Shriveling expectations

Small, shriveled golden oyster mushrooms. September 2023.

When I converted an old, seldom-used blog into this one, I envisioned a writing outlet and ‘daily’ blog combination. After all, I’d just canceled Facebook for reasons too obvious and previously stated. I figured my need to communicate, to shout into the gale winds of social media would inevitably fill this site up with lots and lots of pithy writing punctuating my daily doin’s. It’s now time to admit something about getting older I had witnessed but not from this side of the divide, so to speak: that driving urge to make something happen and accomplish something fades. Some of this is good. Recently I’ve reflected on my typical mindset four years ago when I juggled weekly trips across the continent to San Diego and Seattle from my Raleigh home, monthly visits to attend to my ailing mother in Spokane, and to arrange her final rites in October. (I ended it all with an audit performed in Toronto…in rainy November weather. Yay.) I barely recognize the person who kept multiple itineraries in his head, who could tell you which airports had which kiosks at which intervals, who had a set and efficient routine for unpacking and packing a suitcase, who parleyed sarcastic cynicism into a business persona, and who grabbed beers and food as time allowed. I wish I could convey the inner pressure which led others to give me wide berth at times, but which seemed to be crucial to my survival. But now…

Hard to thrill,
Nothing really moves me anymore.
from “Hard To Thrill” by Eric Clapton/John Mayer, performed by Clapton & J.J. Cale on The Road To Escondido

When Covid partnered with retirement to give me a crash course in inactivity, I reverted to a boyhood prototype: read; pursue an idea as it blossomed; eat; drink; repeat. But don’t call me lazy. I bristle at being called lazy. “Inside my head I’m more active than you’ll ever be,” I think. (We’ll leave to another day what steps I took to slow down and/or turn off the voices in my head.) I learned early that giving voice to my stream of consciousness at speed guaranteed a fairly quick response: “oh god, would you PLEASE JUST SHUT UP!” (Well, I somewhat learned it. I’ve received refresher courses throughout the ensuing 50 years.) Example from a coastal drive during this past week’s visit from a lifelong friend: “There’s a Free Will Baptist Church…not to be confused with a movie about orcas…and definitely Free Willy shouldn’t be confused with that series of pornographic films.” I think I saw heads spin in the car. Did I mention I liked Robin Williams because he delivered comedy at a speed I could appreciate?

All of this by way of explaining my consternation at noting only three or four posts in the past six weeks. Remove the writer’s conceit of a Virtual Vacation and I’ve posted little in the past three or four months. No promises, but I’m headed into a (slightly) more optimistic future in October. In mid-month I’m looking at two periods in the month which hold a dozen days of solitude–a gift to a loner like me.

Our shriveled photo at the top represents a failure at growing a beautiful blooming of golden oyster mushrooms. I was promised a gorgeous cluster, maybe two or three from a kit I purchased in early August. It should have looked like this…ah but that would be stealing someone else’s photo. Let’s just say it would be ten times bigger than the clump in the photo above.

Instead, nothing happened within the 10-14 days it should have. I gifted a friend with the same kind of mushroom kit, and he started a week ahead of me. He didn’t reach harvest until about day 19 or 20, so I held on. About three weeks in, I finally got some growth where it shouldn’t have occurred and it consisted of two distinct clusters which both looked like the picture at the top of this post. It’s an accurate symbol of my shriveled hopes these days. The vendor came through though and sent me a new block which arrived Friday. I started it Sunday, and noted I had not followed instructions–imagine that. This time I made the required shallow incision in the mycelium-impregnated starter block as specified. Stay tuned.

It’s possible that the advent of Oktoberfest with its namesake beer has contributed to some of the lassitude I feel. Or…others…. I’m still polishing off some representatives from the Michigan trip in July. (Though not representative of the state: it’s where I found North Coast Brewing’s Old Rasputin, an imperial stout that drinks like a cross between beer, chocolate, and coffee, all without any additions. Good stuff, but potent. Two of these babies and you’re more than halfway through a typical six-pack.)

The glass is mightier than the sword…particularly when the glasses gang up on the pen.

