Tim Duff

Edina High School

Class of 1968

→ Join 2876 Alumni from Edina High School that have already claimed their alumni profiles.
→ There are 74 classes, starting with the class of 1945 all the way up to class of 2024.

TIM'S PROFILE

This is a limited view of Tim's profile, register for free or login to view all their profile information.

Tim Duff - Class of 1968 - Edina High School

First Name	Tim
Last Name	Duff
Graduation Year	Class of 1968
Gender	Male
Current Location	Long Lake, Minnesota
About Me	THE FIND CHAPTER 1 As he watched the black sedan move slowly down the street that had been parked in front of his childhood home, his thoughts came back to the present tense and he momentarily forgot about the luncheon investment seminar he had just conducted. It was Friday, the end of another week and he felt smug, alight with the flame of second hand distinction and the immeasurable amounts of recent optimism he had received, self- involved and successful in the frantic scribble of unexamined ambition, in what in his circles seemed to pass for “happy”. The seminar had gone well with eighty five people in attendance and the brokers sponsoring the event seemed happy with the potential results. They had not been distracted this day by the usual post lecture crowd of exegists and second guessers. The applause meter was always a key leading indicator of these public events; if it was strong and hearty as you finished the discourse you were mostly assured of success. This particular luncheon had looked productive from the start, with a room full of what appeared to be some substantial net worth, well coifed men and women eager to take advantage of the latest tax nuances and the Federal Reserve omens foretelling declining interest rates. The ovation given to Ryan Davies as he summed up with a very strategically ending exhortation for his audience, apparently finding enough investment metaphors congenial to their spirits, creating a sense of urgency of “do it now,” in order to guarantee their financial future, was quite robust and was mildly exhilarating to him. The audience had been shown, Ryan thought, the metaphorical investment hat and the rabbit, but the rabbit had been as intended put quickly back into that magic hat. He knew by training that you never reached into rabbit-less hats, and that this had tremendous appeal for the cast of self- regarded brokerage supernumeraries and apprentices in attendance, who, had not quite yet mastered the potions and spells. He had orchestrated privately at the luncheon sponsored by yet another demanding broker dealer, an exercise in the sheer eroticism of riches and power, making them mellifluous and as treasurable as honey to the investing public present, all the while pillowing them in self-satisfaction. It was really the same overfed over pleased crowd that generally attended these affairs. They were all there for the same opportunistic delight at the offer, although perhaps not quite so immoderate to be found elsewhere. All the brokers and high finance grunts looked spiffy in their mental dress whites and ties, which were in accordance with the politics of the simplism of supply side and trickle- down economics of the day. They all seemed to be much better friends to him than he was to them. He smiled at the thought as he drove to his parent’s home, of how he had paused before making the closing statement, enjoying the satisfaction for a few more moments, before bringing in the fish he had hooked to the gaff. He chuckled inwardly, as he recalled the old adage: “Put in enough of a commission for the goat and you’d be surprised at how easy it is to sell the goat’s milk as cream.” All he was doing after was just a way of making something essentially simple seem complex. In defense of it’s so enormously important self-esteem, the investment business with Wall Street as its driver, like education and like the social sciences, had developed a Haussprach that resonated with expertise, complexity, reconditeness, significance, and a semantic monumental mystery of what at bottom, was the process of buying and selling pieces of paper. To exploit Wall Street, Ryan had quickly grasped, meant finding what the market maker wanted to exploit. He had come to understand with economic expedition that he needed to feed his audience of investors and brokers with right euphemisms in equilibrium that would spike their vanity. The market relished euphemisms like lollipops, because it helped to build the specious artifice of the potential clients’ psychic rate of return. Wall Street in the end, Ryan realized dealt in fantasies and they traded those fantasies as promises. In the short duration of his career he had witnessed first- hand how financial products were evolving, contributing to the debasement of the investment function becoming a matter now of merely sound marketing. The big brokerage firms could create the nice fission patterns throughout the markets for any new investment product, making it the hottest deal going, capable of “retrieving Lazarus from the dead,” as long as it had enough spread and marketing vig to make it immensely profitable. Ryan and his public platform speaking efforts were a metaphoric fishing expedition for Wall Street, using just the right baits and lures to bring in the fish; the