downtown Minneapolis framed by the new and old Walker Art Center

…(the city where I grew up but never lived as an adult, though with frequent trips back I am slowly discovering what’s here) is becoming clear this afternoon as I realize that my recent regular treasured hang-outs which I would have been super delighted to find in Rome, or Los Angeles, or New York City – Yoga One (the welcoming non-corporate, non-profit community yoga center that even has plants and skylights in the studio), Ecopolitan (super raw cleansing vegan food served in the warm woody parlor of a typical old Lyndale Avenue house), Tao Foods (featuring an olden-timey screen door and bar where I hang out drinking chai with little nephews), The Wedge Community Coop, (where you go into food paralysis when you enter because you just want everything, everything, everything, and where my friend Gaby has a good story about stopping on a coast to coast road trip dying for a decent meal after so much highway junk, gathering up a cart full of favorite things like hummus and carrots, getting to the cash register only to have her credit card rejected, at which point the ‘Minnesota Nice‘ Wedge employee just pushed the bags her way, and told her to go on with her trip, but she went back to the car to make a mixed c.d. for him – which actually brought him to tears when she returned to present him with it), Yoga One (the welcoming non-corporate, non-profit community yoga center that even has plants and skylights in the studio), Ecopolitan (super raw cleansing vegan food served in the warm woody parlor of a typical old Lyndale Avenue house), Minneapolis Sculpture Garden (one of my favorite places in city for anything picnic-y, opened in 1992 and later featuring a Meg Webster sculpture that made an early impression on me, consisting of a terraced inverted garden cone full of flowering plants you could enter through cor-ten steel panels through berms of earth and lose yourself in), and The Walker Art Center (my cultural mecca where I was turned on to new art and architecture at an early age) – are all contained within a golden triangle where I would probably live most of my life were I to live here, mostly contained by Lyndale, Hennepin, and W. 22nd Street – plus since I was last here I see everyone riding around on these pretty bright lime green bikes – ‘NEAT’, as we say.