September saw a few happenings. We got to know our new steel steed, Percy Pilcher:

We set out at the end of August to replace Mr. Lincoln, a 2015 Lincoln MKC and a beautiful realization of automotive vision, but who had become a bit outdated, frustrating, and tired after eight years. “A hybrid, dear,” I told my wife. “That’s what we need. And probably a minivan, though I’m loath to admit those words. We need the cargo room.” We went shopping. Hybrid Toyota Sierras would be available six to eight months–if we pre-ordered. Chrysler Pacificas looked cheap, even at the so-called high end of the model spectrum. The others were DOA, and so…we headed back to the Lincoln dealership where we were treated like returning royalty. No hybrid Aviators? There’s a familiar song. A ‘pre-owned’ model? (Hmm. Weren’t those called “used” not long ago? I think I’m differently opinionated!) Sure. And that’s how we wound up with a current-year Aviator which was returned after five months because the purchasers just loved the vehicle they had traded in, so they bought another one and used this one to cover the cost. Their disappointment was our gain. We bought a vehicle with less than one year’s mileage on it, looks sharp, has all the features we wanted, and…it’s a Lincoln. When I woke up from the euphoria, though, I realized we had purchased another gas combustion engine and that it had 25% worse gas mileage than what we had traded in! Ah, no matter. For now Percy is our new Aviator. Why Percy? Because Percy Pilcher, a relative for sure–there aren’t many Pilchers in the world–achieved quite a bit of notoriety as an inventor and aviator, and likely would’ve bested the Wright brothers at the first to fly a heavier-than-air aircraft if he hadn’t been killed right before attempting it. If you click through to that link, the photograph of him looks similar to my grandfather, the Rev. Howard B. Pilcher, enough that he could’ve been a cousin. I’ve not done much with genealogy, so I’ve no idea how close the relationship is.

Tuesday marked the beginning of a month of travel, both us and others. Or more specifically, both my wife and others. I’m not going anywhere. In my teen years I became acquainted with a guy who later became a good and close friend. Throughout junior and senior high I knew who he was, saw him in groups, but not until I dropped out of college after my freshman year in 1973 did I start working at a Spokane hospital where he also worked. We started hanging out, and because I had become just a little more “normal” we connected. Though diametrically different, we became friends. He was the best man at my first wedding in 1983. We fell into and out of touch, but by 1990 we had renewed it for good. I moved away, and he served in the wedding party for my second wedding. (It was only fair. I participated in multiple weddings for him. Perhaps I’ll tell that tale later.) This past week represented the second time he visited us in Raleigh; the first occurred only because he had followed a woman to Florida in 2009. Had that not happened….but that’s also another story.

This week my brother visits for the first time in over a year. When he leaves a week later, one of my wife’s triplet sisters drops in the next day to pick up my wife and continue to Florida where she (my sister-in-law, not my wife) will look for her retirement home. When that’s done my wife and I will enjoy a whole seven days all by ourselves before she takes off again with a group of friends called The Biker Chicks (though my wife has never ridden a hog or any other type of motorcycle that I am aware of). Finally, as October bows itself out with Hallowe’en, and All Saints and All Souls ushers us into November, I will settle into a sedate period of enjoying my life with my wife. I really don’t need much else. She lets me be to sit here and write these screeds, matches me drink for drink and recipe for recipe, creates handcrafted art in a panoply of media, and joins me in a love of good video, good music, and good times.

What could be better? It’s why I sometimes don’t post here regularly. I’m having too much fun.

Edisto

In 2014 we vacationed to Edisto Beach, an off-the-beaten path resort area in South Carolina. I was over a year into the Job from Hell (as it has been known to my wife and me). Though this vacation started on some bad notes, Edisto worked its magic. I returned refreshed by a simpler time spent walking, staring at scenes like this, and strolling to one of the dining/drinking establishments at dinner. Sometimes one just doesn’t know until one knows. (“How profound,” says the Editor drily. “Been smokin’ that ganja again, boy?”)

When we lost Lokisson

We watched, sadly horrified
when little human-things
took down Lokisson--one fine
oak with humors unusual.
"I lean over their rock-paths,
put down by these silly
human-things: they look up
fearful, ignorant of my
deep-rooted stability."
He would laugh at his humor.
If only he were stable 
as his roots! No.
Humor's ultimate end:
fearful, weak-full, they attack
first. Angry, snarling chainsaws 
bit from all sides, ganged up,
velociraptors hunting
arboreal prey. We knew 
their type from so long ago.
Elephant-bellows issued
from metal contraptions which
looked vaguely tree-like, screaming
their masters' fears skyward, their
cries sometimes oddly resembling 
bugling elks we heard in times
before. Lokisson's beautiful
limbs disappeared first, fed
into hungry maws, exiting
pulverized to bits. Metal 
sheets rang thunder to our sky.
Then...section by section...his
segments fell, crashing, loudly
cutting off his jokes forever.
We cannot laugh through our hurt,
perhaps won't for many seasons.

