As the crow flies, 821 Upshur Street, Northwest, is only about a mile from the pleasant upscale Washington neighborhood that hosts our National Zoo. But as anyone who lives in a modern American city these days can tell you, a mile, in many cases, might as well be a light year. So, after work today, I took a cab there from my downtown office, because, firstly, there’s no way I would leave my imported sports car parked on the street in Petworth, and secondly, there’s no way I would walk to, or, for that matter, back from the Domku Bar and Cafe on Upshur Street to wherever a person might be allowed to park a car with Virginia license plates in Petworth after dark.
If you’re looking for Scandinavian comfort food and can’t prepare it for yourself, Domku is one of very few places such fare can be had in the Nation’s Capital, and Knudsen, being a guy, and a guy from Minnesota of Norwegian extraction at that, certainly knows nothing about cooking. Ice fishing, deer stalking, canoodling for catfish in the upper Mississippi, yes, a true Minnesotan man Knudsen most assuredly is – but once he’s killed the damn things, it’s up to his wife to render them fit to eat. Not that Ms. Knudsen lives anywhere around Washington DC, of course. She’s back in Minnesota, where, she says, the people “aren’t all phonies,” like they are here. The Knudsens, like all true Minnesotans, are the sort of folks who see no contradiction in belonging to both the ACLU and NRA, consider the Winter Olympic games the “real” ones, don’t bother taking the snow tires off their vehicles “because that’s only for three months, anyway,” and come from a town which contains an equal number of bars and churches. They support wetlands conservation because “that’s where you get ducks,” and neither of them, he tells me, can understand why people in places like Washington think Garrison Keillor is funny.
I was there, of course, because Knudsen had invited me. He’s a staffer for Senator Norm Coleman, and we both know he can’t possibly afford to pay my hourly rates for an office appointment. Buying me dinner at Domku, on the other hand, allows him to get my advice and enjoy some reasonably authentic Minnesota cuisine, thus killing two birds with one frugal Norwegian stone. Lord knows, Domku’s owners are likewise thrifty – I can’t imagine they pay too much for commercial space in Petworth.
Regional food, such as is served in restaurants featuring dishes from Northern Europe, only gets so good, but, with that proviso, the fare at Domku is, well, as good as it can get. We started with a pair of aquavit cocktails and appetizers. I ordered the brandy and black currant chicken liver mousse and Knudsen opted for the gravlax and knackebrod.
“Thanks for coming, Tom,” he opened as soon as our server was out of ear shot, “if it’s not too much trouble.”
“None at all,” I assured him. “What’s on your mind?”
Knudsen frowned pensively. “It’s the election, you know?”
“Still stewing,” I responded, a bit surprised, “about Obama winning the Presidency?”
“Not that election,” Knudsen clarified morosely. “The senatorial election. I can’t sleep. I’m a wreck, you know? We had no idea it was going to be so…” He cut himself off abruptly as our drinks arrived, carefully waiting until our server was out of ear shot again.
“… so close. I mean, really, Tom, can you imagine Al Franken in the United States Senate? Excuse me for saying, but the man’s nothing but a clown, you know?”
“Maybe,” I allowed, “but in that case, it seems to me he will be in pretty good company.”
“Uff-da,” Knudsen snorted. “You can’t be serious, now, can you?”
“Don’t take this the wrong way,” I pleaded, “but I’m talking to someone from a state that sent a professional wrestler to the governor’s mansion.”
“Okie-dokie,” Knudsen nodded, “I get you. Living in glass houses and all that, eh?”
“More or less,” I confirmed. “How close is the Minnesota senate race these days, anyway?”
“All acrost the state,” he wailed, “it’s a big pig-[expletive]! Margins coming in thinner than lake ice in May! And the ballots…” Knudsen interrupted himself again as our appetizers arrived. We ordered our entrées – Knudsen decided on the Swedish meatballs; I had the smoked herring with potato pie.
“No lutefisk,” he grumbled. “You betcha, I could really use some lutefisk right about now.”
“Maybe I could wheedle some tickets to a Scandinavian embassy open house for the holidays,” I offered. “I doubt you’re going to find lutefisk on any restaurant menus in DC, even in a place like this.”
Knudsen’s countenance brightened considerably at the suggestion. “Tom, if you could do that, oh, for cute, that would be great, you know, if it’s not too much trouble?”
