Mary Tyler Moore Minneapolis Airport Poem on George Floyd and Memory
I am writing this from Jakarta, only a few hours after landing, with that strange airport feeling still in my body. The trip has crossed time zones, cities, weather, memory, and grief. About 24 hours ago, I was sitting in the Minneapolis airport waiting for my flight to Incheon. I was tired. I was between places. I was thinking about Minneapolis, a city I mostly knew through television until history forced me to know it differently.
That is where this poem came from.
Airports do that sometimes. They make you remember places you have barely touched. They turn a layover into a mirror. Minneapolis, for me, arrived first through Mary Tyler Moore, through that famous smile, that hat in the air, that promise of charm and soft winter light. Then Minneapolis arrived again through George Floyd, through the sidewalk, the officer’s knee, the public horror of a death that refused to stay local.
Those two Minneapolises met in my head while I waited for the next flight.
The poem written between departures
This is the draft I wrote while sitting in the Minneapolis airport. I am sharing it as part of the daily poem project, which means I am not presenting it as final or polished. I am presenting it as alive.
While Sitting in the Minneapolis Airport Waiting for My Flight to Incheon, I Think of Mary Tyler Moore Katerina Canyon Everything I know about Minneapolis I learned from Mary Tyler Moore who brightened the city with a toothy grin that chased off winter and left our memories living in eternal spring. I learned Minneapolis was a place where hats lived midair in permanent twilight. Mary’s city was childlike, a place where she played in the streets with a spin and a smile. She must have been dead three years when George Floyd was murdered. I learned from George Floyd. He died on the sidewalk, childlike with pleas to spare his life. I learned the Twin Cities were split as sharply as Jacob and Esau. George Floyd may have had a toothy grin but I never saw it. The officer who killed him pushed the city into an eternal winter which has the power to snap out a life with a sustaining pressure to the neck.
I keep coming back to the first line, because it says something true and uncomfortable. “Everything I know about Minneapolis” is not everything there is to know. It is everything that reached me before I arrived.
That distinction matters.
A city is never one image. It is not a sitcom opening. It is not one murder. It is not a postcard, a headline, a skyline, a protest, or a memory. But for those of us passing through, those pieces can become the first language we have for a place.
The poem begins with a television memory and ends with state violence. That is a hard turn, but it felt honest in the moment. I was sitting in the airport, inside a clean and ordered travel space, thinking about how quickly a city’s public image can break open.
Mary Tyler Moore gave me one Minneapolis
Mary Tyler Moore’s Minneapolis was bright. It was not really the full city, of course. It was an image made for the screen, shaped by timing, charm, music, and a cultural need to believe in possibility. Still, images matter. They teach us before we know they are teaching us.
For many people, Mary Tyler Moore gave Minneapolis a kind of emotional shorthand:
A woman in motion
A hat suspended in the air
A winter city made warm
A version of independence that looked joyful
A public square turned into a stage
I call the city in the poem “childlike” because that televised memory feels untouched by consequence. It has the quality of a snow globe. The city is framed, lit, and contained. Even winter gets softened. Even the cold becomes charming.
That is the power of nostalgia. It edits.
It lets one person’s smile stand in for a city’s complexity. It lets memory keep the spring and leave out the frost. It lets a viewer far away believe they know something because they have felt something.
I do not mean that as an insult to Mary Tyler Moore. Her image carried real warmth. The question is what happens when that warmth becomes the only story. The poem starts there because that was my first Minneapolis, not a real city with real pain, but a city made of television light.
George Floyd forced another memory into the city
Then there is the other Minneapolis.
George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis on May 25, 2020. That fact rewrote how many of us understood the city, even if we had never been there. The world saw the sidewalk. The world heard his pleas. The world watched a death that should not have happened, and the city became attached to grief, outrage, protest, and a demand for justice.
The poem does not try to explain George Floyd’s life. It cannot. A daily draft written in an airport does not carry that kind of authority. What it can do is admit the way his death entered public memory.
The line “I learned from George Floyd” is meant to sit heavily. It is not the same kind of learning as television. It is not soft. It is not nostalgic. It is the kind of learning that arrives through pain and shame.
It also changes the earlier image of the smile.
Mary Tyler Moore’s grin is part of the mythology I inherited. George Floyd “may have had a toothy grin,” the poem says, “but I never saw it.” That line hurts because public memory often gives some people fullness and denies it to others. Some people are remembered in motion, smiling, beloved. Others are remembered through the violence done to them.