For two days afterward our
living sky cried and grumbled.

the most disturbing book and the beauty of disturbances

This month LibraryThing provoked me with its monthly newsletter. It contained a link to an ongoing discussion topic (months-long): “What is the most disturbing book you’ve ever read?” (If like me, you find library cataloging software and sites lacking, you might want to look at LibraryThing which offers a version for running small libraries. For a control freak like myself, who also needs much more data than a site like Goodreads can provide, this has been a godsend.)

When I read that question, I immediately thought of One Day of Life by Manlio Argueta. I read this book in the first half of my 30’s; it came as part of a four-volume set of Latin America writers from Quality Paperback Books. I enjoyed them, great works all: 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez; Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter by Mario Vargas Llosa; Dora, Doralina by Rachel de Queiroz. But the fourth one, One Day of Life by Argueta haunted me then and haunts me whenever I think about it, and that’s more often than you would think despite its detailing the lead up to the El Salvador Civil War in the 1980’s and despite the fact I never re-read it.

The book’s matter-of-fact, simple prose details horrors the same way any war-zone child would. It just happens. It is what has happened. It is their life. Though it covers a single “day of life”, the flashbacks offer more detail, all of it disturbing. This was the time of the death squads where people were tortured and executed at the hands of faceless men.

[SPOILER COMING UP]

Though I haven’t read the book since the mid-1980’s, it’s seared into my brain. All I had to do was read this synopsis of the end of the novel, about the central character, Guadalupe Guardado and the novel came back to life. Guardado’s granddaughter, involved in the protests of the time, is Adolfina:

At the end of the novel, the authorities bring a beaten man to Guadalupe and Adolfina who had said the name “Adolfina” after being severely beaten. Adolfina does not recognize the man, but Guadalupe recognizes her husband José. On his previous advice, she denies knowing him, and he is taken away.
Wikipedia entry “One Day of Life”

There’s a horrific beauty contained in vessels such as this which exquisitely contain the pain, the despair, the sadness, the very twisted ways of life which the mainstream hopes to avoid. Argueta’s novel reminds me of another version of the same thing, a song by Rubén Blades, “In Salvador” on the album Nothing But the Truth released in 1988. (I’m unable to find a YouTube video of the song although you can watch a “complete album” video of the album. It’s the 7th song.) Although Lou Reed, Elvis Costello, and Sting contributed songwriting efforts to this album (Blades’ first in English), this song is not one of those. Critics have knocked the fact that Blades sings with an over-enunciated English but to me, it makes the album more honest. We’re hearing his description of what life is still like in El Salvador, and we’re hearing someone from Central America (Blades is Panamanian) speak to us. We wouldn’t expect to hear someone speak fluid English when it’s a second language. The refrain:

“No one can protect your life in Salvador. Judges that condemn you have no name. Could it be the gentleman who lives next door? Or the guy who goes with you to work?
transcribed from the album Nothing But The Truth

There are several other disturbing songs on the album in varying degrees. “The Hit” describes how a young Hispanic male violates the main law of the street that “you don’t double-cross the ones you love”. He’s gunned down. “Letters to the Vatican” describes a woman who’s lost a good chunk of her mind, but finds support in the bar scene where the patrons remember how she was “before she got this way”. In “Ollie’s Doo Wop” Blades sings about the cultivated ignorance of Ronald Reagan to Ollie North’s nefarious doings. I get a very personal meaning from “Hope’s On Hold” where Blades sings of all the things that inhibit falling in love, which leads to “hope’s on hold”.

If we go into the beauty of ugliness, of disturbance, I would offer up Lou Reed’s Berlin which has a semi-rock opera construction. It’s about speed freaks living in Berlin. You can imagine the seaminess of it.

Raw emotions of any type remain more true to me than than the equivocal nature of living in polite society. For this reason, I rarely tell anyone, even my wife, what is going on inside my head. As a creative, we entertain the un-entertainable, the unappreciated, the unapproved. We shed the mundane memories which frankly hamper our movement in polite society. We accept all, winnow it, and feed it back to our world, hoping that if we do it in a meaningful manner, it will illuminate rather than obscure.

