After 16 years at 106.9 KROC, Cori Jensen and I took the morning show on the road to Fargo. The company paid for my moving, so I had the movers pack it all. Turns out, they pack everything. Including the past I thought I'd lost. 

It took me forever to unpack. But when I did, I discovered just how seriously the movers take "yeah, move everything". Going through a box, wrapped in many layers of protective paper, I found this:

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That’s right. A wheel from my old fridge on 55th Street NW! I didn’t even know it had come off the fridge. So…sorry about that unstable fridge, lady that bought my place.

Then, I found a note my mother'd written and, I’m not embarrassed to admit, it brought out a tear or two (both of my parents died back in the early 90′s).

My mom and dad were always writing notes to each other (one of my favorites was, “Bill, I love fish, but I love you more.”) and often in the weirdest places.

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Some of the family 1986?
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My father had almost no fashion sense, so my mother laid out his clothes for him. When she wasn’t around, one of the kids would take care of it. After he retired, and all the kids had moved out, he started picking out his own clothes, with terrible results. My mother’s solution was to start making notes in his clothes.

On the inside of his pants she’d write something like, “Good brown pants, goes with nice blue shirt” and in the collar of the shirt she’d write, ‘nice blue shirt’. Or, “Old black pants – for darkroom only!” (My dad was a photographer and had darkrooms all over the place, in our basement, in hotel basements, etc.)

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One time, he finished up in a darkroom and went to the bar across the street for a martini and the bartender looked at him, pointed at his shirt and said, “I”m sorry, Bill…I can’t serve you today. Not in that shirt.” My mother had drawn large circles around all the stains on the shirt and, in big letters wrote, “Darkroom Only…DO NOT WEAR IN PUBLIC!”

The note I found in the box was to my dad, probably written to discourage him from ‘trying to help’ after a dinner party (which often just made a bigger mess). I especially love how she signed the note.

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My parents in a nutshell.

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