It started out on a Sunday, as many weeks do. I was spending the weekend doing things I like to do - cleaning up the branches of a fallen tree, transplanting some raspberry bushes, getting a few chores done in preparation for a bike ride. But when I went to the garage, the bike was gone, stolen from under my suburban nose in broad daylight while I was oblivious in the garden a few feet away.
I was bummed out. Worse things can happen, it's true, but I had grown attached to the dark green Trek in the year and a half I had ridden it, and I was really looking forward to riding it that day. With it disappeared a nice little rechargeable headlight and taillight and a toolkit containing Allen wrenches, tire irons, and a spare tube. It happens every day to somebody; that's life in the small city. I suspect that the perpetrators have no idea what they're doing.
No doubt my downcast attitude colored the other events of the week, which had already looked challenging. I had rescheduled some vacation days to focus on getting a new project launched, and I had some other, nonwork-related schedule issues to work out. And who doesn't have decisions to make in the course of a week?
"Return," said The Book of Changes, "brings exit and entry, somewhere to go with firm strength, going out and coming in without trouble." A few days later it said, "Advance and illuminate virtue by reflecting it under stress, going to three meetings a day." That sounds about right.
What's remarkable now, in retrospect, is how quickly things got checked off my list of problems, as if compartmentalizing the sources of stress and irritation made it easier to address them individually, take a breath and move on to the next one, as if each was separate from the other, which they never are. But I can only do one thing at a time, so I had to take each item of unfinished business out of context and treat it as a single entity. No calls yet from the Nobel committee on my amazing discovery.
So I hastily put together the launch that I couldn't put off any longer, and lo and behold all the key people came to the meeting, which of course raised a bunch of additional issues for all the key people to start working on, and since I'm the production coordinator, each key person's problem is, at least indirectly, my problem.
I'm still without a bike, and wouldn't you know, now the truck is running rough, misfiring in low gear like it suddenly needs a tuneup, when two days ago it was running fine. Normally I would drop the truck at the shop in the morning, ride my bike to work, and pick up the truck after work, but no. So I called the trusted mechanic, and he suggested I try a can of Sea Foam motor treatment, which I picked up for nine dollars and poured in the gas tank in the hope that this stuff will clean up the fuel injectors until I can get a real tuneup.
Sometimes it's the little loose ends left hanging that are most annoying. Not that each question isn't important in its own way, but the plethora of unresolved issues was clouding my thinking. Just make a decision, okay? Yes, I will schedule a new Saturday morning class this fall on the Westside, and yes, I will continue to practice on Thursdays in the park even if no one shows up, and no, I will not make the switch to Wednesday nights when the old men's group changes to its new schedule.
I called my son and learned a lot about his new gig maintaining an event space in SoHo for Red Bull. Everybody in his house is moving out and finding new places to live, so he will likely have a new address come October. He commiserated on the loss of the bike.
I called my parents and heard about some of the adjustments they are making, such as cooking more for themselves instead of getting meals delivered. They're picking lots of tomatoes, and we compared notes on how our gardens are doing. They were delighted to hear that their grandson Max is getting married.
I met my friend John for a beer after work, and among other things we discovered that we had met 23 years ago when we were both in school. Neither of us remembered the other when we reconnected on a church committee a couple of years ago, or when he gave me a can of Fix-a-Flat when I had tire trouble, or when he and his daughter took my taiji class, but we had been in another taiji class together in 1987, and I had the class roster to prove it.
Finally, at the end of the week, I couldn't stand it any more, so I found a pretty good bike on Craig's List and paid the man cash on the barrelhead for a black Schwinn. It's not as jazzy as the dark green Trek; it has wider tires and narrower handlebars, but I'll get used to it, and at least I can ride again.
Sunday, August 29, 2010
Tuesday, August 03, 2010
It's a luxury
You go somewhere other than your usual digs to do something other than your usual gig, and things happen, not exactly as you imagined, which might be the whole point. You make the necessary course corrections in order to have a good time without exhausting your resources. You come back.
Time passes. Memory persists during re-entry, reconstructing events, places, moments of unusual brightness and clarity. The urge to chronicle the experience comes and goes, competing with the need to get things done in the here and now. Travelling seems to spark that memoirist impulse; maybe that's why people take their cameras and bring home the obligatory photo gallery of their trip. I have my hands full getting from Point OH to point MI, so I can't balance the going and doing with the recording and capturing. And even if I could, do I really want to spend my precious vacation time taking pictures and writing in my journal?