Read Argueta’s book. It remains pertinent because the horror merely moved to different countries. It’s the same visceral, hateful viciousness which fuels America’s cultural and political battles. It blossoms in central Africa, in Singapore, in India, in the Europe. It sustains all ideologues on right and left.

Or if you need the short course: listen to Rubén Blades’s song.

Virtual vacation, going home: Days 14 & 15

This will be short but a necessary post if we are to obtain closure. Day 14 took us down the interstates to Beckley, WV, where we spent our first night out. For variety’s sake, I reserved a room at “Tru by Hilton” instead of the Hampton Inn where we had lodged on Day 1. If you’re over the age of 50 and like things such as closets, drawers, and enough desk space to plop down all your electronics, I would steer you away from this brand. Similar to Marriott’s Aloft, it appeals mostly to 20- and 30-somethings who thought the dorm aesthetic in college “was really rad” or whatever I should have inserted here to show I’m not too far over the hill to know (or care).

Before we checked in, we dropped by the Tamarack Marketplace. We had visited in 2010 when I said, “hey, let’s explore West Virginia” and even though that vacation offered a very mixed bag indeed, I still managed to be surprised when we circumambulated the center (it’s more or less a circle): “That’s it?” We revisited in 2023 because we thought, “hey, we probably were just jaded by the end of a vacation. It couldn’t have been that boring.” It was, exemplified by my uttering the same comment I had the first time: “hey, I think we’ve seen this already. Have we really walked the whole thing?” If you would like to pay $23-25 for a semi-unique pottery coffee cup or hundreds/thousands of dollars for art, then this is your place. Even the snacks get priced as if they’re works of art.

We checked the dry-erase board of recommended restaurants–yeah, that’s how Tru does it–and found an acceptable Italian place close to our lodging.

I’d entertained the idea we would stop by the New River Gorge National Park a second time on Day 15, but the idea of getting home in the early evening didn’t appeal to us. When you’re headed home, most of the time you just want to get there. We arrived around 2 p.m., cracked beers while we unloaded: luggage-direct-to-laundry hamper; ice chests disgorging their contents to the beer fridge; and all the miscellaneous crap which creeps out of your luggage and hides in various corners of the car over the two weeks you’re on the road. We joined our good friends from around the block and went out to a better dinner than we had enjoyed in three days.

Returning from a vacation satisfies just like leaving. The familiar looks slightly less so, but the routines comfort in ways hotels cannot provide. Cats cling like two-year-olds demanding you never leave again. You revel in about ten times the square footage you’ve had for the previous two weeks. For me, I look forward to the next day because the day after returning is Re-entry Day, nearly as good as the vacation itself. One gets normalized again, processes multiple loads of laundry, considers midday naps, starts drinking as if it’s still vacation, catches up on all the videos cached during one’s absence, and pulls leftovers from the freezer. It’s like a stay-cation; it’s transition; it’s re-entry. Here we go again.

Rain reflecting where we’ve been. Thurmond, WV, near Beckley. July 2023.

Virtual vacation: Day 13

I love rock and roll. (Put another dime in the jukebox, baby.) For years I’ve wanted to visit the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, and on Day 13 we did just that. I selected a hotel downtown specifically to be near Progressive Field where the Guardians play baseball. On this day our boys, the Phightin’ Phillies of Philadelphia, would open a three-game series against the Guardians and we planned to be there. Having a hotel which was more or less across the street from the park satisfied my first requirement, and offered an extra perk: one mile straight north from the hotel sits the Hall of Fame.

Obviously a popular photo spot–this was the fewest number of persons between me and the sign! Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Cleveland, OH. July 2023.

We both liked the Hall despite the thick crowd of people everywhere. I felt let down, though. I’ve been to the Baseball Hall of Fame several times, and to the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville, and both of these establishments have a more formal visual presentation which leads to a better understanding of the subject matter. I had a great time remembering the various decades of popular music (the RnR Hall uses the term “rock and roll” quite loosely), smiling as songs from big names (Rolling Stones) and small (Link Wray, early pioneers in the 50’s) blasted out of the speakers in front of each display case. The Hall does a great job explaining the antecedents of rock, and it dwells on early stars with entertaining and memorable videos which loop back to the beginning when completed. This last feature facilitates watching the video as soon as you see it; you’ll pick up the beginning sooner or later. Several displays, however, were mystifyingly not connected to other areas to which they chronologically belonged.

