Incrementalism

Attitudes change over time. Beware of the lightning conversion experience, the sudden flash of enlightenment, and the born-again felon/politician/celebrity who is ready to move on and put this all behind him/her.

Bodies grow, develop, strengthen, and mature gradually. Bodies also age, slow down, weaken, and deteriorate gradually. That growth spurt in adolescence or health crisis after retirement might have been building for some time.

Trees have growth rings, some thicker or thinner than others, reflecting the rate at which new xylem and phloem cells add themselves to the vascular structure of the trunk or branch.

People develop new habits and skills little by little. They don't rid themselves of old behavior by swearing it off, going cold turkey, or putting themselves in the hands of a higher power, although any of those courageous acts might be a step in the right direction, followed by practice, practice, practice.

Healing happens cell by cell.

If I learn anything from reciting this set of facts, I will learn it in the same manner, slowly.

Mulligans league founder retires

A nice article appeared on page 9A of the Crossville Chronicle, Friday, September 24, and the clipping eventually found its way into my hands. I would provide a link to it here, but the Chronicle doesn't make back issues accessible on the web, so I'm taking the liberty of posting excerpts.

Charles "Charlie" Duncanson, leader of the Fairfield Glade Mulligans Golf League, has retired after 19 years of dedicated service. As the founder and as the league's organizer, Duncanson has approached his duties (with) a zest for success, just as he's done in (other) aspects of his life.

If you happen to know my Dad, you are aware that references to dedicated service, being a natural and gifted organizer, and zest for success are understatements, and that understatement is his style. But I digress.

There are now 32 members and countless subs who will definitely miss having this gentleman at the helm, but they were happy to learn that he'll still be golfing with them occasionally.

Duncanson revealed his secret to keeping all of those accurate schedules and records for which he was known. Every meticulous bit of information was handwritten by Duncanson, who has never relied on a computer for assistance.

I can testify that Dad would spend some time every day at his desk in a nook off the kitchen, updating the scores, standings, averages, dues, and upcoming pairings of every team in the Monday morning golf league. Again, meticulous and accurate do not begin to describe the discipline and care with which he accounted for every stroke, every tee time, and every dollar of every golfer in every foursome on every Monday. He could also shoot his age for 18 holes.

In his youth, recognition as a multi-sport athlete earned him letters in baseball, football, basketball and track during his collegiate career at Winona State University.

...Duncanson served two years in the U.S. Navy, and then two and a half years in the U.S. Air Force. He taught aviation maintenance and repair in both branches of the service, after which he launched a successful 35-year career in the insurance business....

An appreciation luncheon honoring Duncanson was held Sept. 7 at the Phil-ing Station. Mulligan members summed up their feelings with a heartfelt statement, "To know Charlie is to love the man."

My heroes: Allen and Violet Large

When they won ten million dollars in the lottery, they gave away $9,800,000 of it, according to the Halifax Chronicle-Herald. Are these Canucks plain loony? Or do they know something the rest of us don't?

He is 75 years old and she is 78. He worked as a welder in Ontario for 30 years before retiring to Nova Scotia. She worked for cosmetics and chocolate companies. They have an old house that they like.

She was being treated for cancer on July 14 when they hit the lotto. She underwent her final chemotherapy treatments a week ago. It took them about a week to figure out what to do with all that money.

The Larges donated their winnings to the local fire department, churches, the Red Cross, Salvation Army, and the hospitals in Truru and Halifax where Violet received treatment. Some of it went to family members. They said they felt fortunate to be able to help. "It made us feel good," said Violet. "And there’s so much good being done with that money."

Steal This Education [but Buy This Article]

[Headline teaser in the Chronicle of Higher Education]

Abbie Hoffman said a revolutionary's first duty was to get away with it. Now you can.

