Elizabeth Weintraub • Sacramento Short Sale Agent • Land Park

It's not unusual to own two cars, if you live in Minnesota. You have your summer vehicle and your winter car. This is a photo of the winter version. I found it over on "Eat Street," Nicollet Avenue by 28th.

This area was just beginning to boom when I left Minneapolis for good. Dozens of new restaurants, lots of new construction. When I first moved to Whittier, all of my friends thought I was nuts. It was much tonier to live in the Wedge or Kenwood or Uptown. Or near Lake of the Isles, like Mary Tyler Moore. Sane people did not buy a home in the scary part of town.

Except it wasn't the scary part of town. Not much more crime in Whittier than anywhere else except maybe Powderhorn, and even part of that is just perception.

This is one of the secrets to making money in real estate, though. You buy at the edge of development. Because pretty soon the edge of development will probably creep over into your neighborhood and property values will go up.

We stopped by our old house on Grand Avenue, a 3-story Victorian. The dahlias were gone. The new owners probably did not know enough to dig them up in the winter or else they didn't care. Much of the phlox were gone, too. You don't see phlox in California; I should try growing phlox. But the house next door had been recently sold. I could tell because the Christmas tree lights were gone, and it was painted. Those guys would not have removed the lights nor painted in a million years. The neighbor on the other side said those people had lost the home to foreclosure.

We had sold at the height of the market for almost 3 times the amount we paid for it 5 years earlier. No wonder the new owners didn't stop as they pulled out of the driveway. A minimum down-payment FHA loan will do that to you -- put you underwater if values fall.

Much of Whittier looked depressed. There were huge holes in places. Homes had been torn down but never rebuilt. Stores and restaurants were closed. Nicollet seemed very unhappy and sad, not the vibrant, blossoming street it once was. Even the "Eat Street" signs drooped. That car is probably not somebody's winter car. It's probably their only car.

As a real estate agent, I am not always in favor of gentrification. It displaces people.

Photo: Elizabeth Weintraub

When some things change, other things stay the same, thank goodness. Sure, Minneapolis finally fixed that horrible Crosstown / 35W interchange. I heard that for a while they had you going to the left, and then a while later you were going to the right, as though the planners could not decide which way they wanted you to go. Sorta like a short sale negoiator at AMS, working on behalf of Bank of America.

Back in the old days, I was hit by a driver going east on the Crosstown Highway. It used to be you had until you reached the top of the hill as your last chance to cut into the line. Some drivers would pull over at the bottom of the hill and slide into the long line waiting to exit onto 35W. Those are the passive drivers. But not me. I knew if I caught the eye of the driver, flipped my turn signal, somebody would let me squeeze into the line.

Except that one day when some guy deliberately smashed into my rear end. It was not by accident. He did it on purpose, and then he sped away before I could get his license plate. I was stunned. But there are a lot of inconsiderate and rude people in the world.

Like the agent who repeatedly sent me emails about her home inspection after I explained that I was on vacation in Minneapolis. Of course, as my husband pointed out, the easy thing to do would be to turn off my cell phone. Yet, for various reasons, I am incapable of pressing the off button. But the sellers left holes in the wall, the agent lamented. Seriously? Surely she can handle that situation without my assistance.

Or, the other agents who asked about offer presentation on a certain listing. I explained that I am on vacation. It is a holiday for the sellers, too. I will send them the offers but we won't make a decision until after the day after Labor Day. Their buyers can't wait 2 days. Really? Then, go buy a different Sacramento short sale because the wait on this short sale will be more like 90 days in the long run.

Business goes on, albeit in small dosages.

Here are a couple of cool places to go on a Sunday in Minneapolis. Mandarin Kitchen is a dim sum place on Lyndale at 82nd in Bloomington. It's the restaurant where my husband and I were married in 1999. Back then it was a small place, and you could easily be seated if you showed up by 10:30 on Sunday. After the remodeling and expansion, there is now a wait for a table at that time. It's most likely still the best place in Minneapolis to get dim sum.

The second photo is Kowalski's Market on 57th and Chicago. It's a gourmet market with beautiful produce and a bakery / deli. We stopped by to pick up potato salad before heading out to Apple Valley for a cookout with my sister-in-law and her family. By then my cell phone had run out of juice. At first I thought how strange because I had been plugging it in to charge every night. Ha. The receptacle must be one that is turned off when we turned off the lights in our room. Which is why my cell phone is now dead.

Note to self: Buy and carry an extra battery.

P.S. If you look very carefully at the photo of the sunflower from my sister's front yard by Lake Nokomis, you will see a bee hovering to the right.

Photos: Elizabeth Weintraub

Preserving historic structures seems to become more important to me the older I become. There is something unnerving about driving around a city where I grew up, like Minneapolis, and not recognizing entire intersections. That's because life goes on without you. No big surprise there. However, if a bunch of buildings and homes have vanished, it's like part of your own life has been erased as well. Because real estate creates memories, and memories validate your life. We are all connected by real estate.

I understand now why my mother used to drag us kids to places like Nankin or The Forum for lunch. Because those restaurants no longer exist. But I had an opportunity to know that experience, something my niece, unfortunately, does not. Almost everything on 7th Street between Nicollet and Hennepin has changed. The Tick Tock Diner where I worked my senior year at South High School is gone. My high school was torn down, too, as 1970 was the last graduating year for that building. Big pages of my life have been ripped out.

