When I moved here from Little Rock a few years back, my teaching mentor told me to keep a journal of the transition because it would all fade so quickly. Of course my good intentions about the matter got lost in the shuffle of moving and starting PhD work, and of course now I remember less and less about the whole thing. I was telling Compatriot G. the other day that I really wish I had written down the little things that were so different to me about Minnesota culture before they became just the way things are. Like snow emergency signs.

When we were about to begin our Grand Tour of PhD Programs, I started reading about the Twin Cities. I remember sitting in my mother-in-law’s living room in Pocola, Oklahoma reading a guide to the cities and irritating her with the idea that I would take her son so far across the country. I reached the section on snow plow routes and snow emergencies and paused, because I couldn’t really imagine the weather that would make such a thing necessary. Where I’m from, we get two inches of snow every other year if we’re lucky.

From the time I was tiny, I had always wanted to live somewhere with consistent snow. When we got here, I was a little mesmerized by these signs. It meant it wasn’t just something I had read in a book. It was real, and there would be real winter. Of course, every winter that we’ve been here has been mild by Minnesota standards, but I am Arkansan, and so I have been pretty happy. It’s pretty wonderful to get something you wanted after a long time and find out that yes, you really did want it after all.

The next thing, I still don’t really understand. Minnesotans raffle off meat. From the New York Times piece:

My lovely female relatives steadfastly drank me under the table. They drank me, in fact, under the green plastic fake-grass rug under the table. And so I wasn’t at all certain I was hearing things correctly when a man in a plaid flannel shirt approached us and asked, “Would you ladies care to participate in my meat raffle?”

The ladies reached for their purses again — not for guns, as I would have imagined, given the man’s question — but for wallets. They were each peeling one cool dollar bill off their private stashes as I stammered: “Wait! His what? His what raffle?”

“It’s just a meat raffle, Liz,” Aunt Luana explained. “We always have meat raffles around here.”

“But what do you win?”

“Meat.”

The bartender reached into a freezer and produced for my benefit the evidence: several giant packages of, indeed, meat. Frozen meat. A stunning pack of pork chops and a handsome four-pound chuck roast. These were the prizes of the night — beautiful meat to be sweepstaked off to some lucky drunk! Saloon meat! Chance meat! Destiny's meat!
You know you’re an outsider when something that seems perfectly normal to everyone else is impenetrably bizarre to you. I was dizzied with a thousand questions. (Where does this meat come from? Why is the meat-raffle game board imprinted with an official stamp of the Minnesota State Gambling Control Board? Is that an official Minnesota State Gambling Control Board chuck roast? Is it unsanitary to consume pork that you found in a bar?) But there was no time for questions because, lo, the meat raffle was quick approaching, and there were only a few tickets left. I announced, “Mr. Meat Raffle Man, I shall buy all your remaining tickets!”

Perhaps I will figure out a way to live here long enough to understand meat raffles.