[Byline]

By Dalton Conley

[Snarky lead paragraph]

It turns out that the yippie activist Abbie Hoffman was born a few decades too early. In his 1971 counterculture classic, Steal This Book, he devoted considerable space to discussing how to live for free. He provided survival tips, such as how to take advantage of furniture pick-up day in your neighborhood, how to Dumpster dive, and how to enroll for food stamps or for clinics to get a venereal disease cured gratis. But Hoffman went beyond that: He counseled the reader on how to get

[Rude awakening to unsuspecting reader]

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[Hint: It's yet another self-serving article about the wonders of online courses. Wouldn't Abbie be proud? I doubt it.]

Still Life with Coffee

Woke up this morning,
Put on my slippers,
Walked in the kitchen and died.
And oh what a feeling
As my soul went through the ceiling,
And on up to heaven I did ride.

John Prine has the amazing gift of telling a story in a simple, straightforward song. Verse, verse, chorus. Nothing too intricate; some of the tunes sound a lot alike. They're put together like country songs, two guitars and bass, plenty of twang. They're from Nashville, and he looks comfortable in the black suit and black shirt. But in my book it's poetry.

I went to see Prine last night at the Palace Theater, kitty-corner from the stately Ohio Statehouse, and ended up having a sort of spiritual reunion with some old friends who used to appreciate the same stuff. It's not easy to distinguish the work of art itself from what I was going through at the time. How could anyone separate the song, the album, or the artist from their concurrent personal adventures in life as we know it? So my response to about three albums worth of John Prine songs is heavily tied to people I knew at the time who were sharing that appreciation on some level in their own idiosyncratic way.

I'm guessing Prine connects with a lot of people that way. The bass player asked me what songs they didn't play that I wished they would, but there was really nothing missing. What I most wanted to hear was "Hello in There," and I did. I hoped he would do "Sam Stone" because it is so devastating. I had no complaints. I was just there to enjoy the moment.

When my friend whisked us backstage to watch the encore from the wings and then through a labyrinth upstairs to the little room in the old movie house, we thought we might get to meet Prine himself. Turns out he left immediately to go back to the hotel and didn't go back to the dressing room to hang out, but I did get to express to the band, the promoter, my daughter, and my friend who got us tickets that Prine reaches some deep, soft, emotional place, and that was about as much earnestness as anyone could take.

We had an apartment in the city.
Me and Loretta liked living there.
It's been years since the kids have grown,
Lives of their own, left us alone

He didn't do a lot of talking between songs, but he did introduce that particular story with another story about when he was helping a friend with his newspaper route. They would deliver the Sun-Times to a nursing home, taking a paper to each subscriber in their rooms, and some of the old people would talk to him and pretend he was a grandson or a nephew. So he's always had a connection with old people, he said, "and now I am one."

Old soul maybe. He looked fit as a fiddle onstage, and he moves well with the guitar. His voice is as strong as ever, though he has never had operatic pipes. It's a little rough, like an uncut diamond, and his range covers just enough notes to tell the tale. He's a little thick around the middle, but he always was chunky. He never was a prettyboy, and the ordinary workingclass face has only gotten more beat-up looking with time.

But the songs are even more gut-wrenching now than they were in the early seventies when I first became an admirer. And I was ecstatic to witness Prine's two-hour set in yet another provincial capital on yet another stage in yet another old theater and see him holding his own in the battle against the brutal fact that sweet songs never last too long on broken radios.

Sam Stone came home to his wife and family
After serving in the conflict overseas.
And the time that he served had shattered all his nerves
And left a little shrapnel in his knee.
But the morphine eased his pain, and the grass grew round his brain
And gave him all the confidence he lacked,
With a purple heart and a monkey on his back.

Prine writes about death a lot, and about love, of course, loneliness, despair, betrayal, peaches - all the major themes. There's plenty of religious imagery - God, angels, Jesus, pearly gates - some of it tongue-in-cheek and some definitely not. I guess like many of us who were raised to be patriotic, god-fearing middle-Amerikans, he continues to cast a jaundiced eye on the damage done by his own cultural baggage. Yet wonder of wonders, he maintains a hard-working and indispensable sense of humor.

Blow up your TV, throw away your paper,
Go to the country, build you a home.
Plant a little garden, eat a lot of peaches,
Try and find Jesus on your own.