One of the special exhibits featured Peter Jackson’s The Beatles: Get Back in a multimedia curved display. No one stopped me from taking photos, so…

Of course signature instruments, clothes, and miscellaneous items jam the displays: an electric guitar used by Howlin’ Wolf at the beginning of his career, a 1952 Kay K-161; one of Gregg Allman’s organs with a Jaimoe kick drum and a guitar from brother Duane; a large window display with many items each for quite a few signature acts, such as The Faces.

If you go, be sure to go all the way to the top. Each floor in the Hall gets successively smaller–look at the shape in the photo above. At the top a small room featured short films on four acts. My memory should be better than this…one was Nine Inch Nails… Alas, the others have escaped my porous memory cells. Too bad because I do remember eagerly awaiting a film up there, and it wasn’t NIN. Ah! A second film featured Quicksilver Messenger Service. This leaves two including the one I wish I could remember…

We returned in mid-afternoon, snapping photos along the way and prepped for our early dinner and the true highlight of the day: the Phillies meeting the Guardians. A decent dinner later we walked the one block to the field, presented our ticket QR codes….and heard the dreaded “ANCK” all scanners seem to produce these days when they can’t electronically parse the information they’ve just reviewed. One more try, one more ANCK and the ticketmeister said,

“Oh, these tickets are for tomorrow.” I’m going to need quite a bit of time to expunge from my memory the shock and sadness I saw on my wife’s face. We walked back to the hotel, a lot more slowly on the return than on the approach. As a consolation, the hotel’s TV featured the regional sports network which carried the game that night. While the game started I crunched some numbers: if I canceled the hotel for Day 14 and added one more night to our stay in Cleveland it would increase our vacation lodging expenses by over $350, the cost for one night when the Guardians were playing at home. The other hotel room was on points; no money saved there. In addition, we would have a nine-hour drive on Day 15 to get home, not something we like doing on a vacation. Alternatively we could stay out on the road another night, incurring one day’s additional expense for the cat sitter plus the $350+ for the room, plus the extra food we’d need to eat. We didn’t take long to decide to resell the tickets on SeatGeek. Two weeks on the road is enough these days, perhaps a function of my flying weekly to locations all over America during the final five years of my working life. SeatGeek rubbed some vinegar into the wound when we realized less than 50% the original price of the tickets.

I still can’t figure out how I managed to buy tickets for the wrong day. On the MLB website for each team, the game calendar features large squares just like a printed calendar. Difficult to believe I clicked the one furthest right (representing Saturday) instead of the one next to it. Unless I had a brain fart….did I momentarily think we were going to the game on Saturday? No matter; done is done. This was to be our only Phillies game for 2023, though. [insert crying emojis].

We drank a bit extra that night–and the Phillies lost in a dispirited contest, although Bryce Harper played first base for the first time in his MLB career and made a fantastic catch into the photographer’s area.

Howlin’ Wolf, play a sad song for me. Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Cleveland, OH. July 2023.

Virtual vacation: Day 12

I love National Parks, National Monuments, National Seashores: in fact, any spot of natural beauty will draw me more than most other sights. Don’t even mention “typical” tourism highlights: amusement parks, rides of any sort, sports activities, hanging at a beach, or what’s euphemistically called “visiting the quaint shops of the [insert name here] district”. My idea of horror would be to wake up on board a two-week Carnival cruise on a ship which boasts thousands of guests. I travel to travel, which means being somewhere different from where you normally are. Places of unique natural wonder only exist where they are–one must travel to see them. Cities which superficially resemble all others boast residents who have uniquely combined their histories. One needs to just be with these peoples to understand them, their cities, their culture. This seems simple and logical to me. What seems illogical: spend thousands of dollars to take a family to some Vacation Destination for golf, tennis, horseback riding, shopping, dancing, and just lounging at the pool. You can do that at home for far fewer dollars.

Case in point: In 1997 I announced to my Philadelphia-area co-workers that I planned to quit and move my new wife with me to my hometown, Spokane, WA. Shortly before my last day, a 50-year-old co-worker asked what route I would be driving. I said we would drive west on the Pennsylvania Turnpike through Pittsburgh. This isn’t the most efficient route, necessarily, and he asked my why I was going that route. “Because I’ve never been to Pittsburgh,” I replied. His response remains vivid 26 years later: “So? I’ve lived here all my life. I’ve never been to Pittsburgh.” Pittsburgh lies 300 miles west of Philadelphia. He recently had returned from a fishing trip to Utah. I’m still dumbfounded. How can you not want to experience what represents the cultural definition of your state?