“Of course,” I said, cracking my best, knowing smile. “It’s really not fair, when you think about it. If somebody from, oh, Eritrea or Bhutan for instance, wants a taste of home in this town, there’s always a restaurant that specializes in their own, genuine soul food. But Minnesotans? Forget about it – you might as well be from Tibet and have to do as you are doing right now, finding a restaurant that has, at best, a few Norwegian and Swedish items on the menu.”
“Hot dish,” Knudsen murmured wistfully as he picked at his gravlax and contemplated a vision of the Minnesota countryside that apparently floated a few feet above and behind my head, “that’s what I’d really like to see on a menu in Washington.”
“And some lime Jello in a mold, too,” I interjected with just a hint of irony.
“Oh, yeah, you betcha,” Knudsen enthused, rendering it abundantly clear that the tongue-in-cheek nature of my suggestion was complete lost on him, “with all kinds of good stuff in, eh?”
“Sure,” I humored, “like marshmallows.”
“Ya, ya,” Knudsen replied dreamily, the aquavit apparently kicking in, “that’s what, all right.”
“On the news,” I observed, returning Knudsen from his reverie, “as you mentioned, they say there are a lot of pretty strange contested ballots.”
“Oh, don’t I know that,” he muttered into his cocktail. “People checking off Norm’s box and then writing in Joe the Plumber…”
“Or ‘The Lizard People,’” I added. “That’s my favorite so far.”
“I hear,” Knudsen related through a mouthful of knackebrod, “that somebody checked off Al Franken, then wrote in Hubert Humphrey.”
“That,” I proposed, “could actually have been an honest mistake. Some old DLF biddy having a senior moment, thinking she was back in the day at the last minute.”
“Makes you wonder,” he mused, “about whether they ought to let everybody vote.”
“Well, usually,” I pointed out, “it’s not an issue…”
“Yeah,” he agreed, “because those weirdo ballots there, they don’t make any difference, anyways, not usually.”
“But now,” I continued, “every vote counts, even the flaky ones. I hear they found 171 ballots stuck in the bottom of a voting machine in Maplewood.”
“Oh, ya, I heard about that, too, don’t you know,” Knudsen concurred, “and ain’t it funny, how it turned out that 122 of them were for Franken?”
“Then, of course,” I countered, “there were the 133 Coleman votes that mysteriously appeared during the Minneapolis recount.”
“Okie-dokie,” he shrugged, “but that’s what recounts are for. To find missing votes, eh?”
“I suppose so,” I conceded. “But what the hell, my friend? You’ve had a good run here in Washington, working for Norm since 2003. Given how homesick you seem to be, I don’t understand why you aren’t just plain indifferent about who wins that Senate seat from Minnesota. Tell me the truth, now, you wouldn’t be terribly disappointed if you didn’t have to spend another six years here inside the Beltway, would you?”
“That’s just it,” Knudsen confessed, his voice cracking slightly, “I don’t want to leave.”
“But surely, you must miss your wife; your family?”
“Oh yeah,” Knudsen admitted, stopping for a moment to stare at his gravlax, “sort of.”
“Sort of?” My cocktail paused midway to my lips.
“Ah,” Knudsen struggled on, “it’s hard to explain. Before I left Minnesota, I was just a regular guy, you know? But since I got here, every time I came back to visit the wife and kids, I was somebody special. Everybody, not just them, they all treated me like royalty or something. People had me over to their homes all the time, invited me to birthday parties, weddings, christenings, everything like that. Since I started on Norm’s staff you know how many Minnesota children I’ve been asked to be the godfather for? Nine, that’s how many.”
“Lutherans have godfathers?”
“Yeah, sure, ya betcha they do. And I’m nine of them!”
“I understand,” I informed him. “You’re afraid that if you aren’t the big shot from Washington anymore, folks back in Minnesota are going to go back to treating you like plain old Knudsen.”
“Oh, Jesus,” he sighed, “when you put it like that, ‘plain old Knudsen,’ it makes the hairs on my neck stand up. I get a chill just thinking about it, being plain old Knudsen again.”
“So it’s not Washington itself…” I ventured.
“Okie-dokie, okay, that, too,” he acknowledged.
“Come now,” I posited, “surely the fabled Twin Cities have everything Washington has to offer – great orchestras, renowned theater, famous libraries, major league sports, illustrious universities, prestigious art museums, world-class fashion…”
“You call choppers, parkas and Sorels fashion?”
