I Slept Around!

Okay, that’s a provocative title and probably a bit deceitful. But I’m taking a page from Dawn’s blog (The Bohemian Valhalla) on that one. She puts a lot of thought into her post titles, trying to lure unsuspecting readers into her little corner of mayhem, eclectic photographs and the  best food porn in the blogosphere. True, I am going to write about places I’ve slept but not in the true sense of how that slutty phrase is usually used. Not that I didn’t go through a short but memorable phase after a bad break up where I could come up with enough material to write a post like that. But that post will not be forthcoming until a week or two before I die when I’m in a mood to confess all my sins. This time I’m going to walk down Memory Lane to all the TYPES of places I have slept.

The first place I remember sleeping away from home was at a summer camp for Campfire Girls. There were canoes and a bunkhouse involved so I’m thinking it was a camp on lake but my memory isn’t all that clear on the details. I do remember making s’mores and going home with poison ivy and the Campfire Girls’ motto of "WoHeLo" which stood for "work, health, love." I want to believe we also sang the Campfire Girls’ official song back in the day but I just don’t know if memory and wishing I did got mixed up in my brain.

The next memorable place I slept away from home was on a vacation with my parents and I was probably fourteen at the time and we slept in a tourist trap kind of place that had a circle of tepees where travelers spent the night. Not authentic tepees made out of buffalo or deer hides but I was a kid and that didn’t matter in an era when my brother and I probably saw every black and white cowboys and Indians movie ever made. (And now that’s he’s an old man and living in the Memory Care building he’s back to watching them from morning to night. Note to my future cargivers: When I’m too old to remember how to change my TV channel put mine on HGTV or anything other than the old people channels. Why anyone wants to watch black and white after color was invented boggles my mind, but those channels are popular here in independent living, too, so just call me Bogglehead.)

Next up in the I-Slept-Around lineup was back here in Michigan in a cottage on Lake Michigan complete with sandy beaches and a peer where I soon learned that drawing boats coming and going was a great way to meet boys. Like the Campfire Girls' week-in-the-woods this one was also chaperoned by my mom. By then we’d moved up to be Horizon Girls and this was in our senior year. I have many fond and silly memories from that week at the beach but the one I’ll share is of my mom leaning out an attic dormer window with a broom ready to beat off the boys who were dangerously close to using that window to sneak into the house. Crowded behind her was a gaggle of screaming and laughing teenage girls.

Fast forward to a time after meeting my husband and on vacations we started out sleeping in the back of his pickup truck with sleeping bags but we soon graduated to having a camper cab in the back of the Chevy 4x4. (Not sure 'camper cab' is the correct term, but lets go with that for now.) One of those places we slept under the stars in the bed of the pickup truck I wrote about in a post titled The Happiest Day of my Life. It was written in 2012 and it my archive of memories it still lives up to that title. No bait-and-switching with that blog title.

A few years later we invested in a Northface tent that was all trick out with the latest and greatest camping gear. I've always hated cooking for everyday needs but cooking along side the tent on our trips was fun as long as Don lit the stove. One time while camping we woke up surrounded by a herd of deer grazing in the early morning mist. They were so close we could have touched a few of them. By then our dog-at-the-time was so hard of hearing he, thankfully, slept through the enchanted event. Either that or he pretending to sleep through it so he didn’t feel obligated to protect us and where would he started? There must have been twenty of them.

Our cozy little family back in the day.

I don’t remember why or when my husband decided to give up tent camping and buy a motor home. He called it our ‘Rolling Dog House’ and that might give you a clue. The dog we had before Levi and my husband were brothers by different mothers, as they say. And Don didn’t like leaving him at home and I wouldn’t let him take the dog if it was really hot. So even on day trips along Lake Michigan or to go to the heavy equipment bone yards across the state we’d take the motor home so Cooper could ride along. It was also a time in Don’s life when he was heavy into collecting his way across the country and near the end of trips it wasn’t unusual that we’d have to rent motel rooms because he had the motor home too loaded up with things for his gas-and-oil memorabilia collection and for resale in our antique booths. (Think American Pickers. We actually knew those guys before they had that TV show and Don did the same kind of picking as they did.)

