The Widow's Vacation in Saugatuck

This woman has been on vacation! Yes, a genuine, long-overdue vacation where I packed my bags, put the dog in a kennel and took off for some R & R. I didn’t go far. My niece and I checked into a Bed and Breakfast in my favorite tourist town along Lake Michigan. I’ve been going to Saugatuck since my teens but I’ve never stayed overnight unless you count the times in my late twenties when my husband and I brought sleeping bags over to the beach and fell asleep under the stars. Those were the good old days when we were carefree and didn’t worry about getting caught with our pants down. Literally. (Raise your hand if you think I’ve shared too much information here.)

Our B & B had nine bedrooms with private baths and it was the oldest continuous use residence in town. My room had its original horsehair plaster walls and polished plank flooring with square, blacksmith-made nails and it was named after Susan B. Anthony. She stayed in the same house 136 years ago while she was in town to help organize a local Temperance Union and to give a speech on woman’s suffrage. The local newspaper of the era said “she succeeded in closing six of the fourteen saloons” and “that was a testament to her persuasiveness and organizational skills.” My niece and I tried to find a bar to have a drink in one evening and we only found two open, neither one enticing enough to draw us inside. Susan would be proud that we choose, instead, the only other business open that late---a chocolate and ice cream shop.

We packed a lot into our vacation. After a leisurely breakfast each morning, seated on miss-matched oak chairs at a long farmhouse-style table, we’d take off to do things like: walk the beach, drive the shoreline of Lake Michigan, visit a neighboring town, and browse a few antique venues. We also walked along the marina, strolled a few residential blocks with gardens you can’t truly enjoy just driving by, and we even visited the place at the shore where we spread some of Don's ashes. One night we went to a summer stock production of First Date, a musical that was so funny I had tears running down my cheeks; another night we went to an outdoor concert in the park where we perfected the fine art of people watching. One afternoon we toured a restored 1920s, twenty-five room mansion with a third floor ballroom that was built by the inventor of comptometers, the first commercially successful mechanical calculator. His story was fascinating. Where the lumber industry clear-cut the woods along the lake, he managed to restore the land, stabilizing the shifting dunes with carefully chosen vegetation and now the property is a deep woods again. I wouldn’t have thought that was even possible.

Our Meals: When we first got to town we had lunch at a store-front restaurant with Andy Warhol style murals of Marilyn Monroe and James Dean on the walls. The next day we ate at the oldest structure in the county, originally built as a hotel for traders and people in the lumber industry. I lost my ‘fish tacos virginity' at another place across from where the ferry operates. But my favorite meal of all was when we decided to have dessert instead of lunch at a large pie factory-restaurant. It’s out in the boondocks---in the middle of apple orchards, wine vineyards and blueberry farms. They’d taken a page out of a near-by winery's book and had a pie sampler tray on the menu---various, warm pies served in squatty jelly jars with vanilla bean ice cream on the side. Then there was the day we had ice cream cones for lunch. Yup, I was a bad influence on my niece. But so was she on me. Did I mention her stop to purchase a couple of bottles of wine?

Saugatuck is 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 spend the summers 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. My niece and I wondered if my great-great grandfather could have lived in town during its boom town days when he was known to have made his living following the lumber industry around this part of the state. We romanticized him living in our B & B when it was a boarding house for lumberjacks or eating at the hotel where we had dinner. Using our imaginations doesn’t make it fact, though the idea could be an interesting, family genealogy ball to chase for a tenacious researcher.

However, we did get a heavy dose of family history while we were on vacation. Sorting boxes in the basement the week before our trip, I had found six cassette tapes made of my mom and dad talking---circa the early 1970s through 1984. My niece and I listened to half of them in the evenings while drinking wine and munching popcorn. It still blows my mind that tapes made thirty and forty years ago could so clearly bring my parents back into focus. At one point we laughed so hard I actually thought I’d pass out from lack of oxygen; I could feel my face turning red. I suppose you had to be there to understand the humor in hearing my folks say long good-byes to their two dogs. They were dropping them off for me to babysit while they spent the winter in Florida. My niece started prompting them to include me (their daughter) in their “good-byes” and I started prompting them to say “I love you.” The tape ended with me singing a 'lullaby' to the dogs, which reminds me I should erase that embarrassing section. 