fish called greed and pride and opportunism, to the surface. These were however Ryan was beginning to see, really fish that fed on them-selves and seldom discovered it. How long could the balloon stay afloat, he thought with all these types nibbling at the edges with their sharp teeth of self-indulgence? He knew he was being used, but in the shadings of his young life this present day, this was the way of life. It was the way it worked. Maybe he often thought he never had a choice and would have been an uncertain performer at whatever he did, but his decision to aim at the stars had been a conscious one, and this was the way it was, being weighted on the American scale of, “do it or shut up.” Ah well, he thought, it’s the way of the world; we are all just rungs on someone else’s ladder. As his memory and circumspection of his meetings and his business were left behind his thought focused on the deep ebony sedan and the mysterious, yet familiar license plates, the government VIP plates he saw moving down the street away from his parent’s home on Cedar Lake Road. Had he seen that car and those familiar plates before or not? Something was familiar about them he thought as he entered his boyhood home and the delicious aroma of baking bread creating its uncontrollable oedipal tug. Nothing brought back the past as quickly and powerfully as smell. Ryan’s olfactory nerves instantly aroused something in the limbic center of his brain, where he stored long term memory on his mental hard-drive. He gazed upon his mother who looked healthy and effervescent once again, gaining back once more, thank God, the rosy cheeked look about her that was the true index of her character. The memory of her drawn paleness of past, was just that now, a faded memory. Mary had been a homemaker all her married life and had made his boyhood home painstakingly easy and well. They had pretty much lived a charmed life, Ryan and his older sister Coleen. To him his mother had always been like the dinner he really needed to live and thrive. She had made it possible for him and his sister to believe that their world would be effortlessly cared for, because she had seemingly effortlessly cared for it. During the period of her illness he remembered how her eyes could lose their shine, stilled and sagged, and then she would take a deep breath and marshal her strength and her eyes would light up again like lanterns that had momentarily dimmed in the harsh breezes of her thoughts. “I’m fine,” he remembered his mother would say soon after she was diagnosed with early stage two cancer, but her smile would be weak without light or warmth, fighting the accumulated ennui of the past eighteen months, and for the first time he thought of what it must be like to know you were going to die, that the seasons would change and you may not be there to see any of it. It was like standing too close to some evil conflagration he remembered as his mind quickly leapt back. But now her face glowed once again, cured of the ravage that had dwelled within her, and as Ryan entered the front door giving his mom a loving hug, the delicious aroma of baking bread floating through the air, the wonderful foretaste of manna from heaven that had been so much a part of his childhood. “Say, who was driving away from the house?” Ryan asked. Mary tried to respond immediately, but her throat seemed to have closed around a knot of newly discovered fear and dread. “Oh, oh that was just Doctor Mason from the clinic. He’s just one of those old time docs’ who still likes to make house calls,” she nervously explained, looking at him with wounding sympathy. She looked as if a disappointing distasteful memory had passed through her mind like a quick cloud across the sun. Ryan always felt he’d gotten his talent for reading people from his mother. She was like him, what Sigmund Freud called a menschenkender, which loosely translated meant, a good judge of character. But, it went beyond that. He and his mother both had an unusual ability to read faces and expressions and intuit whether people were telling the truth. It was certainly not foolproof and it was not like being a human polygraph. It was merely an innate talent the way people were natural painters or could tell stories or had perfect pitch. They were both good at detecting lies. Though not perfect. He gazed upon his mother now who looked just for a moment it seemed as though her face had lost its usual pose of patient resignation, as if a mask had suddenly been stripped from it. Hopefully Ryan thought whatever he sensed was orbiting his mother’s mind would not give way to a desperate lonely vulnerability, an expression made almost unbearably poignant by his feeling that he was being asked to share in her despair, that she was reaching out to him, for him. “Caramel rolls on the bake?” Ryan asked trying to clear his head of his own lingering unanswered queries. “Oh yes, and I need to put the icing on them now, so why don’t you take Brock out the back door to the lake. She’s been perched downstairs eying the geese all afternoon.” “All-right,” Ryan blurted happy to change the mental scenery, shoving his faintly building anxiety back to the furthest reaches of his mind. Ryan thundered down the stairs past the water color portraits and pictures of Coleen and him at various