All of this represents my lead-in to Day 12 when we headed south from Cleveland to the Cuyahoga Valley National Park. Cuyahoga shares a background to other Eastern national parks because Congress carved it out of settled areas. Great Smoky Mountains, Acadia, and Shenandoah among others share that background because Europeans settled there centuries before the concept of national parks became realized in America. The photo below illustrates that. As the park was being formed–I can’t remember if it had been formally established or if this was the lead-up to it–a car junkyard existed in part of it. Many thousands of dollars were needed to clean it up. Heels were dragged. But the beavers tired of our politics, built a dam, and flooded the entire area. Problem solved–except all those automotive corpses still reside beneath the surface of the waters.

Beaver Marsh, south end of Cuyahoga Valley Nat’l Park. July 2023.

Before visiting the Beaver Marsh, we received a great introduction to the park by one of the rangers at the Boston Mill Visitors Center. He directed us to two specific destinations: Brandywine Falls and the Beaver Marsh. The falls were lovely:

Brandywine Falls, Cuyahoga Valley Nat’l Park. July 2023.

Temperatures weren’t devastating but the humidity had us sweating as we hiked from the viewpoint (from where I took the photo above) around the top of the falls by way of the bridge at the top of the photo, and then along the north bank of the Brandywine Creek. The trail leads down and down until you walk along the banks of the creek. Some (not us) take a “side trail” to the creek and wander barefoot in its cool waters. The trail crosses the creek and then heads back to the parking lot. Unfortunately for people in their mid-60’s and in poor physical shape, the trail up requires a lot. We paused several times to catch our breaths (and maybe let the feeble breeze evaporate some of the sweat staining our shirts). We regained the comfort of the modern air-conditioned vehicle and drove to the Beaver Marsh.

Beaver Marsh offers one of my favorite environments: still waters, marshes, lily pads, and the hidden inlets where long-legged waders lurk. Here’s one:

Great Blue Heron, Beaver Marsh, Cuyahoga Valley Nat’l Park. July 2023.

When we got to the marsh proper, we were welcomed by a bird I haven’t seen much in North Carolina:

Red-winged blackbird at Beaver Marsh, Cuyahoga Nat’l Park. July 2023.

Before we encountered Mister Blackbird, we had witnessed a few duck-like birds which have defied my ability to identify them. I’ve looked at Audubon and Cornell using multiple sources for each, and I don’t see ducks which look exactly like this. I think they are some type of teal, but…maybe one of y’all might know?

A pair of …ducks? teals? Still wondering. Cuyahoga Valley Nat’l Park. July 2023.

We gratefully escaped the humid hotness to the air-conditioned comfort of Mr. Lincoln, fueled up, and after a short break enjoyed a pub meal at Flannery’s Pub, an Irish-styled establishment.

Virtual vacation, Day 11: coda

St. Maron Church, Cleveland, OH. July 2023.

Returning from dinner the day we arrived in Cleveland, I noticed statues of what I took to be saints on top of a parking garage across the street from our hotel. As I followed the line of statuary eastward, I saw that the parking garage must serve a church since the statues continued up to there. I snapped one of the lesser photos of my life, then went inside to look up the name: Saint Maron Church. Thus do we learn new things.

Saint Maron lived in the 300’s AD, a Syriac Christian hermit monk in the Tarsus Mountains. His followers established a religious movement after he died, and this movement became known as the Syriac Maronite Church. This church is in full communion with the Holy See (the Vatican) and the Catholic Church. From my readings it’s debated whether the Syriac church ever left the communion, but it’s definitely in communion now. This makes them my religious family since I’m a Roman Catholic. The Maronites are part of the Eastern Churches, what we loosely call Orthodox churches. There are six traditions in the Catholic Church; one is called Latin, what most Americans think of when they hear the word “Catholic”. Maronites were re-established after Islamic rule by the Greek Orthodox Church of Antioch, hence the official name Antiochene Syriac Maronite Church. Today its parishioners are primarily Lebanese, with smaller amounts of Syrians, Cypriots, Israelis, and Jordanians.

Huh!