“Well, okay, maybe not fashion; and probably not an attractive and diverse night life, either. But it’s not like you’d be going back to, God forbid, Iowa or anything, is it?”
“I’ve lived on the East Coast long enough,” Knudsen confidently declared, “to realize that Washington’s got everything New York has, only it’s cleaner, nowhere near as crowded, not as dangerous and less expensive.” Knudsen shivered. “And warmer, too.”
“Knudsen,” I gently chided, “did spending all that time here south of the Mason-Dixon line make your blood thin, or are you just getting old?”
“Yeah, well, about that weather,” Knudsen divulged, “I’m not so fine with it anymore. I grew up thinking seven months of snow and twenty below was normal. Now, the last couple of years, I’ve been making up excuses to only visit back home between May and September, you know?”
“Well,” I revealed, “I’ve never actually been to Minnesota…”
“Good for you!” Knudsen flushed bright red when he realized that he had raised his voice so forcefully at the exact moment our server had appeared, bearing his Swedish meatballs and my smoked herring. I guess you can take the Canute off the forty on the prairie, but you can’t take the forty on the prairie out of the Canute. Our server politely gestured at Knudsen’s half-finished gravlax.
“Shall I take that for you now, sir?”
I watched as Knudsen’s mind short-circuited like a rabbi’s wife contemplating ham on sale for seventy-five percent off. Should he let the gravlax go, thus risking damnation to Lutheran Hell for wasting food, or should he risk an egregious public breech of the bourgeois etiquette he now knew is so ubiquitously observed in Washington?
“Just slide that,” I directed, “onto the side of his dinner plate.”
I watched as Knudsen’s composure slowly seeped back into him.
“Would you gentleman care for anything to drink with dinner?”
“A Norwegian beer,” I stated, “would be best, I think.”
“Sir,” our server cooed diplomatically, “I’m afraid we don’t have any Norwegian beer.”
“Anything Scandinavian,” I replied, “will suffice.”
“No,” Knudsen interjected, looking askance at his Swedish meatballs, “I don’t think so. I’m having… wine. Yeah, that’s it. A glass of the house red.”
“Make that two,” I seconded, not wishing to complicate things.
“Two house red,” our server dutifully repeated, jotting down our request, then vanishing with appropriate discretion.
“Tom,” Knudsen complained, “I’m a mess. If Norm doesn’t get another term, I don’t even know if I can get a job back home. Excuse me for saying, but it’s just like everywheres else, with the economy and all, doncha know?”
“Whereas,” I remarked, “here in Washington is where they print the money.”
“Yeah, sure, you betcha,” he agreed. “Not about to run out of it around here, are they?”
“Not likely,” I agreed. “Tell me – do you have any sense of what Norm might do if he loses? What I mean to ask is, do you think he’s all that anxious to go back to Minnesota himself?”
Knudsen considered my question carefully, tasting a meatball as he pondered. “I donno, Tom. Fifty-fifty, maybe.”
“Okay,” I elaborated, “let’s consider what will happen if he stays here. What do you think he will do?”
“Oh, that’s easy, ya,” Knudsen expressed confidently. “Lobbyist. That’s for sure. He’d sign on with some big lobbying firm.”
“In that case,” I inquired, “couldn’t you go along and work with him?”
Knudsen’s eyes lit up. He smiled. “Okie-dokie! Excuse me for saying Tom, but you’re one pretty smart guy, eh?”
“And even if he does lose and decides to leave Washington, you could probably land a position with a Republican-oriented lobbying firm without him. Maybe not for the same salary, but…”
“But who cares?” Knudsen uttered excitedly through a Swedish meatball. “I’d still have a job in Washington!”
“You could even,” I slyly whispered, “apply for a slot on Senator Franken’s staff.”
Knudsen stopped chewing. “I could?”
“Why not? All they can do,” I reminded him, “is say no. And if they did say no, it wouldn’t be because you aren’t a qualified and experienced US Senate staffer, since, in fact, that’s exactly what you are. No, they would realize, deep down inside, that they are rejecting your application because you used to work for Norm Coleman. But doing that would be spiteful.”
“Oh, yeah, for sure,” Knudsen nodded furiously, “it wouldn’t be nice, eh? Not nice at all.”
“And,” I concluded, “as we are both fully aware, Minnesotans simply can’t bear to be impolite.”