So in a way he wrote part of the soundtrack of a certain version of my life during a crucial formative stage before I was set in my ways, and it was fun to share a little of that magic with Zelda at a crucial formative stage before she gets too set in her ways. These opportunities don't come up every day, and rumor has it there's a time limit.

Butterfly Effect

When a butterfly flits its wings in the Amazon basin, they say, it affects the melting of the polar ice cap. How does it do that? Through a vast chain of multiple causes and effects too complex for anyone to fathom. How do they know this? Inductively.

An individual person who is a member of multiple, sometimes overlapping groups at work, at home, in a family, among friends, in schools, churches, and informal circles transmits and receives hundreds of signs, signals, and messages every day. Spoken, written, postural, gestural, performative, functional, aesthetic. It would be neat to discern exactly what led who to do what.

Why did you do that? People can be very creative when called upon to justify something.

I dreamed about owls. Not one owl, but three owls landing one by one in quick succession on three difference branches. Three big owls flying in from left to right, then landing right to left. Then I forgot about it, but it came back so I wrote it down. I can't tell you what it "means" except that my sleeping mind had owls in it.

I dreamed I was driving in a rainstorm and all of a sudden the windshield wipers blades shredded right before my eyes, splitting into long useless strips hanging by a thread while I stopped the car to try to fix them. In a rainstorm. In a dream. You tell me.

Chuang-tse famously dreamed he was a butterfly and awoke wondering whether he was really a butterfly dreaming he was Chuang-tse. An epistemological conundrum. Who can say for sure. For myself, I am reasonably certain that I am not an owl in this lifetime.

Sitting and forgetting is another big theme in Chuang-tse. He suggests sitting and forgetting as an antidote to strife and trouble, as a way of letting internal measures address the distress brought about by external matters. At least that's how I remember reading it. Sitting and forgetting is the same as meditation, if meditation aims toward tranquility by letting go of thoughts that arise and trouble the mind. Forgetting is just a negative, characteristically Taoist way of calming the mind.

Forgetting is a favorite issue of mine because of my own predisposition (or habit or talent or fatal flaw) for losing track of one thing while focusing on another. I multitask well - one thing at a time. The hard part is switching from one thing to another at the right time, like keeping track of the conversation without missing your exit on the interstate. Period. New paragraph.

Some people are exceptionally gifted at sitting; others have a penchant for forgetting. Rare is the bird who intuitively knows how to do both, and rarer still is the sage who can do both at once.

I'm pretty good at getting so absorbed in what I'm doing over the weekend, without a thought of the work I left on my desk on Friday, that by Monday morning I have no idea where I left off. I'm in the 99th percentile at letting my right brain take over temporarily, so my left brain retains nothing - or vice versa.

There was more I could have said about this momentous topic, but I forgot what it was, thank goodness.

Why I love the rec center, Part two

A warm, clear October afternoon. The qigong class is practicing outside under a big maple tree. Kids are playing on the playground nearby, and a hum of activity pervades the space. Pretty soon the rec center staff are setting up tables next to bales of straw for their Fall Festival.

Our little circle of six is joined by a mother and daughter for a few minutes. They mimic our movements and move on to other forms of play. We're a mixed bag of younger and older, male and female, hipster and nerd, in other words a really cool cross-section of everyday people. We finish our form, talk about next week, and Miss Connie from the rec center comes over to offer us cider and donuts, now that we're all one with nature.

It's too nice a day to just get in the car and go home, so I take a walk past the playground full of kids climbing and watchful parents sitting on benches or standing around talking while keeping one eye on their babies, out to the ballfield, where teams of young adults wearing matching T-shirts play a spirited game of kickball. Some of the twenty-somethings run fast and kick with power; some of them are just starting to get the hang of the eye-foot coordination thing, but they are out there playing anyway, among friends in a safe social environment, doing something physical without having to be athletic.

Pinch me. This is what I want to do when I grow up. This little corner of the park is a little bit of heaven on a Thursday in October.

The next day is a workday, another opportunity to get something done, try to communicate effectively, solve some problems, and get paid for it.