It was a vacation filled with quality time and memorable moments with one of my favorite people in the world. I crossed a few things off my Bucket List but believe it or not, there are still things on my ‘Saugatuck To-Do List’---like take the chain ferry across the river, ride the paddle boat, visit the art colony, walk the entire length of the boardwalk and I can’t believe we forgot to go to the kitchen gadgets store! I love that place. But for the bonus point of vacationing, when I picked Levi the Mighty Schnauzer up from the kennel it was reported that he had a wonderful time playing with a puppy during the puppy's daycare/socialization sessions and taking part in group obedience classes at night where he was pronounced to be "well behaved and sweet." Levi came home as tired and happy as I did.  ©

Main Street, Saugatuck

Our Bed and Breakfast

The Susan B. Anthony Room

The Felt Mansion

The Marina

The pier in the distance, Lake Michigan. The photo at the top was taken looking in the other direction.

This is an elaborate set of brand new steps and wheelchair ramps at a county park leading down to the beach. Don would have loved it!

Finding the Past, Seeing the Future

Family is so important---past, present and future. This fact was driven home on Monday when I spent a beautiful summer day with my niece roaming a couple of cemeteries looking for ancestors. We found my great-grandfather, a Civil War veteran, within two minutes of entering the veteran’s cemetery. The lots, plots and rows were well marked and easy to find without even getting out of the car. As my niece said, “That’s the government.” Given the fact that he died in 1917, his stone was in remarkable condition (see photo above). He was only in my mother’s life for six years before he died but his life and military service took up three pages in the family history book I wrote last winter. It still amazes me that I was able to find details about the type of bullet he took in the head and the various hospitals where he recuperated but I don’t know how he took his morning coffee. Note to future family historians: I like mine with Italian sweet cream.

In another cemetery it took us quite a while and an iPad with a screen shot of the cemetery map plus counting plots, rows and tombstones to determine that my grandparents never got markers placed on their graves. Nothing that says, “I was here, don’t forget me.” Guessing the reasons why makes sense when we thought about what was going on in the family in 1922 and 1945, when they died, but it was a bit of a let-down for our “stones and lunch quest" and it made me sad that they ended up in unmarked graves. I never knew my grandparents. Still, the stories told over the years made them “real” to me. Growing up, I was so jealous of my best friend because her grandparents lived within walking distance and I’d go there with her after school sometimes. I credit them for teaching me to love antiques. Her grandfather’s face lit up when he’d tell stories about his treasures. Now I’m the one with stories about the obsolete things I have collected over years. Hopefully, what goes around comes around and I’ll spark a love of old things in someone born in this century.

I asked my niece if she thought her descendants will be walking around a cemetery in a 100 years looking for her granite marker. She didn’t know but afterward I thought about it and I realized that in the not so distant future it won’t be necessary. With the popularity of “living headstones” aka QV codes growing rapidly, GPS will take people right to a grave and when they get there they’ll be able to use their smartphones to view pictures, movies and the eulogy of the deceased. I keep thinking I want to get the QV code for Don’s stone---they only cost $50, the last time I checked---but that task keeps hanging down at the bottom of my ‘to do someday’ list.  Maybe I’ll put a clause in my will requiring my heirs to create QV files for both Don and me before they get any money. “That sneaky Aunt Jean,” they’d say, “reaching out from the grave like that to blackmail us into doing her bidding!” 

My niece and I had lunch at a quirky restaurant, a former railway station that only has two booths and thirteen counter seats for customers. They make the best malts and hamburgers in town---not just my opinion. They’ve been voted as such a few times. The place has been “in the family” since, well, forever it seems. Owned by my cousin then passed down to his daughter and son-in-law, it’s a city landmark that’s fun to visit. It’s too bad restaurants with L-shaped lunch counters lined with stools went out of fashion. No one stays a stranger long in a place like that. It’s the kind of place where the customers introduce themselves when you sit down. Cooking in that fishbowl on the other side of the counter, though, would be my nightmare job. You’d not only have to know what you’re doing on the grill but you’d also have to be able to kibitz and kid with the customers, tell jokes and keep the politician debates from getting out of hand. I don’t multi-task well when cooking is involved and I’d probably want to burn the burgers of a few people whose outrageous political views seem to come straight out of the twilight zone. 

