I survived last Friday the 13th. I’m not superstitious, but as a man of 71, I’ve learned to respect the odds—especially since the next “day of misfortune” arrives next month.
To celebrate the date and, more importantly, my son-in-law Matt’s 50th birthday, we met at Tequi Town in the bustling metropolis of Esko. Tequi Town is part of a four-restaurant chain in Minnesota called Tequila Town. Their Esko location sits across from the high school, which led to a bit of local drama last year. The Town of Thomson Board of Supervisors, wielding its authority over liquor licenses, stipulated that the exterior signage could not refer to an “intoxicating beverage” because of its proximity to the students.
In a 3-2 decision, the “poobahs” of Thomson required the word “Tequila” be scrubbed from the building. Apparently, they believe seeing a word on a wall is a greater threat to youth than the beer and wine ads they see ad nauseam during every sporting event. But I digress.
Finding decent Mexican food in Northern Minnesota is a challenge, but Tequi Town is excellent. It’s the halfway point between our house and the kids’, and the Carnitas are the best I’ve had since Frank and Fina’s Cantina near our old Las Vegas home.
Matt, who now has a half-century of eight Friday the 13th birthdays under his belt, seemed blasé about the milestone. But watching him across the table, I found myself reflecting on the decades that separate us. I spent the weekend thinking about the societal privileges I’ve experienced as a white, male, postwar baby boomer, and how they’ve shaped a perspective that is becoming increasingly hard to share with old friends.
Lately, I’ve had to distance myself from friendships with people I’ve known a long time and genuinely like. I’ve lost my appetite for conversations that blame the victims of political violence or characterize my hometown as a “smoking battleground” of evil forces trying to “change our culture.” These headlines feel like fiction to me, perhaps because my own origin story was written on the “easy setting” of the American Dream.
This column is really about the realization that my life is less a product of pulling myself up by my “bootstraps” and more a masterpiece of timing and luck.
After serving in the Philippines during WWII, my dad was lucky enough to buy a house in Richfield in 1956 using the GI Bill. At the time, Richfield was the fastest-growing suburb in the state, boasting a vibrant school system and the nation’s first indoor shopping mall. What it didn’t have were minorities.
While Richfield wasn’t “redlined” in the traditional sense, developers building those rows of “ticky-tacky” houses in the 1950s used racially restrictive deed covenants to ensure the suburb stayed white. Black veterans, despite carrying the same discharge papers and GI benefits as my father, were legally blocked from buying those properties.
As white kids, we never noticed the invisible fence. We had the privilege of moving about freely, playing pickup baseball in any park we chose, and wandering through neighborhoods without a second thought of being stopped or questioned. It was an era when a single income could pay a mortgage, buy a car, and load up enough groceries to feed a growing boy.
The 1950s and 60s provided an economic ladder that was wider and sturdier than today’s. I was privileged to move through the world without having to consider how my race might affect an interaction with a police officer, a landlord, or an employer. That is the definition of privilege: the absence of obstacles you didn’t even know existed.
I was privileged to see early on and up front the toll layoffs take on a household, which taught me the value of work without the crushing weight of systemic poverty. I was privileged to receive a polio vaccine, sparing me the daily struggle my older cousin has faced for decades. I even learned to prop open a butterfly valve on a carburetor to start a flooded engine—a skill as useless today as a rotary phone, but a marker of a time when we felt we could fix what was broken.
Most importantly, I raised my four kids in an era when a doctor’s visit didn’t get bogged down in insurance paperwork. Clinics and dentists would take small monthly payments on a handshake. The safety net was made of local grace, not corporate algorithms.
The privileges I enjoyed—and there are too many others to list— are not freely available to the poor and dispossessed today. Acknowledging this isn’t an apology tour; it’s an exercise in honesty. We won a game that had different rules, and that is a reality no amount of sign-scrubbing in Esko can hide.