Saturday morning has recently become another classtime in my week. I drive across town to another rec center and do my best to convey to adult students how to practice what I practice, and to my enormous satisfaction they seem to get it. This group is smaller - three instead of six - and a slightly different really cool cross-section of everyday people.

On my way out, I pass an empty gym. There is a leather basketball on the floor calling my name, so I spend half an hour practicing another ancient movement form. Right hand, left hand, legs and back interacting with the ball, the floor, the backboard, and the hoop. Muscle memory kicks in big time, and I discover to my mild surprise that I can still do this meditation form I've been doing for going-on-sixty years.

I'm not alone in the gym. A couple of neighborhood kids are shooting at the other end. The rhythm of their movements with and without the ball show that they know what they're doing, and a lot of their shots go in. At another basket a young man and his son toss the ball back and forth. The dad looks like he's more familiar with the soccer field than the basketball court, but he's getting it too. Dribble, pass, shoot. The drum-like sound of the ball on the hardwood.

What would it be like to live alone?

I really don't know. It's been a long time. And a four-day weekend by myself is not about to show me in any real way what living alone would be like, although it does prompt the question, and it's a question worth asking. Not that I'm planning on living alone any time soon, like in the next 30 years, but eventually almost everybody lives alone.

I've done it a couple of times. I grew up in a moderately big family - five kids, two parents. Even then I spent a good bit of time alone, but I never ALONE - existentially alone - because I was always surrounded by my family. Then I had roommates for two years in one dorm, Apple Hall in Kent, and one year in two apartments in Ann Arbor. Those were good times and good places, and I enjoyed the company, mostly.

Then I came back from a trip to Europe and got a room by myself in a rooming house for a year. Nice quiet street, come and go as I please; friends would come over. It was okay. It was better than okay, it was great, but it didn't last very long. I moved out and moved on, living in other people's places for a couple of years - a spare room here, a spare room there, Lower Peninsula, Upper Peninsula - in a house, a cabin, a tent, and finally moved south and found a roommate who eventually became a wife.

Of course that changed everything. For the next 33 years I managed to find time by myself, and over the years I have gotten better at making space for myself within the shared space of apartments and houses. Even with kids, it has always been possible to find time alone and create a space for being alone. But that ongoing balancing act is not the same as living alone, which makes the occasional four-day weekend a useful and revealing experiment while Gven Golly takes part in a sisters-and-cousins reunion in scenic Helen, Georgia.

One makes one's own coffee in the morning; walks the dog in the morning and evening, feeds the dog, and makes sure the dog has water in her bowl. This is not part of my routine normally, so it's a new and different part of my day that would take a serious decision to commit the kind of time a dog requires, that is, if it was just me and the dog. For now, since it is just me and the dog, it's still a major responsibility, as the dog needs and expects my full attention, at least a couple of times every day. Now if she would just learn to heel instead of yanking the leash - and my shoulder - this way and that.

One makes bean soup and arranges lumber in the shed. One watches tennis and football on TV. One reads a story in McSweeney's and articles in the New York Times. One goes for a longish bike ride out Dustin Road to 3Bs&K Road. Have you ever been out that way? West of the interstate, east of Alum Creek Lake, a quiet rural part of Delaware County, quite lovely if you have the time.

I've had an surprisingly active social life this weekend, aside from all that time with the dog. Saturday night I went to a gallery opening - Gven's friend Evangelia's gallery with Gven's work in the show - where I ran into a few people I knew - friends of Gven. Sunday I went to the temple and meditated, stayed for the teaching, went out for coffee, and drummed with the regular Clinton-Como drum circle in the park, where I ran into several people I knew - independently of Gven. She has her circle, I have my circle, and our circles overlap like a classic...Gvenn diagram. Sorry.

One finds things exactly where one put them, cleans up one's messes, and eats what one cooks. There is an increased sense of control, inhabiting a house by oneself. Everything is right where I put it. Nothing gets done if I don't do it myself. There will be no chicken dinner on Sunday. Nobody's going to clean up those dishes but me. Who am I gonna blame when something goes wrong? Why are we are out of coffee? Who left all this stuff lying around? Oh, yeah, that would be me.

