apple!

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When I was a teenager I babysat on Saturday nights. The mom of three boys across the street hired me for around $1.50 an hour. They were good boys who played hard and fell immediately to sleep when I tucked them in bed. The oldest boy was busted up badly when hit by a car while riding his bike on our quiet street one day, but not on my babysitting watch, thank God. The image of his mother running down the street with terror freezing her face, toward him lying on the pavement next to his curled bicycle is a permanent negative image in my mind. Thankfully he recovered fully from all those broken limbs. Oh, cherished little ones we entrust to babysitters! It's almost too frightening to think of it. How fragile, and how life changing a minute can be. Such responsibility.

One mother I babysat for managed to get me to watch her two energetic kids, plus feed a third - a baby in a high chair - and do the ironing for that amount. I think I only worked for her once. The money wasn't much, but it gave me a small amount of cash for a movie or a vanilla phosphate at the drug store (otherwise I raided my mom's wallet - brazen!). There was something else I hoped for at the houses where I watched kids. The parents were always nice and said what was in the cupboards and fridge was mine. (You might know by now that I love food.) Oh I remember babysitting my nephews Todd and Eric once, after my sister Nancy had made fried rosemary chicken for their dinner. She made enough for me, and I can still taste the bliss on my tongue. Usually I wasn't quite that fortunate, but the one snack I did hope for was a good apple. You see, my dad was as frugal as they came. This meant that he bought boxes of overripe fruit from under the counter at Horrock's, our local produce market. They'd put apples under there that were starting to soften and bruise, and they were cheap. Dad would put them in the fridge's crisper drawer (hopeful!), and within a few days the whole fridge started smelling like fermenting apples. This was my life. Me. A lover of a good apple, doomed to smell bad ones and never eat them. Except when I went to babysit. I might get paid eight bucks for the night, but if a good, crunchy, fresh apple was given as a bonus, I felt I was very well compensated. That frugal father of mine, bless him, had plenty of cash in the bank to loan us when we needed a down payment for a house - I'm grateful! But I just wanted a good apple.

By the way, I just made the shift from a PC to a MacBook Pro. Fresh!

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My parents were married 69 years ago today

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In my grandmother's dreams, Mom was supposed to play Chopin to a hushed audience in Carnegie Hall, marry an ambassador and cook flawless Cornish hens for him and their international guests. Mom was piano tutored, Horace Mann schooled, Smith Colleged, Columbia Universitied, and engaged to that would-be ambassador who made it to Life magazine's cover in the 1950s. Though there was a lot of brilliant material to work with in this girl nicknamed Bobby, her mother always said that raising her alone as a single mother (Grandma Olive was an artist-designer, divorced from Grandpa Sidney when Mom was six) was like raising an army. Mom climbed, crawled, rolled, cartwheeled and otherwise got through the rooms of their house in every way except walking, while Grandma Olive finessed the alignment of delicate tracing paper for wallpaper designs taped to walls. In school Mom swam, dived, and played tennis, basketball and field hockey ambidextrously. No wonder she was voted Best Athlete at every school she attended. Her disciplined fingers played Rachmaninoff's Flight of the Bumble Bee like it was the soundtrack of her encyclopedic mind, and all this put her on course to be the wow! Grandma Olive envisioned when this Bachrach portrait was taken. Bobby in this picture is posing as Barbara in a dress her mother would have spent an entire day scouring NYC for, with Bobby in tow, tormented.

With all that inborn exuberance and strength, and the preparation Grandma helped with, basically, she wasn't supposed to marry my father. He was a Virginian gentleman with red hair like Thomas Jefferson's, but without the worldly substance that might have reassured Grandma Olive. And he wasn't just not wealthy. He was poor. And why was he poor? He had chosen a profession as a Baptist minister, which just made him even less appealing to my grandmother, who explored lots of religions in her lifetime, but not the unsophisticated, unrefined, tacky Baptist church.

Before meeting Dad, in addition to her physical, musical and mental energy, Mom was also brimming with spiritual vigor, debating over a vibrating saxophone in a jazz bar the merits of various religions with Columbia classmates. That spirituality exploded after she heard the Gospel and was offered the chance to become a born again Christian when she took her music students to church in Fairfax, Virginia, where they went to different churches each Sunday. Maybe singing The Old Rugged Cross and having no stand-up-sit-down high liturgy in the Baptist Church was just what her spiritual self wanted, in contrast to those fancy schools and a mother whose standards were impossibly high.

So what is a born again protestant Christian who is Bobby the smart pianist tomboy to do with all that inborn abundance? Either become a missionary or marry a minister. When she eventually met a tall, young, handsome redhead (she loved red hair) who had just become a pastoral intern at the big Southern Baptist church where she had started playing piano, and they shook hands, she knew she would marry him, which she did, March 22, 1941. Then she birthed and raised eight kids (I'm #8), directed the church music program, wrote music (her hymn A Christian Home written to Sibelius' Finlandia tune is sung in most evangelical churches in the U.S. on Mother's Day), led Bible studies, mentored women, taught Sunday School, and played hymns and choruses on the piano that became rhapsodies flooding out the open country church windows into the farm fields along with birdsong from the trees. I think the soybeans grew tendrils like treble clefts those years.