ages of adolescence at the myriads of family birthdays and Christmases and more recent collection of grandkids and in-laws. He chuckled as he found the family’s black and white Springer spaniel glaring menacingly from atop the couch through the large rec-room picture window at the large fowl floating leisurely on the backyard ponds’ cold and clear late April waters. “Go get’em girl,” he urged opening the back door of the split level home. In a whirlwind of long floppy ears and legs she was at last free to exhort herself upon her evil long necked prey. It was a routine that occurred at least three times a day, through the spring and summer until the late fall, when the salt and pepper pedigree would feel at last the annual accomplishment of ridding the predators from her estate, as they finally mercifully flew south in their instinctive annual migration. Ryan howled as she flew long into the air landing on her belly with a splat at least twelve feet deep into the pond, the creatures gathering energy in the flut of their wings, flying up and away ruining the dog’s feeble attempt at being a heroine, glaring back down at the mutt who daily disturbed their peace, with black-eyed beaded disdain. Ryan looked up at his mother standing in the oval windows of the kitchen, as she shook her head in constant amazement at the dog’s intense instincts. He walked to the far end of the pond nearest the lake, the earth moist and giving under his feet from recent spring thaw, wondering why a physician would drive an auto which such license plates. Had he seen that car and those familiar plates before or not, or was he dredging up withered memories? He was quite proud of his prehensile visual memory. Were they vanity plates that had recently become popular in the ever expanding culture of me-ism? Yah, that’s probably it, he mouthed silently to himself, allowing the matter to fade from his thoughts. He dropped the black polyetheline hose that had been holstered over the winter back into the pond and waited for the water from the main lake to once again flow back into the water that had served as the neighborhood skating and hockey rink all the winters of his childhood. He clapped for Brock to get out of the water and dry off as a sudden gale began to blow along the western shores of the lake making its way towards the Davies’ home. Above in the kitchen Mary’s hands trembled as she looked down at the document she took from the drawer where she had hurriedly stashed it after seeing Ryan coming up the driveway. She stood holding it as if it contained some malevolent genie that had been released from its chrysalis of total secretiveness. She had thought all this past history to be over, or so she had hoped, mentally chastising herself for such somnolence. It had been so long ago now it seemed that both she and Wally had longed for this clandestine incident to be forever behind them. With the untimely death of Dorothy, along the shores of White Iron Lake in 1963, they had mistakenly, as was now evident had been pursuing their own folly of false hope. Hearing the back door open and the dog bark, she quickly slid the document back into the drawer underneath some cook books. “Got to go Mom,” Ryan pleaded as he rounded the corner coming into the kitchen. “Say hi to Dad.” “Say hi to Nan and the boys,” Mary responded putting a tupper full of caramel rolls into her son’s hands. Mary made herself smile. Whence came the smile and how she had mustered it she had no rightly idea, but it pleased her to smile at him. “Well until later then,” he said, as he went down the front steps, the door closing behind him, leaving the image of his uncertain smile to remain, beholden in his mother’s eyes. Mary watched as Ryan backed down the driveway, lowering her head into her own raised hands, fingers splayed now from forehead to chin, and let out a long tremendous sigh hoping to find some level of composure. She hadn’t yet been ready to face this, feeling the lesions beginning to grow in her mind. Until now her visitor today had been more of a presence than a person, but now this emergence, and she felt a shiver to her bones approaching. She had remembered him surprisingly well from their first uninvited meeting back in 1963. He had the same eyes of a war bird that she recalled and a nose that would have done honor to the Capitoline. His skin, Mary repulsed inwardly, was now psoriatic and acne pitted and oddly pulpy as if the flesh beneath it had worked itself loose from the bone. They had chatted briefly no more than five minutes just inside the front door, neither giving or getting, like money changers of old just swapping coins. She had faced life up to this point and had fought it at least to no worse than a draw, she thought. She and her husband had always believed deep in their subconscious that this potential enemy was lurking out there biding his vengeful hour, waiting patiently like wolves stalking deer, to bring Mary’s family and its deserved heritage down and punish all for having been smarter than their predator had thought. The trick was to see life as it was, she reminded herself, as an unending series of impending cases, one after the next, to be fled from if possible and if not to be punished by and by each punishment to be shriven, to gain an extra dollop of