That is one of the tensions in the poem. Who gets to be remembered joyfully? Who gets reduced to an image of suffering? Who gets spring, and who is trapped in winter?
The poem does not answer those questions. It only points toward them.
Airport writing creates a strange kind of honesty
There is something about writing in an airport that strips away ceremony. You are not at your desk. You are not surrounded by your books. You do not have your usual rituals. You have a gate number, a bag, a charging cord, a plastic seat, and time that does not belong to any one place.
That can make the writing rough, but it can also make it honest.
When I wrote this poem, I was not trying to solve Minneapolis. I was not trying to make a complete statement about race, television, history, nostalgia, policing, or grief. I was trying to catch the collision happening in my mind before the next flight pulled me somewhere else.
That is what a daily poem can do. It captures the pressure of the day.
A poem written every day does not always have the luxury of distance. There is no long pause where the poem sits quietly in the mind for a week. There is no perfect revision window. There is today’s poem, and then tomorrow is already waiting.
That can be frightening. It means the poem will show its seams. It may have awkward lines. It may reach too quickly. It may miss something. It may need a better title, a sharper ending, a cleaner turn, or a more careful word.
But the pressure is also useful. It forces the poem into the world while it still has heat.
Every daily poem is a draft
I want to be clear about this part of the process: everything is a draft.
There is no way these poems will be perfect. That is not false modesty. It is simply the truth of the project. A poem a day means the work moves faster than my inner critic can control. Some days, that is a gift. Some days, it is uncomfortable. Most days, it is both.
The daily practice asks me to accept several things at once:
The poem may have flaws.
The poem may still be worth sharing.
Readers may see something I missed.
Revision can come later.
The next poem still has to be written.
That last point matters most. There is no “I am going to let this sit in my head for a few days” in this structure. I may want that. I may even need it. But the project does not allow it in the usual way. The poem gets written because tomorrow I have to think about the next poem.
That changes the relationship between writer and reader.
Instead of only showing finished work, I am inviting people into the process while it is still moving. That means mistakes may be visible. It also means the energy is visible. The uncertainty, the reach, the raw connection between travel and memory, all of that remains on the page.
I welcome readers pointing out flaws when they see them. Not as cruelty, and not as a demand that every draft become perfect immediately, but as part of the conversation. The poem is not a marble statue. It is wet clay.
Memory can make a city too simple
The poem also reminds me how dangerous it is to let one story stand for a place.
Minneapolis is not only Mary Tyler Moore. Minneapolis is not only George Floyd. It is a real city with people who wake up, go to work, raise children, fall in love, mourn, argue, cook, shovel snow, make art, and try to live. The poem knows that, even as it admits my own limited entrance into the city’s meaning.
That is why the phrase “Everything I know” carries irony. It is a confession, not a claim of expertise.
We often meet places this way now. A city reaches us through a show, then through a tragedy, then through a layover, then through a news story, then through someone else’s memory. We carry those fragments and mistake them for knowledge.
Poetry can interrupt that mistake.
A poem does not have to make the city complete. It can show the incompleteness. It can say, “This is what I thought I knew. This is what broke that thought. This is what I am still trying to understand.”
That feels especially true when writing far from home. Sitting now in Jakarta, after moving through Minneapolis and Incheon, I feel how strange distance can be. The body keeps traveling, but the mind lingers. A city I barely touched stayed with me across the ocean because a poem had already started asking questions.
The work continues tomorrow
I had no donations today. I will be honest about that, too, because this creative journey is not separate from the practical reality of making time to write. A poem a day takes attention. It takes travel-worn hours, airport seats, tired eyes, and the willingness to share work before it feels safe.
If this poem moved you, challenged you, or made you think about the stories cities carry, I hope you will consider supporting the project when you are able. Even encouragement helps. A comment helps. A careful reading helps. A note about a line that worked, or one that did not, helps the next draft become stronger.
For now, I am grateful to have landed safely in Jakarta. I am grateful the poem found me in Minneapolis before the next flight. I am grateful for everyone following this very wild creative journey.
Tomorrow, there will be another poem. That is the promise and the pressure. Today’s draft carries Mary Tyler Moore, George Floyd, Minneapolis, memory, winter, television light, public grief, and the strange silence of an airport gate. Tomorrow’s poem will have to begin again.
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