I don't know how long it would take for all this glorious solitude to get old, but it would get old. There is no one there in the evening to unload all the day's baggage of disappointments, misdeeds, unmet deadlines, and crises du jour. And there is no one occupying the couch and the TV the entire evening with inane hospital shows and sitcoms, so I can catch every update on every ballgame on SportsCenter if I feel like it. Or not. It's mixed.

On realignment

If the Big Ten is going to expand, and they are, let's do it right. If that sounds like I have skin in the game, maybe I do and maybe I don't. When you've grown up breathing the air and hearing the language of midwestern college sports, it feels like it all matters deeply, because it does. Herewith some gut responses.

1. Keep the name. The 'Big Ten' brand transcends the actual number of universities in the conference, so don't get hung up on 11, 12, 14, or whatever the business arrangement becomes. It's the Big Ten, and it shall remain the Big Ten.

2. Screw Notre Dame. It would be like marrying the biggest prima donna in the senior class. Better off without her.

3. Organize the expanded conference into divisions based on geography AND history AND economics AND mob psychology. What is this, social studies? Yes, as a matter of fact, it is.

Now make a graphic organizer comparing the market size, football bowl appearances, basketball tournament record, academic research funding, and level of alumni fanaticism in each of the following:

East: Penn State, Ohio State, Michigan, Michigan State, Indiana, Purdue.

West: Northwestern, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska.

4. While you're at it, add Missouri and Kansas. Not right away, because the Big Ten doesn't make impulsive decisions like those other, lesser, mercenary enterprises to the East, West, and South that lack our sense of history, decorum, stodginess. Hrmph. Give the current configuration 20 or 30 years to make sure its a prudent move, then see if Missouri and Kansas are worthy. By that time, the Big Pac WAC Tex Mex 18 will have morphed into any number of Frankenleagues.

Come to think of it, that recent interloper Michigan State, which joined just the other day in the 1950s, is really still on probation, and the jury is definitely still out on this new outfit from State College.

5. Not Pittsburgh, not Syracuse, not West Virginia. Not Connecticut, not Rutgers! Let's not get carried away. Okay, maybe Pittsburgh and/or Syracuse, at least they're not coastal, but wait until some time in midcentury. Or Kentucky! Why is Kentucky in the SEC anyway? But no.

Of birds and bees

It's a Saturday morning, already warm but not yet hot, as I enjoy my coffee at a steel and tile table on the terra cotta patio. About a dozen bees move from flower to flower on a sprawling old multi-stemmed salvia. When they latch onto a flower and feed, the weight of a bee shakes the whole stem, and when the bee moves on to another flower, the stem rebounds like a spring. The mass of a bee's body hanging on the salvia stem must be like boys climbing trees in an orchard to pick apples, going out on a limb to grab the good stuff.

It's my idea of a good time just to sit out here and watch the yard come alive.

Last weekend I was sitting right here enjoying a quiet morning, and I heard a big bird swoop in past my left shoulder and land under a rose bush right beside me. All I could see was its black and white tail feathers for the minute that it rested under the roses. Then it took off and in two seconds was in the middle branches of a maple tree in the corner of the yard. I could just barely see the tail twitching under the branch that obscured its body. When I walked closer to get a better look, the hawk flew away, and for a second I could see its white belly shooting across the parking lot to another maple. Not a red tailed hawk, maybe a sparrow hawk, and whatever you are, you can see me a lot better than I can see you, so thanks for stopping by.

When Jessi was here in July working on the house, he made a number of trips to the hardware store to get tools and materials. A drill bit here, a section of PVC pipe there. On one of those trips down the bike trail from Summit to State Street, he was riding past the South High School baseball field, and he saw a hawk caught in the netting of the batting cage on the far end of the field. The big bird must have randomly flown in one end of this long, narrow net and gotten tangled up trying to find its way out of the 65-foot tunnel of rope.

Jessi being Jessi, he got off the bike and into the cage, trying to shake the net to free the bird. It took some doing, but finally the hawk got unsnagged from the net and flew out the open end.

That was the week that was

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.

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.