toughness to seal up another pore of vulnerability. Over the course of time she hoped the tears would be fewer and fewer to come and eventually a state of grace would be attained and life would finally let you alone. Mary thought now of how she had looked at him as beseechingly as she could, “I don’t know what you are talking about,” imploring to her visitor, with mild scorn tinged with faint incredulity, looking intentionally blank. He had stared back at her over his huge nose as if on high lectern, an altar so that he looked imperially on her as from a great height, while trying to be as amiable and off hand as possible. She took another deep sigh, walking away from the window as Ryan’s car faded into the distance. Carrying the ruthlessness of the power of everyday anxiety with her, she walked briskly to her bathroom and splashed water on her face, blessing the mirror in front of her for telling her she didn’t look as tired and as old as she now suddenly felt. Hoping she had enough reserve of resolve she slowly padded her way back to the kitchen. She knew what had to be done. He heard the phone ring at the check in desk of the pool at the club, as he finished his fifty sixth lap, doing a flip turn that would have made Mark Spitz proud. This was not one of those clubs based purely on snobbism and he appreciated that. He had started swimming more than ten years ago now, ever since the day he had seen an image in the full length mirror that has repulsed him into action. Doing at least a mile a day, sometimes much more had trimmed him down to his weight at his Army physical in 1943, getting free of that middle-aged belt line bulge. As he swam down the lane in the pool dedicated to his swimming marathons, he could see Karl, the club’s nearly blind elderly masseur wave at him, phone in hand. “Your wife is on the hook, here Mr. Davies,” his old Slavic voice gurgled hoarsely. Walter finished his crawl stroke with a strong final two bursts and hopped up on the deck, Karl handing him a towel. “Hi Mary, is everything okay?” “He was just here.” “Who Mary, are you alright?” “Our intruder, from the lake in the 60’s.” There was silence on the ends on both lines as both seemed frozen in trepidation. “Wally, Walter…” “Yah I’m here dear, I guess I was just hoping we would never…” “Yes me as well,” she quickly added. Walter distinctly heard the nervousness in her delivery. “I’ll take a quick shower Mary and be home in thirty minutes. Stay calm, Mary.” Borgen, Walter Davies mouthed silently to himself as he walked to the shower. The patriarch of the Davies’ family scolded himself mentally as he pulled out the club parking space, thinking foolishly that this old annoyance could have been trivialized by time, and simply go away, never reappearing to haunt the family. As CEO of a prominent food manufacturing and distribution company, he scolded himself for not having better judgment. He made key corporate and financial decisions daily and yet he had dealt with this matter as if it would just disappear into the foggy mist of the distant past. “Damn it,” he said aloud as he merged onto the freeway heading west into the setting sun, recalling now from his philosophy studies in college the aphorism, that, “’Nothing was as easy as self-deceit, for what we wish, we soon also come to believe to be true.”’ “Damn it,” he cursed again, as the golden setting sun annoyed with inner rancor inside him, hoping it would give him a new occasion for catharsis. Another ten minutes and I’ll be home, he reminded himself and he squared his mental shoulders and tried to think through this latest news from Mary. He blamed himself, accepting his consciousness of error. How often we let things go until the iron seemed to get humiliatingly cold. Perhaps destiny had finally presented itself and it just might be time to seize it, even though doing so could likely involve breaking through the confining crust of career, family responsibility, and all the questions that go with the potential of throwing off all the burdens of caring for their extended families, dependents and dependencies and his own contractual obligations he must continue to meet with the company he ran and the people he employed. He looked out at the rush of traffic moving in every direction and thought momentarily of the war, and the men he’d fought with, some like him home and safe, others left behind out beyond the Atlantic. He felt a twinge of real loss. He remembered his father speaking of the “hole” war made in man’s soul, even if a man came out of it whole, it was as if some part of him had been amputated or left behind on the battlefield. He was civilized and had been born with the right passport, a very decent man who wore laces in his shoes and bought his clothes at JC Penny throughout the blabby, hairy, self-expressive decades that followed the Eisenhower years. Whatever vestigial inclination he might have had toward “me-firstism” was mantled over with ideologies of morality and ethics, so out of date they appeared ridiculous to the noisy blatant post- adolescent world of 60’s and 70’s Wall Street. The old ways of talking about politics were falling away. Candidates for national offices were now serving up rhetoric that tingled with strains of utopianism, intercut with equal and opposite strains of