Virtual vacation, Day 11: foibles & fumbles

Hitting the road again makes me feel good, even if I’ve enjoyed where I’ve been staying. That Grand Rapids provided a couple of days where I didn’t feel so good only made it a little bit sweeter (even if it wasn’t GR’s fault). We loaded Mr. Lincoln with our spare luggage–one airline carryon works well for two weeks, especially if you pack shoes in a separate duffel–then retrieved 15-20 ice packs the hotel graciously froze for us. Distributed over three ice chests containing a sampling from Beer City U.S.A., these packs would keep things cool for the five days remaining…we hoped.

One week later, we pointed Mr. Lincoln back to Lansing specifically to stop by Lansing Brewing Company. LBC drew me back because of a style of beer I had not known before, amber cream ale. A nuanced difference, surely, since a cream ale mimics a lager and an amber version therefore drinks similarly to any Vienna lager such as Samuel Adams Traditional Lager, Devil’s Backbone Vienna Lager, or many, many others. Subtly different though, being an ale not a lager. Additionally, on Day 4 LBC had offered an English Pale Ale (Wayfaring Stranger) which nailed the style perfectly. I’d brought an empty growler along for just such a discovery! We serendipitously left such that we would arrive just as the brewpub opened at 11:30. At 11:32 we entered, growler in hand, to discover the staff had waited until then to clean the beer lines for all the special beers poured “in the back”. A 30-minute wait. What was there to do but drink a couple of lunchtime pints?

My wife, lovely hand model, displays an LBC Amber Cream Ale. Lansing, MI, July 2023.

Beer lines cleaned and dispensing, we grabbed a case of the amber cream ale, some pilsners, and a growler of the Wayfaring Stranger, then headed toward an Audubon Society bird sanctuary about 45-60 minutes away. The Haehnle Bird Sanctuary undoubtedly has much to recommend it, and I would like to do so except for one thing: when you show up with a pint of beer accumulating in your bladder, a restroom of any sort–heck, a reeking port-a-potty would have been okay–proves a formidable barrier. As a man, I had no issues with finding a sheltered spot behind a tree, but such would not do for my wife, and we left minutes after our arrival.

Our drive to Cleveland proceeded uneventfully, as interstate drives usually do. The highest form of drama occurred when the Google Nav quit talking to me. Negotiating freeway-to-freeway maneuvers in greater Cleveland were made much more difficult needing to read the directions on the phone. Our hotel, one block from Progressive Field, seemed to be situated in a….less than desirable section of town. To be fair, we eventually walked entirely through the downtown area, and I didn’t see much more to recommend any other part of central Cleveland. Perhaps a few tax dollars directed toward repairing the potholes in the sidewalks?

We attempted dinner at a restaurant which looked promising…on the web. It seemed a bit skanky when we got there, and when the waitress obviously didn’t know anything about beer–and the restaurant had little to offer either–we headed to a Southern Tier brewpub a block away. (Yeah, it wasn’t local, but we didn’t care.) We returned to the hotel by way of this historic cemetery.

Erie Street Cemetery, Cleveland, OH. July 2023.

It had been a short day of whimsical weirdness, but not bad overall. Travelers need days where nothing goes quite according to plan, yet the day ends well anyway.

Virtual vacation, Days 6-10

Our first five days of vacationing to Michigan delivered exactly what we’d been seeking: easy, relaxing times in places new to us. Only our drive northward through the state had disappointed. We looked forward to the end of our first week and what would come after. After one of the weirdest “Continental” breakfasts I’ve ever seen in an hotel–boiled ham slices swimming in 4-5 inches of water?–we headed west and south, giving the state a chance to erase the boredom of Day 4’s drive from Lansing to Mackinaw City; but…it was not to be. Cloudy weather dogged us most of the day. Road detours abounded, not refreshing hey-look-at-this-off-the-route sight, but more a geez-what-a-crappy-road type of thing.

Not surprisingly for a Friday, tourists clogged the more popular destinations on Lake Michigan. More surprisingly, we seldom could see Lake Michigan even when the map said we ought to be able to heave a stone into it if we threw it to the west. Worse, I couldn’t find coffee–the breakfast offering had been abysmal, and I desperately needed a cuppa. Dark blue-gray clouds threatened a massive storm which we somehow avoided with an end-run around them. Things started to look up in Traverse City. We turned off the main route, and in quick order found MiddleCoast Brewing just around the block–my inner beer compass continues to function eerily well. We thoroughly enjoyed French-style sandwiches and a pint. The way-too-heavy meal stuck with us all the way to Grand Rapids, a.k.a. Beer City USA.

