I was the one who volunteered to go hunt down more basil for the party. My wife very pointedly held the last tiny clump of it under my nose so I got the full authentic aroma, the shape and color of the leaves, as though I might confuse it somehow with mint or watercress. “Fresh basil. Make sure it’s fresh,” she stressed. “They have it up at Rainbow Foods, I think. That’s probably the only place you’ll find it on a Sunday.” She smiled and turned back into the fray of family women chopping garlic, boiling rice, and clanging pots and pans around. I was glad to have an excuse to get out of there and away from all the frantic urgency of guests arriving. I can’t even remember now what the celebration was all about. It wasn’t a death and it wasn’t a wedding. I remember that much.

I was looking forward to the ride alone in the car, up the long hill to Rainbow Foods—a twenty-four-hour supermarket on the edge of town in one of those early-sixties malls that had been made obsolete by newer, more strategically placed malls. I liked the wide, maple-canopied Midwestern streets where the twenty-five-mph speed limit was accepted as though it were part of the Lutheran credo and where if you had the audacity actually to pass anyone you were honked at vigorously but rarely given the finger. Minnesota pedestrians tended to stare right into your car as you passed, studying every inch of your face with an almost desperate expectation of finding something—some clue in the eyes of a total stranger. What could they possibly be looking for? I don’t know any other region of the country where they stare into your car with such bewilderment. Maybe it comes from surviving too many long winters and lutefisk church buffets.