So when I got back from our very short northern lower peninsula sojourn, I scrounged a surface to write on while the memory was still fresh. It's a luxury to have a day at home to clean up the kitchen, do laundry, water and weed the garden, read the paper - the usual weekend things - before going back to work on Tuesday. So I put a pen to paper and scrawled a couple of pages without much self-editing; the good news and the bad news is that this happens on vacation because it doesn't during the routine everyday rhythm of home and work.
It was a luxury to be able to pack the car and take off Friday morning, arrive that evening in a campground where we are known, and for twelve dollars a night sleep in a tent, cook over a fire, meditate under a humungous pine tree, and breathe the air of the north woods.
It was a luxury to get up in a dry tent Saturday morning and drive to Mancelona for breakfast, read the local paper while drinking coffee and waiting for our sausage gravy and biscuits. The young couple from Ann Arbor at the next table at Bo Jack's Bakery Cafe was envious as they busily minded the manners of their two little girls, four-year-old Ava and two-year-old Lydia. Especially when we told them that our grown-up daughter was dog-sitting for us back in Ohio.
The early morning rain had not let up, and we found just the map we were looking for at the gas station, so we took off west on M-88 to see what we would see. What we discovered was the cute little town of Bellaire and a string of small lakes on our way around the northern tip of Torch Lake, a big beautiful body of water just inland from Grand Traverse Bay. On a lark, we turned down Cairn Road to try to find Camp Maplehurst, where I worked and played for a short time in 1974, before moving on to the U.P. and other adventures.
To my surprise, we found it largely unchanged, the lodge sitting up on a knoll about a mile in from the highway, with cabins lining the path down to a little lake. On a whim we stopped and asked if we could look around. As luck would have it, we had walked in on a reunion of campers and counselors from the 55 years of the camp's existence. That explained all the Cadillacs and Volvos in the parking lot. The proprietors, Lawrence and Brenda, son and daughter-in-law of Tom, who ran the place back in the day, graciously invited us to make ourselves at home.
So Gven Golly and I looked around the big old house and took a self-guided tour of the grounds, down to the lake, past the dock, around the ballfield and the basketball court, through a cherry orchard and back to the lodge. Old campers were singing camp songs and eating lunch together. I had never met Lawrence and Brenda, but they had known the people I worked with, most of whom have since died or become hermits, and it was cool to make that connection.
That little side trip gave us plenty to think and talk about the rest of the afternoon while driving around the hills east of Traverse Bay, past dairy farms, orchards, fields of sunflowers, and houses with fieldstone porches. Even with a good map we managed to get a little bit lost between Elk Rapids and Kewadin before getting our bearings again, rounding the southern tip of Torch Lake, and making our way back to Bellaire for a cup of good Ethiopian coffee and some serious fantasizing. Just enough exposure to the local culture to whet the appetite.
When we got back to our campsite it was still drizzling, not a heavy rain but not weather for a bike ride and a swim. We made do with a charcoal fire and cooked our pasta, which we enjoyed with some cheese, an avocado, cherry tomatoes, and an Oberon ale. The charcoal fire gradually dried the wood we found, and the fire kept going until bedtime.
Next morning the sun came out, so we made breakfast and rode our bikes to Pencil Lake for a swim. The road was smooth, with pine and poplar and ferns on both sides, and we passed the occasional house along the way. The water was clean and clear. A man and his two grandchildren got there just as we were leaving; other than that we had it to ourselves.
This was Sunday, our return-home day, so we decided to go to Traverse City and see what was happening. By midday the awesome weather and a film festival had drawn throngs of people to the beach and the streets. We did the streets first, which were packed with film geeks and tourists. Gven found just the right restaurant for lunch, Poppycock, and the food was almost as good as the people-watching. She faced out and I faced in; it's a toss-up who saw the better show.
A walk on the beach confirmed my suspicion that a fairly wide socio-economic cross-section of midwestern humanity flocks to this bay at this time of year. And who can blame them? Of course there are the high-end tourists, who have a summer house on the water, and the low-end tourists, who pitch a tent in the state park, and everyone in between. And my slow realization is the high-end tourists don't have a monopoly on education and good taste in art, food, drink, clothes, or water sports.
We took back roads almost halfway home and got to see a different view of that part of Michigan. Because we indulged our senses all morning and most of the afternoon, it was a late night before we got home. We were spent but it was worth it.
Time passes. Memory persists during re-entry, reconstructing events, places, moments of unusual brightness and clarity. The urge to chronicle the experience comes and goes, competing with the need to get things done in the here and now. Travelling seems to spark that memoirist impulse; maybe that's why people take their cameras and bring home the obligatory photo gallery of their trip. I have my hands full getting from Point OH to point MI, so I can't balance the going and doing with the recording and capturing. And even if I could, do I really want to spend my precious vacation time taking pictures and writing in my journal?
