To Sunburg

Yesterday I drove out in the country with my dad so that he could attend the all-school reunion for Kerkhoven High.  He's a member of the class of 1950.  Our route is mapped above--I-94 to St. Cloud, Highway 23 to New London, finally Highway 9 to Sunburg, where the reunion was hosted on the farm of a classmate just west of town.  The current high school, KMS, for Kerkhoven-Murdock-Sunburg, opened in the late 1970s.  The reunion was for those who had graduated from the old Kerkhoven High.

I got a necessarily brief tour of Sunburg before the reunion began.  It's changed since I was a kid, not for the better.  Even my dad, who's been back more frequently than I, seemed a little alarmed at the dilapidated state of things, including the house he grew up in.  The attendees were mainly from graduating classes in the 1950s, so they were a little dilapidated, too.  At the very first high school reunions, people talk big about themselves and their jobs; at the very last ones, the talk is largely medical.  The years have a levelling power.  It doesn't seem that the quarterback and homecoming queen are more apt to survive, or to be more mobil and hale if they do. It isn't all to the bad.  Classmates, instead of competing with one another, begin sympathizing with one another.  One moment in particular I remembered I was in Keillor territory.  I was sitting alone drinking coffee from a Styrofoam cup at a picinic table outside the huge metal outbuilding where the tables were set up and the visiting occurred.  A man, about my dad's age, limped out of the party and took a seat by me.  "Geesh, it's loud in there," he says.  "I can't make out a thing, and when I turn up my hearing aid, all the jumbled sound just gets louder."

Studying the map now, I'm surprised to find a Lake Calhoun in Kandiyohi County.  The one by my house, in south Minneapolis, has been the subject of some controversy lately--has to do with it being named for Senator Calhoun, famous for his support of slavery.  See the big lake just to the east of Highway 71 by Sibley State Park?  That's Green Lake.  The small one just to the east of it is another Lake Calhoun.  Don't know who it's named for. 

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