Ten minutes to write. Less time to read.

Your opinion of Fargo, North Dakota, was probably formed from the movie named “Fargo,” created by the Coen Brothers several years back. Until I visited there, my impression was formed the same way.

But now that my son, the world literature professor at a local state university, lives there, I’ve come to know and love Fargo firsthand. It’s deceptively charming, and nothing at all like the movie. Perhaps that’s because the movie wasn’t filmed there in the first place.

The real Fargo is meat and potatoes stuff, sturdy and filling without being continental. Maybe they talk funny there, but I never noticed. There are 250 restaurants, including many restaurant chains, a couple eateries that stand above the norm, and Sarello’s, the one and only restaurant in town that deserves four stars. You go there for special occasions, and Kevin and I dined there tonight.

The main street, which runs about half a dozen blocks, doesn’t have a building over three stories high. Most of the storefronts are early twentieth century, although they are trying to accommodate early twenty-first century enterprises: coffee houses, independent bookstores, antique dealers, bars, and a movie house where Marge from “Fargo” movie fame is memorialized in a wooden sculpture on the mezzanine. It’s a fairly accurate likeness too.

Fargo is the unofficial gate to North and South Dakota, to Montana and Idaho. Think of names like Mt Rushmore, Little Big Horn, Wounded Knee, the Black Hills and you get a sense of the space and distance in this region of the United States. I’m only visiting my son for two days, but someday . . . someday . . . I plan to take the wider tour, starting at Fargo and reaching back into our country’s earlier history.

Presuming, that is, that Kevin stays in Fargo long enough.