So when I got back from our very short northern lower peninsula sojourn, I scrounged a surface to write on while the memory was still fresh. It's a luxury to have a day at home to clean up the kitchen, do laundry, water and weed the garden, read the paper - the usual weekend things - before going back to work on Tuesday. So I put a pen to paper and scrawled a couple of pages without much self-editing; the good news and the bad news is that this happens on vacation because it doesn't during the routine everyday rhythm of home and work.
It was a luxury to be able to pack the car and take off Friday morning, arrive that evening in a campground where we are known, and for twelve dollars a night sleep in a tent, cook over a fire, meditate under a humungous pine tree, and breathe the air of the north woods.
It was a luxury to get up in a dry tent Saturday morning and drive to Mancelona for breakfast, read the local paper while drinking coffee and waiting for our sausage gravy and biscuits. The young couple from Ann Arbor at the next table at Bo Jack's Bakery Cafe was envious as they busily minded the manners of their two little girls, four-year-old Ava and two-year-old Lydia. Especially when we told them that our grown-up daughter was dog-sitting for us back in Ohio.
The early morning rain had not let up, and we found just the map we were looking for at the gas station, so we took off west on M-88 to see what we would see. What we discovered was the cute little town of Bellaire and a string of small lakes on our way around the northern tip of Torch Lake, a big beautiful body of water just inland from Grand Traverse Bay. On a lark, we turned down Cairn Road to try to find Camp Maplehurst, where I worked and played for a short time in 1974, before moving on to the U.P. and other adventures.
To my surprise, we found it largely unchanged, the lodge sitting up on a knoll about a mile in from the highway, with cabins lining the path down to a little lake. On a whim we stopped and asked if we could look around. As luck would have it, we had walked in on a reunion of campers and counselors from the 55 years of the camp's existence. That explained all the Cadillacs and Volvos in the parking lot. The proprietors, Lawrence and Brenda, son and daughter-in-law of Tom, who ran the place back in the day, graciously invited us to make ourselves at home.
So Gven Golly and I looked around the big old house and took a self-guided tour of the grounds, down to the lake, past the dock, around the ballfield and the basketball court, through a cherry orchard and back to the lodge. Old campers were singing camp songs and eating lunch together. I had never met Lawrence and Brenda, but they had known the people I worked with, most of whom have since died or become hermits, and it was cool to make that connection.
That little side trip gave us plenty to think and talk about the rest of the afternoon while driving around the hills east of Traverse Bay, past dairy farms, orchards, fields of sunflowers, and houses with fieldstone porches. Even with a good map we managed to get a little bit lost between Elk Rapids and Kewadin before getting our bearings again, rounding the southern tip of Torch Lake, and making our way back to Bellaire for a cup of good Ethiopian coffee and some serious fantasizing. Just enough exposure to the local culture to whet the appetite.
When we got back to our campsite it was still drizzling, not a heavy rain but not weather for a bike ride and a swim. We made do with a charcoal fire and cooked our pasta, which we enjoyed with some cheese, an avocado, cherry tomatoes, and an Oberon ale. The charcoal fire gradually dried the wood we found, and the fire kept going until bedtime.
Next morning the sun came out, so we made breakfast and rode our bikes to Pencil Lake for a swim. The road was smooth, with pine and poplar and ferns on both sides, and we passed the occasional house along the way. The water was clean and clear. A man and his two grandchildren got there just as we were leaving; other than that we had it to ourselves.
This was Sunday, our return-home day, so we decided to go to Traverse City and see what was happening. By midday the awesome weather and a film festival had drawn throngs of people to the beach and the streets. We did the streets first, which were packed with film geeks and tourists. Gven found just the right restaurant for lunch, Poppycock, and the food was almost as good as the people-watching. She faced out and I faced in; it's a toss-up who saw the better show.
A walk on the beach confirmed my suspicion that a fairly wide socio-economic cross-section of midwestern humanity flocks to this bay at this time of year. And who can blame them? Of course there are the high-end tourists, who have a summer house on the water, and the low-end tourists, who pitch a tent in the state park, and everyone in between. And my slow realization is the high-end tourists don't have a monopoly on education and good taste in art, food, drink, clothes, or water sports.
We took back roads almost halfway home and got to see a different view of that part of Michigan. Because we indulged our senses all morning and most of the afternoon, it was a late night before we got home. We were spent but it was worth it.
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