It’s time we reveal a poorly kept secret: I’m a beerhound. I’ll detail my long history with beer another time. It’s enough today to acknowledge my on again/off again streaks of brewing beer at home over 15 years, the refrigerator purchase ten years ago for the sole purpose of holding more than 12-24 bottles of beer, and that when I packed our car for this trip I put the suitcases in the back seat of Mr. Lincoln because the three ice chests in the rear of the vehicle precluded putting the luggage back there! In discussing the itinerary of the vacation which had to be reoriented twice, I was left with the question, “what do we do after two or three days in Grand Rapids?” It didn’t seem like the one to two days left could be put to good purpose by visiting greater Detroit (sorry, CIMPLE), when it finally hit me about the same time as my wife: just stay in GR. Visit more breweries. See more sights. LRR.

Saturday, Day 7, we drove meanderingly into central GR, aborted the idea of trying to get to Belknap Lookout in Belknap Park when we saw about a thousand Goths all lined up to get into some concert/event there, spent about 30-45 minutes trying to find a place to park, then began an aimless trek from sight to sight. GR has retained many of its old brick buildings to its credit. However, its modern architecture, while striking, jars the eye as one looks past a 19th-century church. Not having recovered from the previous day’s food, (or perhaps from having killed a growler purchased in Mackinaw City), I spent this day in shaky fashion. I took only a few photos, and we stopped a couple of times to “refresh” ourselves: first, at the Brick and Porter then at Grand Rapids Brewing Company. Dinner? Overpriced and gimmicky–I won’t mention the firm’s name.

The ubiquitous, elusive frogs of Calvin Ecosystem Preserve & Native Gardens, Grand Rapids, MI. July 2023.

Our worship Sunday morning occurred at the Calvin Ecosystem Preserve & Native Gardens just up the road a bit from our hotel. Calvin University is a Christian school more than 125 years old, founded as a theological seminary. These frogs were amazingly frustrating. We could hear them everywhere from the moment we walked by the first pond, but we couldn’t see any. We heard them arepeatedly on our walk. Finally, we stopped where the path went over a very small creek, relaxed, spent some time, focused, and there they were! Everywhere. Everywhere! Just in this one small area were at least two dozen. They sounded like a belch crossed with a bullfrog’s deep ba-rumph.

Having fulfilled our quota of tourist-y activities, we repaired to Mitten Brewing Company for a few tastes, then srove to the outskirts of GR to Perrin’s brewery. The latter introduced me to the black ale style, a very nice discovery. We ended at Brass Ring for some of the best versions of English-style ales I’ve enjoyed and traditional English pub fare. Unfortunately, something didn’t agree with me–likely the food–and I spent more than half of Monday in bed. Our truncated day followed in similarly disappointing fashion. Not having learned our lesson on Friday, we drove west on a boring state highway hoping to catch a few sights of Lake Michigan, but all we saw were resort houses and buffer zones of trees. Topping it off, we drove to Holland expressly to visit the New Holland Brewing Company which Google told us was open on Mondays. It is…to people who have business to discuss with the brewery. To the casual beer drinker, however, they are not open, referring them to one of several brewpubs. One was back in Grand Rapids. Of course.

We put a feeble but valiant effort in at the end of the afternoon, visiting Brewery Vivant and stopping by Harmony Brewing only to walk out again due to the weird vibes and poor customer service. You know it’s been a poor day when dinner at the hotel sounds like a good idea. At least the food was decent, and the service was even better.

Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park, Grand Rapids, MI. July 2023.

Our last day in Grand Rapids ended well. Just a few miles up the road from our hotel we visited the Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park. A huge, impressive site: though we spent two to three hours there, we never saw much of the sculpture. We decided to focus on the nature and see the sculpture another day. I’m going to reserve most photos to appear later, but here are a few:

Mute swan, Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park, Grand Rapids, MI. July 2023.

Japanese tea garden, Fredrik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park, Grand Rapids, MI. July 2023.

After this lovely start to the day, we took pause before heading out to a large beverage store. Our trips to local establishments had proven disappointing when it came to “collecting specimens”; this trip more than filled our three coolers. Beers from all over Michigan were in the cart, as well as a few from Indiana and Illinois, plus a couple breweries which don’t distribute to North Carolina (or do so minimally)–North Coast Brewing from California and Alaskan from Juneau, AK. A refined dinner at Cooper’s Hawk Winery and Restaurant capped a delightful day.