apocalypticism. They gave forth stories of hope of a society that could surpass any the world had ever known. But they also told stories that spoke to the dark looming fear that the world bequeathed us by science, technology and the Pax- Americana that would not make us more secure but might instead unleash the devil. The feelings of community and interdependence engendered by the war were fading away, moving in a selfish direction. A new generational fault line seemed to run through the middle of the country, with what was once considered revelatory now becoming old hat. They were being replaced by the march of narcissism, solipsism, paranoia and self-indulgence. He could sense the strange new spirit even as early as the Korean War. It might be, he thought, that America, the birthplace of an “all or nothing” attitude was now simply too vast a nation to deal with the small wars of moral conviction. Public opinion was turning in the direction of “every man for himself.” Patriotism was all well and good but it seemed to be reserved now for the other fellow. To die for one’s principles and country was hardly the best way to put a second car in the garage. The country was awash in goods and the near maniacal love of them, the ravening appetite stimulated to climax by television, which pushed the possibility of material luxury into the humblest most hopeless shacks. He began to realize as he wound up his internal soliloquy that he indeed may have to shed whatever fogginess real or imagined he had developed, like a snake and join the fight once again. He and Mary had both found their ways of hiding from the facts, one with solipsism and the other with his seductions. Anxiety would have to be shoved back into the farthest most nearly invisible reaches of his mind, Walter instinctively knew. As he turned onto Cedar Lake Road, in deep reflection on the past and what steps they may be required to take, something suddenly came into his sight line that piqued his interest. A white van that appeared to be unmarked was stationed just two houses away from his own. The war had trained him as a Pathfinder on the Normandy beaches, to be acutely aware of changes in scenery and landscape. This was a fairly private residential neighborhood where service vehicles parked in the driveways of the clients they were serving, not out on the street. He passed his house and circled around the block passing the van once more. No windows in the rear, no one sitting in the driver’s or passenger seat. It was likely nothing, but his war bred instincts were now on full red alert. Walter began his deliberate measured response as he walked through the door and greeted Mary, canvasing her face for a quick reading, bringing an index finger to his lips, clearly realizing that the urgency of the conversation needed to be deflected. He could clearly see that her face had lost its usual look; of patient resignation, as if a mask had been stripped from it. She put an urgent hug around him, a hug of desperate lonely vulnerability, an expression made unbearably poignant, as Walter had been invited to share in the despair. “It’s so nice out; let’s take Brock for a run at the geese, before the sun gets too low.” He motioned her to speak and she confusingly took the lead saying, “Okay that sounds great. Maybe we can take the paddle boat out on the lake.” “Come on Brock,” Walter bellowed as they walked out the back door toward the pond and Cedar Lake that sat adjacent to it. “What’s going on, Wally?” Mary whispered. “No geese, Mary? Did someone we know already dispense with them?” “Ryan was here earlier and took her out, so they haven’t dared to make a return.” Brock looked out at the glistening water, feeling forlorn, and dove into the chilly water regardless. Walter helped Mary on the paddle boat, untethered it at the dock, and nearly fell head long into the cold winter lake thaw, as the springer ran between his legs and sat perfunctorily next to Mary as if it were her royal queenly throne. “So what’s happening?” Mary asked as they drifted out on the shimmering azure water. “It may be nothing. I’m just trying to be cautious. Tell me what went on, Mary.” “It was the same man who visited us at the lake back in the early sixties. He’s much older obviously but it was him.” “Arthur Borgen”, he whispered just loud enough for Mary to hear. “God I really had myself convinced this was behind us,” Mary moaned. “I know, I know, I feel the same way. Tell me everything that occurred, from the moment he arrived until he left. Remember everything, Mary. You know how important this is!” She went through every detail of her conversation with Borgen, which had lasted no more than five minutes, with a faint glow of dreaed appearing on her face as she spoke. “How far into the house did he get?” “He stood only at the marble entrance, just inside the door. What did you think; I was gonna’ feed him lunch?” “Did he ever get out of your sight?” “No, only when I ran into the kitchen, to turn off the oven timer.” The caramel rolls he thought a serene smile creasing his face as he put his arm around his wife’s shoulders, the dog applying slobbery loving licks as he did. “He may have planted a bug,” Walter said explained to Mary about the mysterious white van parked two doors down. They sat in quiet contemplation as they paddled down the north shore of Cedar Lake, which by summer’s end would be a storehouse for a mess of newly developed weeds called Eurasian milfoil, transported to many of the state’s lakes, by boats that had taken port on Lake Superior. The sun was beginning to make its last appearance over the stately white pines as they sat together now holding hands, drifting along, watching the hens and mallards scramble for shore as they sensed their perched predator making her way toward them. Walter was beginning to come up with a plan. “We can’t let on, right Mary? Do you still agree with me after all these years?’ “I guess so Wally, but I’m scared. He would not have come back if he didn’t have good reason.” She was right, he thought, but instead he heard himself say how he wasn’t so sure and that he felt they should play this out a little longer. He stopped paddling and looked at her angelic face, her still rich, lustrous, peppered black hair and deep into her piercing brown eyes. It was after all her decision her family’s heritage at stake. They had been married now for nearly forty years now and they had laughed when they remembered the phases of their marriage when it was still a mirror, reflecting back both of their carefully constructed, easily shattered conceits. Mary had many times recalled the first Valentine’s Day after they were married, when Wally had given her red bath towels. She cried when she unfolded them. The towels were a metaphor she came to see, that momentarily blotted out the sun, shrieked across the reassuring hum of a gradually gathering darkness of her newly married life. It was a romantic high-noon to her, an emotional and historic accounting in which her husband had been found sadly wanting. She would say to herself then that they were not really married, still in the teen romance mode, of He loves me; he loves me not, still riveted by the high drama and pitched emotion of courtship and passion, in which a passing glance can detonate a sudden emotional danger. She couldn’t remember anymore why she was so angry, but she reasoned that it must have been that she had staked everything on this man and he was not the way she thought. She had defined herself in terms of this man she came to realize and he was a man who gave towels. They both smile now when they recall this story and now Walter gives her red bath towels and pink and red roses every Valentine’s Day. It has become part of their mythology and the laughter now is its own edgy commentary on how things have changed, how they have changed each other, and how the two people who now smile at this are indelibly stained with each other’s expectations and disappointments, how who we are is a composite of who we might have been refracted through the lens of whom we married, the shared laughter becoming a counterpane covering the lumps they’ve dealt each other, the scars left from various surgeries they’ve performed on each other, and the enthusiasms dampened so a that a couple could emerge. Walter and Mary were the living testimony that all marriages are like mended garments. In the marriage, you don’t always make it all better, you just get over it. Through marriage they had both come to realize you have willfully introduced a witness into your life and can no longer close the mind’s eye on uncomely passages, but must stand up straight and put a name upon your actions, because if you don’t, your partner will. Marriage, as it had worked for Mary and Walt was a mystery, made up of such a complicated ebb and flow of affection, admiration, ritual and gradual unfolding understanding that with the right person it’s not a bad life to live. Their marriage was now steeped in the music they share and enjoy, in their family, on the way they both have changed and the things they have come to know, in exasperation and elegance, in the poetry of darkness and in the solace of each- other’s company. They see each other in the manners in which Walter has saved Mary and the ways Mary has saved Walter, providing each other with a modest continuity of care rather than seeking some miraculous cure, listening to one another and caring for their welfare in such a way that had become such a comfortable experience that the magic aureole of love had descended upon them when no one was looking. “Okay, what’s the plan?” Mary finally softly whispered. It was a brilliant plan first put together by her father back in the late 1930’s before the war and Walter had a huge role in bringing it forward, but it was the patriarch of the Chisholm family on the Iron Range, her father David who had originally staked it out. He always felt that Mary wanted to bring it to fruition, but he also knew that the fear factor would eventually play its fateful hand. A year ago Mary would have most likely backed away from the current urgency, but now with her cancer defeated she was feeling her old strength and stamina one more. “When we go back to house Mary, we must act as you did with Borgen, expressing our mutual dismay that he thinks we know something about the matter. I’ll look for a bug near the front door and take Brock for a walk and see if the van is still there. Let’s unyoke the oxen for now Mary; after all, it is the cocktail hour,” Wally said as he slipped the boat up to the dock and escor...(read more)