 

The last memorable place I slept was in the same inn as Susan B. Anthony stayed in for a month. It’s a bed-and-breakfast in my favorite little tourist town on earth, Saugatuck, and my niece and I had a wonderful weekend that included going to a play at the local theater, driving along Lake Michigan and shopping main street. At one time I did a deep dive into all things related to getting women the right to vote so sleeping in the same place as Susan B. did was an awesome treat. She was the founder of the National Women's Suffrage Association and the bed and breakfast at one time had a bunkhouse wing with 16 bedrooms that housed 100 lumberjacks who worked the vast forest lands in the mid-to-late 1800s. Being in places with historical significance has always energized me a way that is hard to explain...like I'm a spear carrier on the timeline of humanity. Historical place remind us of what past generations have fought for, what we (hopefully) can build on it and then pass it on to the next generation.

There were other memorable place I’ve slept like on a steamship that sailed the Great Lakes and on top of a grave site during a low point in my young life and on a beach in Jamaica with a happy-happy rum buzz going on in my head, but we all have similar places we could catalog when we're as old as I am. And a second post that actually lives up to the title of this one? Don’t hold your breath waiting for it. Until someone gives me an expiration date I won’t be spilling my deepest, darkest secrets. ©

Until Next Wednesday…

* Photo at top is of the Park House Inn Bed and Breakfast in Sautatuck.

                               

Favorite Places and Widow's Tears

 

Saugatuck, 1895

I needed a mini vacation and I got one last weekend when my niece and I went over to Lake Michigan to my favorite town, Saugatuck, to spend the afternoon driving the road along the beach to see the “cottages” and the waves crashing on shore before window shopping the Main Street shops and having lunch at the oldest restaurant on the coastline. When we left the city, headed to the Big Lake, it was sunny and light jacket or sweater weather. The fall colors were starting to show and Saugatuck was busy with others also wanting to get one last walk-around in this tourist town before the shops close up until spring. A lot of the stores we walked by were selling their stock for 75% off but all I bought was a jar of American Spoon apple butter which as far as I can tell never goes on sale. You could spend a fortune at American Spoon with all their yummy preserves, butters and curds. It’s a small, Michigan artisan brand with a big reputation and a healthy mail order service.  

The town itself was the first one settled in the county but long before it was a town, the first white settle came there by boat to build a log cabin on the mouth of the Kalamazoo River in 1830 where Mr. Butler and his wife traded sugar and whisky for game and furs with the Indians. Three years later they were joined by another white settle who opened up a tannery near-by. Lumberjacks were the next to come along. The log cabin Mr. Butler built has been a bar and restaurant ever since those long ago days and it still bears his name although the log building itself has been rebuilt after a fire or two and no doubt has expanded its size. 

When we got to The Butler we had to wait at the bar before we could get a table. The Detroit Lions were playing the Minnesota Vikings on a large screen TV just over our shoulders and there were a dozen hardcore football fans cheering and jeering while looking in our direction. A couple of young ladies were bantering back and forth about taking their differences outside. I could care less about any sport but I thought if we sat there long enough I’d find some blogging fodder. It’s been a long time since I’ve been surrounded by sports fans watching a game and I loved their animation but it’s too bad they weren’t watching the University of Minnesota game. It would have been interesting to watch this gang react to seeing Casey O’Brien getting The Hug from his college coach after holding the ball for the kicker in Sunday’s game. He’s a four-time cancer survivor with a back story that makes the sports casters’ jobs easy. That hug and Casey's backstory was all over the media. 

A good share of the tables at The Butler over-look the mouth of the river and a marina which---along with their good food---keeps people coming back year after year. Like a lot of tourist towns, it’s hard to find many businesses open in the dead of winter, but The Butler is one that never closes for the season. My husband and I used to do this same little mini trip on clear, January nights when the town looks like something out of a Bing Cosby Classic Christmas movie with its left over holiday lights giving extra sparkle to the snow covered and empty streets. In the winter The Butler can be counted on to have a collection of hardy locals lined up along the bar and snowmobiles rather than cars parked outside.

The last time we were there, my niece had the special---liver and onions---which is something my mom used to make once a week. I hated liver and onion nights but my niece likes the yucky stuff and she joked about my mom being there with us. This year it was a spooky coincidence (or was it?) that the special happened to be another reminder of Mom---pot roast and mashed potatoes. She served it often and The Butler’s special tasted just like Mom's did, confirming its moniker as a ‘comfort food’ in our family.