So, when it came time to pick a place to meet up with an old friend, Gary, a guy I probably have not seen for more than 40 years, I picked the 12th floor of what used to be Dayton's and is now Macy's. We had lunch yesterday at the Oak Grill. Like with most people who refuse to give up the past just because corporate conglomerates have altered our futures, the 12th floor will always be Dayton's to me. Walking into the Oak Grill is like stepping back to a quieter period, a time without cell phones, jackpot slots or jet-skis. It's reminiscent of leopard-skin pillbox hats.

This is a guy who at the last minute joined a friend from Wayzata and me, and together we hitchhiked to Washington, D.C. in 1969 for the March on Washington. We called him Big Al, based on that character from Laugh In. I recall a day we sat in the Tick Tock Diner. He got the name of Big Al from those old timey salt and pepper shakers that sat in little baskets with sugar packets. This guy would pick up the set by its handle and shake it: Ring that bell.

Gary and I were friends because we shared the same values and core beliefs. It's why we are still friends today. No matter what has gone on in the world around us or how we have been shaped by our past experiences, we are still basically the same people. I can't say that about many of my old friends. Or, it's also entirely possible that they are not the people I had envisioned them to be, and my perception of them was altered by my own expectations. We are all victims of our own realities. Trapped in our own heads.

Which is one of the reasons I begged my husband to take a ride up the Foshay Tower. I had a strong urge to see the view.  It used to be free to go to the observation deck. Now it costs $8 a person to take the elevator up to the 30th floor. For decades, the Foshay Tower was the tallest building in Minneapolis, built in the 1920s. You can see all the way to Saint Paul and the St. Paul Fairgrounds. I did not know that Wilbur Foshay had been convicted of fraud, incarcerated at Leavenworth Federal Prison, and then later released by President Roosevelt and pardoned by President Truman.

I do know that people ridiculed Foshay when he decided to build the tower. They thought it would fall over. Called it Foshay's Folly. But there it stands today, dwarfed by some of the newer buildings such as the IDS Tower, which was built around the time they started to film the Mary Tyler Moore show based in Minneapolis. They put a statue of Mary Tyler Moore in front of Dayton's in 2002, just before I left the city for good. I hadn't yet been downtown to see it, something I rectified now, so you can see me with Mary above.

We had dinner last night at The Black Forest Inn, a historic German restaurant in Minneapolis. This place serves enormous quantities of food and a black forest cake with cherries the size of your head. I was almost rolled out into the street. As we passed the photo on the wall, I pointed out the bullet hole in the center to my niece, Laura. This is a photo taken in 1963 at The Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C. It is 10 women of the Daughters of the Revolution, draped with sashes. Some doofus for no reason whipped out a pistol one night a long time ago and shot a hole in the picture. My niece looked at me in horror and said, "And you brought us to this restaurant, why?"

When you get off the plane in Minneapolis, which you boarded in Sacramento, the humidity hits you like a ton of bricks. I have lived in Sacramento for 9 years now. I have taken dry heat for granted. It's like you don't even notice it. I mean, I'll be out in the back yard yanking a few weeds out of the garden when all of a sudden beads of perspiration will roll down the side of my face. I'll think: what is that? Where did that come from? Oh, yeah, right, it's 95; I forgot.

You don't forget when it's 95 in Minneapolis. It's like a Turkish bath. Not that I have ever been to a Turkish bath but one day I will go. The reason I have not yet gone to Turkey is because Greece is right next door. I hear the two countries do not get along. So, if you're going to visit that part of the world, you might not want to cross boundaries from one country to the other -- they prefer that you choose one and stick to it. Whereas, I am in the "may as well" camp. If you're going to Minneapolis, for example, you may as well go to Saint Paul.

Which is where we are headed tomorrow, to attend the best State Fair in the entire country. Yes sirree, right here in Saint Paul, Minnesota, home of Garrison Keillor and A Prairie Home Companion. I had never heard of Lake Wobegon until I spotted somebody in the Home Depot parking lot somewhere in Orange County wearing a t-shirt that read: Where is Lake Woebegon, Minnesota? So, I stopped him and asked if he knew because I did not. Lake Woebegon -- that's how much I know about Garrison Keillor.

Except it's common knowledge that Garrison Keillor goes to St. Paul Saints' games, which is the minor league baseball team in Saint Paul. I am not a huge baseball fan. I once went to a game at Midway Stadium in the 1990s. This was when Darryl Strawberry played for them, after he got into all that trouble with cocaine. The crowd chanted Strawberry, Strawberry, Strawberry -- they loved him, but he was not from Saint Paul, so who cares, and Strawberry soon thereafter left the state. It's surprising that I am sharing any of this with you because I am not a sport's fan. I don't really follow any sports.

Which is why yesterday I was standing on the Light Rail from the Lindbergh Terminal and wondering why there were so many Sacramento Kings fans on Light Rail with us. The Light Rail was jam packed, filled with men, women and children wearing purple shirts that read KINGS. It wasn't until they turned a bit that I could see there were two more letters on those shirts.

Photo: Elizabeth Weintraub