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Si quaeris peninsulam amoenam circumspice. (If you seek a pleasant peninsula, look about you.)
—Michigan state motto

Well, the pressure finally got to me. I’ve been hounded, begged, flattered, and cajoled to bring back the mary’zine. OK, I may be exaggerating just a bit. But when I tried to explain to J.M. of Fairfax, Calif., that it has to be fun for me, she cried, “But you’ve left the rest of us in a sucky void!” It’s not that I lost interest in writing. But once I made the move from the San Francisco Bay Area to the Green Bay Area, my mission seemed to change. No longer was it enough to riff on the odd theory about the universe, describe humorous or poignant encounters at the grocery store, or rant about bicyclists’ wanting to be treated like regular traffic except when they run stop signs or ride in front of you at 9 miles an hour. I felt I had to do more… describe my change of circumstances in terms both humorous and grand… tell pithy anecdotes with an underpinning of profundity… relay hilarious but respectful tales of family life. Could I be happy and still write with the soul and wit of a born critic? Could I convey the joy of a semi-retirement spent in solitary refinement: reading… watching movies… listening to music and radio talk… playing and napping with two sweet balls of purr? Could I—should I—have blogs of things to say about the election or Darfur or the environment? (Jellyfish are washing up on the beaches of Spain: We are doomed!) Should I have important observations to share about the U.P., or at least the south U.P. (SoU.P.)? It all became Too Important, and I lost the gift of having fun with it.

I may have been reacting to the disapproval of one of my spiritual mentors (for lack of a better term) who was alarmed at my saying that I’m happy here and have “nothing left to prove.” Truly, I’m done striving—not that I was ever much of a striver to begin with. (I merely floated to the top.) He thought that the mary’zine should consist of more than “things that [I] ‘think’ will ‘amuse’ people.” He seemed to be worried that, having moved to the culturally and intellectually moribund Midwest, I had become dull and complacent—had left my brain, if not my heart, in San Francisco. Yes, God forbid anyone should actually enjoy life. One must seek but never find. He even thought that my plan to make copper and found-art objets, perhaps to hang in the trees in my back yard, was “a copout”—a copout from what, I don’t know.

I have disappointed so many people in my life.

•    Mr. E., 9th grade English teacher, who, during a locker inspection, discovered I was reading a paperback adaptation of “Leave It to Beaver” (OK, that’s pretty bad, but I was yet to discover Catcher in the Rye and become a literary snob);

•    Miss W., 12th grade English teacher, who generally adored me but wasn’t pleased with my irreverent take on Shakespeare’s 400th birthday—a poster with the punchline, “My what’s-its-name, my what’s-its-name, my kingdom for a what’s-its-name”—something to do with Richard III and a contest to name a horse (OK, that was pretty bad, too);

•    Dr. R., director of the Bureau of Business Research at the University of Michigan, who almost fired me for writing “SUPPORT BAM” [Black Action Movement] on my timesheet in large block letters; he was incredulous—“We have to keep these timesheets in the files for YEARS!”;

•    Fellow socialists at a college in Maryland who thought it was a crime against the Revolution to play solitaire or sew a Grateful Dead patch on one’s jeans; they didn’t even approve of psychology.

To the literary people, I was too low-brow; to the political people, I was too frivolous; to the scholars, I lacked ambition; to the artists, I was uncool; to the authorities, I questioned too much; to the spiritual seekers, I was too complacent. While riding on the back of the tandem bicycle of Life, I have never, apparently, done my fair share of pedaling. Well, I say this: It has taken me a long, long time to realize that I can make my own decisions about how to live my life. As for the tandem bicycle, Life has control over the handlebars that actually steer the thing; mine are just for holding on.

And maybe it’s the peaceful environment I now find myself in; maybe it’s having become a sexagenarian…. but I’m just happy—that untoward, somewhat embarrassing H-word. Like my mentor, you may be thinking, “How dare she! With the world in the state it’s in! She has given up! She must be asleep… her vestigial brain cells are rotting from self-absorption, inaction and lack of stimulation!” So, yeah, I’m fat-and-happy and I have all the downside quirks of my personality that I ever had, maybe more, but the good news is… I don’t care so much. If loving my life is wrong, I don’t wanna be right.

*****
So… (finally, she begins…) It’s been a quiet year-and-a-half in Menominee, Michigan, my hometown. After moving to this north central middle American upper peninsular small town 4 years ago, my transformation from Westcoaster to Midwester is complete. I knew this for sure when I went online to iTunes and downloaded “The Beer Barrel Polka.” [I’m not kidding]

Illusions? I always knew I’d lose a few after I settled in, but I didn’t know which, how, or when. My most profound delusion was that I would become an entirely different person—involved, friendly, sociable. Hiding out in my condo in San Rafael, I thought I was just avoiding the rowdy neighbors, parking lot rappers, and midnight crazies. But here too I peer out the window before going out on the front porch to get my mail. Some days I don’t go out at all, or if I do, I back my Jeep stealthily out of the garage like Dick Cheney emerging from his undisclosed location. I avoid making eye contact with neighbors or passers-by, unless they wave or say hello first.