I was listening to the radio while waiting to hook up with my niece the day we went to Lake Michigan when George Strait came through the speaker singing, “…It's time to say goodbye to yesterday. This is where the cowboy rides away…” and out of the blue tears trickled down my cheeks. I had my husband’s Stetson cowboy hat listed for sale at the time and I wasn’t sure I’d get hold of myself by the time my niece appeared. I did, but I ended up telling her about those lyrics making me cry anyway. The mini vacation turned out to be a great day for conversation between two people who trust one another with each other’s life struggles and joyful thoughts and all manner of human experiences in between. ©

The Charm Bracelet and the Devil at Book Club

Women's fiction writer Debbie Macomber says The Charm Bracelet by Viola Shipman, is “Utterly Charming!” And another back cover blurb sums up the story this way, “Through an heirloom charm bracelet, three women will rediscover the importance of family, love, faith, friends, fun, and a passion for living as each charm changes their lives.” 

The story centers around a 70 year woman, Lotty, who lives in rural Michigan, close to a small town that everyone in my book club thought was patterned after Saugatuck, a popular tourist place on Lake Michigan. Her daughter gets a phone call from someone who’s worried about Lotty so she and Lotty’s granddaughter take vacations to go to stay with Lotty for a few weeks to assess what’s going on with Lotty’s memory loss and while they’re visiting they learn the stories behind the charms on the bracelet that Lotty hasn’t taken off since she was a teenager. I found it hard to believe that a person could get that old without having already told those stories to her daughter and granddaughter, but a book has to have some structure to hang its chapters on so I could overlook that head scratcher. All but one person in the club thought it was a nice, light summer read, an unabashedly sentimental story. The odd man out called it “corny” and note it wasn’t me. I found it fascinating, though, that three others reported crying through out the read while the book didn’t milk even one tear out of my eyes. The only emotion it stirred in me was a burning curiosity about where the author lives and an increased fear of not having family closer by if dementia shows up at my dinner table.

A google search turned up the fact that the author is actually a guy---a gay guy who lives in Saugatuck. His ‘Viola Shipman’ pen name belonged to his grandmother, and he’s a critically acclaimed author with nine published books---six of which are non-fiction memoir-style under his real name (Wade Rouse) and three fiction books under the pen. I’ve probably mentioned before that I have a love/hate relationship with my book club and I couldn’t wait to share this detail on book discussion day, knowing several members belong to churches that condemns homosexuality. Ya, I know. That’s Mean Girl thinking, isn’t it, wanting to taunt them with reality, but on the other hand I could talk myself into believing I had an altruistic goal of illustrating without words that you can’t judge a person’s worth by their sexuality. You be my judge---devil or angel. If I had to put a label on my big reveal I’d called it passive aggressiveness. 

I didn’t bring the pen name thing up until after everyone had shared their opinion of The Charm Bracelet. Then I told the group I had tracked down one of the author’s memoir books and it covered a period of time when he and his partner bought a cottage near Saugatuck and he quit his job to write full time. The cottage was the same one he described in The Charm Bracelet. I never got to the part about how they occasionally referred to Saugatuck as Gayberry, a nickname that’s been around since the 1920s when it first appeared in an underground tourist guide of gay friendly places. (The things you learn when you collect antique maps and travel guides, like my husband did!) But I never got a chance to mention Gayberry---the open secret most tourists don't know about---because another book club member challenged me by saying, “Oh, no, the author is married and has four children! I’m sure I read that somewhere. Can't be gay.” I replied, “I just finished reading one of his memoirs and at 40 he’d been in a ten year relationship with his partner and he didn’t have any kids.” She insisted again and she started talking about the son in the book at which point we all knew she had her books and authors mixed up because there was no son in The Charm Bracelet. 

After that little “oops!” I shared the fact that Wade Rouse’s memoir had me laughing out loud so many times that the dog got up and left the room, giving me a dirty look for disturbing his sleep. Before the move to rural Michigan, Wade was a city guy who, like me, loved his Starbucks. Even his dog, he wrote, was so citified she didn’t know how to walk on a leash without cement underneath her feet. The book---titled At Least in the City Someone Would hear me Scream---was one of those books I didn’t want to end. When I finished sharing these last few sentences, no one said a word. Not. One. Word. It’s not unusual for us to talk about other books besides the one we’d all just read, so that wasn’t it. They just stared at me, looking like goldfish waiting for someone to drop some floating food pellets into their tank. The little devil on my shoulder laughed, but the angel on the other shoulder felt guilty for shocking the ladies speechless. Either way, I couldn’t help it. I found this author’s memoir humor to be too good not to share. (Humor was all but absent in the book club selection.)

