It started with a coupon -- a coupon, of all things. A day after the vows were said, the cake was cut, but before real life began, we set off -- off to begin our new life together. Being low on cash, as most newlyweds are, we accepted a voucher from my parents for a free stay at the Radisson Harborview Hotel in Duluth. And so began our love affair with Duluth 15 years ago this fall.
Cresting the hill atop Interstate 35, I first caught sight of the city below, with Lake Superior wrapping her arms around it. For a moment, that first moment I saw her, I lost my breath. I've been to both coasts over the years and have seen vast oceans and bustling cities. But Lake Superior is something else altogether. It has a depth about it that I can now see as I contemplate my marriage through the eyes of our time in Duluth on that honeymoon so many years ago.
The remarkable Congdon estate, Glensheen, was first on my honeymoon to-do list. We arrived for a tour and, like most, were stunned at the sheer splendor and magnitude of this palatial manor. The china just so. The wood-carved panels a feat. The back stairway? A mystery. As I gaze back in my mind's eye I now realize this historic home taught me that though a house may appear perfect on the outside with a perceived perfect family on the inside, sometimes it's not as it seems. Duluth taught me to be grateful for the bricks, though in my own home they may be few, and to count the laughter inside, which is more precious than gold.
Down to Canal Park we went the next morn to discover a panacea of treasures. The boardwalk shops. Ah, the restaurants! Which one? I think we visited them all. Years later, I'm still awed that this "park" was built amid the ruins and rubble of an era long gone. Duluth, in her wisdom, showed me that, like it did with Canal Park, I must always remember to look for beauty, purpose and worth -- and to hold tight to hope. For with hope there is vision and with vision a better tomorrow.
A marriage, at times, can be lackluster, as this fair city has shown me; but it also can be resurrected to something one could never imagine.
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And the Lift Bridge: She was an experience on my honeymoon I just had to venture. We waited and waited and waited some more to cross from here to there. But those who wait, as this aquatic link showed me, can learn to accept, like the bridge itself, the ups and downs in the nuptial state. When it is down it connects two into one. The Lift Bridge showed me to expect the highs and, with them, the lows but to hold tight, too, because for the patient ones a journey to life's next stage is before your eyes, whether to Park Point, to parenthood or to perennial bliss.
But it was the lake, that grand expanse of Gitche Gumee, that proved the greatest marriage advocate of them all. To these waters I am indebted. This lapping liquid revealed to me its heartbeat, if I looked closely enough. It's not a rip-roaring tide but a gentle, ever-constant heartbeat. An embrace between water and land that now, later on, I can appreciate as truly like the perfect marriage. One compliments the other. It gently folds into its mate -- but gently, never harming the other.
And with these lessons, as we drove through the city, I learned a lifetime of wisdom of what to expect in our new life, from the sadness we felt as we passed the corner memorial dedicated to those strung up in scorn to the laughter that filled our car as we headed uphill to purchase clothes for my groom because he had forgotten all his back home.
To you, Duluth, I owe my gratitude, for you have shown me what is, what can be and what is yet to be. Just remember, all of you, a new love affair could be just around life's corner if you, too, clip those coupons. Who knows what you'll discover about a city and, more importantly, about your life.Dawn Quigley of Forest Lake, Minn., is a finalist for the Minnesota Emerging Writer Award and in the Minnesota Loft Literary Center's mentor series. She wrote this exclusively for the News Tribune.