When I got back home I got a call from my nephew’s very excited wife. She had good news. Both of her kids have been married awhile and both of them just found out they are having their first babies within weeks of each other. Her son’s baby---my future great-great nephew or niece---gives the family a 50-50 chance of having someone to carry on the family surname. That’s something I’d very much like to see before I die. Whether my nephew and his wife become the grandparents of two boys or two girls or one of each, I will need to get my knitting needles back out. Life is good when you can see family far back in the past and far into the future at the same time---that’s the pure joy of continuity that bridges the centuries. ©

An Unlived Destiny and Family Trees

 

 “Finally, I began to write about becoming an older woman and the trepidation it stirred. The small, telling "betrayals" of my body. The stalled, eerie stillness in my writing, accompanied by an ache for some unlived destiny. I wrote about the raw, unsettled feelings coursing through me, the need to divest and relocate, the urge to radically simplify and distill life into a new, unknown meaning.” 

Sue Monk Kidd, Traveling with Pomegranates: A Mother and Daughter Journey to the Sacred

As old as I am sometimes I just want my mother back in my life, if only for an hour.  She died in the early 1980s and I still think of her often, especially when I can’t spell word. When she was around, I would call her long-distance when my dyslexia was kicking in and she could always spell the word that had eluded me. Not bad for a woman whose education was limited by a young life filled with hardships and poverty. She lost her mother four days after her eleventh birthday and after that Mom was “farmed out” to a boarding house where she worked for room and board. In her late teens she left the boarding house and earned a living as a waitress in a diner until he met my dad in her mid-twenties. She learned how to work hard and make every penny she earned count. At her funeral I heard so many stories about how she’d secretly slip this person or that person some money when they were going through hard times and I’ve often wondered if my dad knew she was doing that with her grocery money. I think he did. One time I interviewed him for a book of family memories I was writing and he said the reason he was attracted to her when they first met was because she was the only girl in the neighborhood who had a job and she had just slipped a young boy some money and told him to buy a bag of potatoes for his family. Times were hard and the neighborhood kids never had enough to eat.

Back when I was in my teens, my mom started doing genealogy research on her family. She and a life-long friend would drive all over the state gathering information from court houses, going to cemeteries and visiting relatives they could locate. In the seventies I got in the act. Fast forward to this past winter when I got out all that long-ago research that sat in a dusty box in the basement and I went online to fill it all in with rich details and graphics. This week I finished building and editing a book on her family going back to 1530. It helped that she had a lot of famous people in her family and much of the research we couldn’t document in the ‘70s was now online. Placing an order to get the book printed came with mixed emotions. Mom would have loved seeing the final results of all our hard work but having the project finally finished closes one more connection I had with her. At the same time, I’m excited to be able to introduce my mom to her grandchildren and great-grandchildren in a way they’ve never known before. Her family were important players in the birth of our nation (and more) and they should know that. 

As I age, as I continue to write, I often wonder if I have an unlived destiny. Doing genealogy research where you can see the beginnings, middles and endings of so many lives that had an influence on your own makes you think about your own destiny in the grand scheme of things. If I had had children and grandchild I suspect I wouldn’t worry so much about fading into the darkness. I’d be remembered after I’m gone. And at least a few of life lessons I passed down would survive through the decades, maybe even the centuries…like with my mom’s family full of strong women who left their mark on the world. 

A few years ago I built and had printed a genealogy book on my dad’s family. I can’t do anymore and it’s time to pass the family historian torch on to the next person to get bit by the genealogy bug. Every generation seems to have one and I think I know which one it will be, as young as he is. Do you look at your children and grandchildren and think you can predict their personalities and odds for living a successful life? And do you predict what life lessons you taught them will get passed down and which ones will be taken away by time? Like me, do you ache to find an unlived destiny, or do you feel that you've fulfilled yours already? ©