On Wade’s website I found out he does library talks from time to time in my hometown and you can bet the next time he’s in town to hawk a book or host a workshop for to would-be-writers, I’ll be there. And I’ll be wearing my charm bracelet with its fifteen silver charms. ©

 

Note: the photo at the top is my bracelet, started when I graduated from high school and finished ten years later with the love birds---Don and me. Now, that's what corny looks like.

Day Trips and Judgement Women

Pop quiz. If I said I went to a bar and grille three times in one day, would you believe me? If you answered ‘no’ you’d be wrong. Thursday was the annual restaurant hop organized by the senior hall and all three courses of our progressive meal took place in businesses with “Bar and Grille” as part of their name. Our senior hall bus holds twenty-five people and it made five trips---on different days---to a tourist town along Lake Michigan. They ought to rename this event “Eat and Shop” because that’s what we do. This year we went to Saugatuck which is one of my favorite places on earth. I’ve written about the town before and I described it as “a town with a history rooted in boat building and lumbering and it’s often called the Art Coast of Michigan because of its 100 year old, 115 acres art colony with ties to The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The town is a mecca for people from Chicago who own ‘summer places’ in town or boat over on the weekends, a high energy town with a wintertime population of around 1,000 that swells to 3,000 in the summers.” 

We couldn’t have asked for a better weather day for the restaurant hop and I had the luck of the Irish when a woman I didn’t know well sat next to me and somehow we clicked conversation wise. That doesn’t always happen when you take potluck on the bus. A lot of people sign up with a friend so they’ll have someone to pal around with all afternoon. The bus dropped us off for our appetizer course where I had a salad dressing made with apples, caramel sauce and cranberries over spinach, mixed lettuce and soy nuts. Ohmygod, that was good and I’m not fond of salads. Then we had an hour to shop our way down to the main entrée. I had pre-ordered a hamburger because I hadn’t had one in a long time but I wish I had ordered the fish tacos. 

We had a young waiter who impressed all the ladies at my table with how skillfully he served twenty-five people all at the same time. In fact one of the ladies wanted to tip him extra over the 20% our senior hall pays. But when we got to our dessert course at a different restaurant a woman, who reminded me of a 1950’s librarian with her white hair pulled back into a tight bun and her glasses hanging on a lanyard, complained the entire time while we ate our strawberry shortcakes and brownies about the young waiter at the last restaurant. She said she was going to tell the senior hall director when we got back home to call the entrée restaurant and chew them out for poor service. Her problem, it seems, was she only got a half a cup of coffee before the waiter's pot ran out and it took too long for him to come back with another. I’m starting to dislike old women with ruby red lipstick and tiny lips that they purse in disdain. As I watched those lips moving after a while all I heard was, "I'm old and ornery blah, blah, blah." Two of the ladies at my table also got a half cup of coffee. The waiter had split what was left in the pot between their two cups so neither one had to wait for the fresh pot to brew, he said, and we all thought that was a consider thing to do. Funny how different people can perceive the same set of circumstances differently.

I ended up eating and shopping with my seatmate from the bus. On past trips that’s never happened. She latched on to me after the appetizer course and at first I was annoyed that I wasn’t free to roam the streets with my many memories of Saugatuck to keep me company. Then I thought, what the heck, Jean, it’s probably not healthy to pick the past over the here and now. So I quit thinking about slipping away. By the time our second block of shopping time rolled around she’d spend all the money she wanted---she bought a $45 ring and an $25 art print---and I’m not a shopper by nature so we walked down to the channel, found a bench and watched two tug boats bring a cement pier down the river and an excavating machine on a barge dredging the channel deeper and we talked to the other tourists strolling by on the board walk.

When we got back to the senior hall I said to my seatmate, “I enjoyed spending the afternoon with you” and I meant it. She replied, “I did you too. You’re very easy to talk with.” We had some things in common but she’s a "casino fly" and I have zero interest in casinos so our chance match-up won’t go anywhere in the possible friendship department. Listen to me! I was disgusted by Miss. Ruby Red Lips because I deemed her to be too judgmental and here I am being judgmental about people who love casinos. If I was Catholic I’d be saying some Hail Mary’s about now. (She actually went on an eight day bus tour where all they did is go from casino to casino! I didn't even know tours like that existed.) ©

* The print above is by James Brandess and is of the Kalamazoo River, in the heart of Saugatuck