Christmas With the Old Norwegian

Lorna and I were spending Christmas with my daughter Adena and her wife Nicole in the Cooper neighborhood of Longfellow in Minneapolis. It is a pleasant neighborhood on the buffs above the Mississippi gorge - a good neighborhood for walking with or without a dog for an excuse. A fifteen minute walk south of their 1925 bungalow is the Seven Oaks Oval, a two acre 35 foot deep wooded sinkhole in the middle of a ring of classic craftsman homes.

While we were in the neighborhood I knocked on the door of an old friend to wish him a Merry Christmas. Chris Kvale answered the door and invited me in. We caught up on backyard birds, music, politics, and the status of his bicycle frame shop, which was severely damaged by fire-fighting water during the rioting following the George Floyd killing. 

Chris stepped out of the house to greet my family who were across the street trying to locate two hooting Barred Owls in The Oval. I followed Chris and pulled the door closed behind me. It latched with an audible *clack*. Locked. We tried the back door. I had locked a man out of his own home and the neighbor with the spare key was out of town. Marcia was going to be gone for hours. Chris used my phone a number of times, but she did not answer.

Given our dilemma and limited options, I gave Chris my jacket and we walked  back to Add and Nick's home ... where we ate cookies,  drank wine and visited. I learned that Chris's friend had originally manufactured his sheet metal paint spray booth several decades earlier. It was first assembled for use in a basement shop, later in two other shop locations. That same friend will be reassembling it one more (last?) time in Chris's shop in the Vine Arts Building. On Monday, after 19 months of forced early retirement (at age 76) Chris Kvale will be begin reassembling his shop, to again build fine bicycle frames to classical music and greet friends for conversation and a day's end drink.

After a couple of hours of "wisiting", Marcia eventually called. She was home, wondering where he was. So Addy took the Old Norwegian back home to a waiting Christmas dinner. 

The Old Dane,

Gunnar