/24/07 and credited to my alternate identity, Elisa Korentayer.

One of the most surprising things to me about living in a small town is just how many people know my business, sometimes better than I do myself. For example, recently I’ve learned more about the house I just bought from random, everyday conversations than I imagine most people in the suburbs can learn about the history their houses through formal research. Almost every time I describe my house to a local, I am interrupted halfway through my description with the conversationalist declaring knowingly, “Oh… the Brooks house. You bought the Brooks house.”

From each new conversation I have about the former Brooks house, I pick up bits and pieces of information. I’ve been sewing these scraps together to form an oral-history quilt of the story of my new house. As these scraps of information have come to me from a variety of sources—none of them official—I cannot vouch for the factual veracity of any part of the story I’m about to tell. As lawyers would allege, it’s all hearsay. But, as a storyteller, I know that it’s the truth behind the story that matters, rather than the facts themselves. And I quite like the story that’s emerging organically, conversation by conversation, about my new house. In fact, this house’s oral history has more truth to it than any documents would. So, let me tell you the story of my new home as I am coming to know it.

In 1995 Dana Brooks commissioned Dick Lausten to build a Southern-plantation-style house on a piece of farmland. He wanted this house built of wood and designed to have two floor-length verandas, one atop the other, held together by four grand two-story columns. The house was sided in cedar and furnished with oak appointments. Fireplaces grace the two main gathering rooms on the first floor. One of the most unexpected parts of this house is the elevator that was installed to allow Dana’s handicapped son to move freely among the basement, main floor, and second floor, as needed.

Dana’s son died at the age of 13 and is now buried at the foot of the driveway along with Dana’s mother, on a small piece of property still owned and cared for by Dana. Two blunt stone tombstones face the gravel drive and are attended by a small wooden arbor, an artfully rusting remnant of a metal buggy, and an old RV that seems to have been there long enough to become part of the landscape. The small piece of land sits on the road and is separated from what is now my property by a stone wall. You can’t see the graves well from the road, but I see them each time I drive up or down my driveway. When I first saw the graves on my initial visit to the house, I was tempted to hold my breath as I was instructed to do as a child when driving past cemeteries. Now, my inclination to pull away has shifted to curiosity. I look forward to learning more about the people whose memorials I will pass daily.

I ran into the builder Dick Lausten at the Lick the other night. When asked by Pam Robinson whether there was any dirty money, illicit treasure, or mob secrets hidden in the walls of my new house, Dick said there had almost been a dead body. When installing the elevator, the technician, who had had his doubts about the instructions included with the elevator, put two wires together while standing atop the elevator. Immediately the elevator shot two stories up into the air and broke two of the rafters. The technician would have been crushed, but luck and his reflexes allowed him to jump off in the instant the elevator exploded upward. A bit the worse for wear, the technician managed to escape with his life intact.

Over its short twelve-year lifespan, the house has had five owners. The house was first sold a couple of years after it was built to Wegscheid the oil man from Bluffton. Wegscheid delivered fuel oil to the hard-to-heat home, and must have been there often as the house requires one barrel of oil every three weeks to heat. (Needless to say, with the price of oil, we’re considering alternate options for heating now). The oil man redecorated the house and spruced it up to his taste. If he lived in it, it wasn’t for long. Soon after he bought it, he sold it to the Boyims, who lived in the house for a couple of years. My information about the Boyims came from another unexpected source, a furniture salesman at Country Furniture in Lake Park whom we met while doing surveillance on the cost of furniture to fill our new house. (Moving from a postage-stamp sized apartment in Brooklyn and then living in a small house in Mills leaves one with a furniture deficit when moving to a larger house.) Tony, the salesman, was in the process of taking us on a personal tour of the many expensive furniture options available when we described our new house. Upon hearing our description, he told us that he knew the house well and had been there. The previous owners, the Boyims, were friends of his. Apparently, his friends had loved the house and their only complaint was the exorbitant cost of heating. When the Boyims left, they sold the house to the Balbachs, who lived there for a couple of years and then sold it to us this fall.

There is another connection to this house that adds a pleasant bit of providence to our purchase of it. Chris’ father, Ken Klein, a native New York Millsian, had visited this house some years back when the Klein Insurance agency starting insuring it. When he saw the house, he thought to himself, “I wish one of my kids could live here. Too bad none of them was ready to buy a house when this one was on the market.” He didn’t expect the house to become available again in a timeframe that might work for his son. This summer, when Chris and I were talking to Ken about our house hunting process, Ken told us about the plantation house, one of the most beautiful houses he had seen in the area. Too bad it wasn’t likely to be on the market for a while, we agreed. A couple of months later, our real estate agent, the lovely Terry Weiser from Lakes Area Realty in West Ottertail, called me with excitement. “There’s a house that I appraised some years back that’s just come on the market. It’s not on a lake, but you have to see it. I think this may be the house for you.” It was only once she showed us the picture of the house that we realized it was the house that Ken had seen and wished for his son a couple of years back.

I’ve started adding my own elements to the story of the house. I’m working on turning one of the bedrooms into my music studio and office. As I paint and clean and struggle with wallpaper and baseboard removal, I feel like I am starting to make my own mark on the house and contribute my own part of the story. I wonder what you all might say some years hence when describing this house to someone else. Will it still be the Brooks house? Or might it, by then, have become the Korentayer-Klein house. Or perhaps the KorenKlein house. Then again, it might be nice if the house could have its own name by then. I’ve been playing with ideas, but haven’t found the right name yet. But, hey, being that I’m living in a small town, maybe you can help. I’m learning to appreciate the contributions of my neighbors. If you have any ideas for a good name for my new house, pass them along. Your suggestions are welcome.