My mom did feed international guests - graduate students at MSU from India, Thailand and China, and half a dozen Thai high schoolers who lived with us in our big wide-open house, including my beautiful sister DeeDee. Mom and Dad were married 54 years until my dad died of lung cancer, though he never smoked. Mom died of Alzheimer's two years later - what a mind she lost! She had channeled every molecule of physical, mental, musical and spiritual energy to God, to my dad, to her family, to the congregation, and to the world through her precious hospitality (she loved to make curried rice for our Indian friends) and her daily prayers for every world leader - around 200 of them - that began at 4am, on her knees, in the dark. I think she didn't need to marry an ambassador. She was one.

I'm sorry I didn't manage to get a photo of Mom and Dad together before this post. You might have noticed that this wedding anniversary musing had little to say about my dad. Maybe one of these memorials will focus on him, but frankly, I do not carry as much of him inside me as I do Mom.

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Collecting Saugatuck

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"We've had this bookstore twenty years," said Phil. But it looks more like 100, or even 180, as long as Saugatuck has been a town. The upstairs Singapore Bank Bookstore reminds me of Shakespeare & Co. in Paris, another bookstore where books are piled and stacked like wood in the shed - whichever way they'll fit and not tip over. But something always does get knocked over, because the maneuverable space is so tight for us clutzy, star-struck customers.

Phil talked to me a good thirty minutes about how it is to live in a seasonal tourist town. We began talking about Gogol (I'm reading Dead Souls, one of my two, or if I'm voracious three, novels a year) and ended up chatting about his old grill being replaced by a new one. He has to break down the old one so it can be hauled away by the recycling truck that comes by twice a year. The old hardware store a couple doors away recently closed, which makes Phil's household projects take longer than normal. "Now I have to plan trips to Menard's over in Holland thirty minutes away." It must have been getting close to lunch time because I bought Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma from Phil after our talk.

I had spent the previous night in Saugatuck, so I could wake up and get out to Oval Beach by 8am, before the fog dissipated (last post). Here is the town on the Kalamazoo River, which feeds into Lake Michigan a ways north of Oval Beach. In the summer you'd see yachts, fishing boats and ferries trolling along both directions.

It's pretty extraordinary that Saugatuck and nearby Douglas don't have strip malls or national stores. I had a tall coffee reading Gogol in Uncommon Grounds where the table lamps glowed and reflected on the windows looking out at a gloomy downtown, no Starbucks in sight. Saugatuck began as a lumber town, naturally as it sits on the Kalamazoo River, pouring right into Lake Michigan. This area fed trees to Chicago to rebuild after the great fire of 1871. But when the trees and lumbermen were gone, farmers cultivated peaches and other summer fruits for a wide market, and rustic natural beauty brought vacationers over from Chicago, about three hours away by car these days.

Lakeshore Drive in Douglas

In 1910 artists from the Art Institute in Chicago started the OxBow School of Art on OxBow Harbor north of town. I snuck around in my car until I found the campus, empty in the winter, except for me and the robins. They only house artists eight weeks in the summer. My grandparents, Grandma Olive and Grandpa Sidney, studied at the Art Institute together, and I wonder if they might have visited OxBow since it was begun in their era. Too bad they're not here to ask. Some of the old cottages (not in the picture below) have been fitted with high studio windows, just lovely. You can see the OxBow harbor behind the little found object sculpture in the upper right corner, below. Click on the image to get a closer look.

The town of Saugatuck has fewer than 1,000 permanent residents, like Phil and his glass sculpting wife Judy. During the summer when this becomes the Cape Cod of the Midwest, the town holds around 3,000. There are beautiful bed and breakfasts - including the Wickwood Inn owned by Julee Russo of The Silver Palate cookbook, where Don and I have celebrated a few anniversaries and birthdays.

Besides the dunes and beaches, people come to see world class art displayed in more than a dozen galleries in Saugatuck and Douglas. I visited one this time - the Water Street Gallery in Douglas. The Bruce Baughman painting, upper left corner below, was in the window of his own gallery on Main Street in Saugatuck.

Clockwise from top right: Sparrow, by Byron Gin; Saugatuck Dunes, by Anne Corlett Wiley; 

glass piece title and artist unknown; title unknown, by Bruce Baughman

Of all the great eating places in these two towns, I couldn't resist a new combination: the first ever bowling alley here (in Douglas), where you can get a terrific burger (and any burger on the menu can be ordered as a veggie version, yay) and a martini. I had to try all that. I don't think I stopped smiling the whole time I ate my mushroom Swiss veggie burger and sweet potato fries while sipping a Cosmopolitan at the Lakeview Lanes bowling alley. I even bowled a very bad game and laughed at my form with my neighbors in the next lane.

I did all this in one day by myself in a needful retreat, which my kind husband recommended. Imagine a week of good times you could have in the summer with someone as considerate as that - swimming, kayaking, eating ice cream and caramel apples from Kilwin's, lying in the sand, riding a ferry, shopping for one-of-a-kind jewelry or dishes or art, driving around looking at cozy cottages, lounging in your gorgeous bed and breakfast room Sunday morning over coffee while reading the paper, strolling the marina gawking at yachts with people eating lunch on them like it's normal, eating a picnic lunch listening to piped music from the Butler while watching boats on the river, shopping for antiques, collecting shells, stones and photographs.

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Saugatuck's Oval Beach

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Place: Abandoned. Wild. Quiet except for a spiky gull's call.

Me: Climbing, like dune grass, or motionless, like fog. Breathing at the pace of waves. I got away from normal [appointments·work·email] to get back to normal [whole·imaginative·energized].

I plan to post a little more from my Small Escape.