So I’m the neighborhood riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, and no one comes a-knockin’ for a cup of sugar. Which suits me fine. I’m happy as a clam up in here, with my kitties and my lifeline to the greater world, the Internet. It’s like living in my own personal biodome, or biosphere, or whatever they called that underground experiment in the ‘70s where people lived without natural light and discovered their biorhythms without external cues. I sleep irregular hours, often in my big red chair, with one kitty on my lap and the other curled at my feet. I usually stay up most of the night, reading, listening to music, or wading on the Internet (never learned to surf). My favorite times are when I’m still awake at 6:30 a.m. when Schloegel’s opens, and I can sit in a booth by the big windows, with my coffee and scrambled eggs, watching the sun come up over the bay. But then I always wish that I had slept, so I could start my day in the bright sparkling morning.

My quasi-hermit life has changed somewhat since I hired Paul to put up new siding on my house. Paul is that rare contractor who is dependable, agreeable, and a perfectionist. He’s done several jobs for me, including replacing my roof, blowing insulation into the attic, and installing a skylight in the old attic room that I’ve painted in a wild and crazy fashion.

That’s Brutus on top of the world/cat tree.

Paul and his helper Bob, two old guys (I say “old”: they’re both younger than me), along with Bob’s son-in-law Joe, have been working on the siding 7 days a week for several weeks now. They just finished on Labor Day, and my house is now the shining star of the neighborhood. I’ve gotten used to having them around—sawing, pounding, walking on the roof, coming in to use the bathroom and get a Mountain Dew. Bob is fond of saying, “Whatever makes you happy….” He’s done several things for me that weren’t strictly in the job description, like clearing out the weeds and old bottles from under my back deck. All the guys have day jobs: Paul and Joe work in factories, and Bob is a city worker in charge of the parks. But they come straight from work to spend another 4 or 5 hours working on my house on weekdays, plus all day on the weekends.

The three of them are always joking around, and I enjoy contributing to the banter. I have a mild fantasy of hanging out with them off the job site, so to speak. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but men are so refreshing sometimes, in their willingness to be playful. Bob likes to tell stories, some of which are of questionable truthiness. He told me he used to lend money to his friends and charge them 100% interest. So he’d lend this one guy $400, and the next month the guy would pay him back $800. But then the guy would borrow another $400, so Bob figures he wasn’t really making any money from it. I’m sorry, but wouldn’t he be making $400 a month? I have a feeling I’m not meant to scrutinize these stories too closely. (My contrary nature makes me get all jokey when people are serious and require documentation when they’re trying to be funny.)

Because the guys are out in the yard or up on ladders all the time, they get to do the meet-and-greet with curious neighbors and passers-by, including an old (see above) guy named Stan who comes by now and then. One day Stan asks Bob, “Is the woman who lives here married?” Bob says, “I don’t know, I’ve never seen her husband.” Stan says, “Maybe I oughta get together with her!” Yeah, right. Make a new plan, Stan….

Dozens of people so far have exclaimed how beautiful my house is now—it’s sage green, in a town where most buildings are white, gray, or beige. I’m so proud of my color sense. Also, I say fie on George Bush’s economic stimulus package. When I got my $600 check, it felt like pocket change. I’ve stimulated the local economy by putting $25,000+ into the siding, lights, metal soffits, painted railings, stained deck, (red!) doors, and a new driveway. It’s like that Citgo commercial, where “Bob” eats at “Tom’s” restaurant, so “Tom” can get his car fixed at “John’s” garage and “John” can get gas at “Bob’s” gas station. In a small town like this, I can see my California-gotten gains making a real difference to local people and businesses.

I did accidentally meet the woman across the street whom I’ve studiously avoided since she and her husband and baby moved in 3 years ago. I’m just so awkward with casual yard-to-yard relationships. When are you expected to wave, and when can you just go about your business? Do you wait for them to look up from their lawn mowers, or do you tramp over there with a plate of cookies and an earnest query about the wife and grandkids? I really blew it by not introducing myself to the neighbors when I first moved in, but I opted to hide instead. I somehow thought, Oh, I’ll only be here for another 20 years or so, there’s no point getting chummy. I have this thing about remaining anonymous and thereby exempt from the laws of social discourse. “Don’t mind me, I just moved into this big house on the corner where the previous owners had lived for 17 years or so and probably planned block parties, held rummage sales, and did house-to-house canvassing for the freakin’ American Heart Association, and here I show up, a middle-aged, apparently single gal from the exotic land of California, no visible means of support, lights on at all hours of the night, darts in and out with nary a by-your-leave or a “Howdy, neighbor!’”

My sister Barb’s sister-in-law lives around the corner from me, and, needless to say, I have been derelict in never dropping by to visit or to buy more of her stained glass ornaments. She told Barb she didn’t know why I bought that big house, there was a little ranch-style house down the street that was for sale at the same time that would have been “more appropriate.” So it’s now a running joke between me and my old friend P about how “inappropriate” and “big” my house is. When P was on vacation in Napa Valley, she mailed a postcard addressed to me at Menominee, MI, with zip code but no address other than “Inappropriately large house, 4th St.” It got here.

I often wonder if I’m ever going to make any friends here… I mean “friend-friends,” people with similar interests and outlook. Where have all the bohemians and artists gone? Long time passing! But I do have a growing roster of people I’m friendly with, who I stop and talk to if I see them around town. It’s different from the intimate friendships I’ve formed in other places. But these stop-and-say-hi relationships are surprisingly satisfying and genuine—whether the other person be waitress, bartender, haircutter, grocery store clerk, veterinarian, bank teller, or store manager. In a small town there’s a camaraderie that comes from seeing the same people in expected places, most of whom were born here and are connected in sometimes unlikely ways with family or other people you know. Usually I’m only one degree of separation from anyone I meet. Bob’s wife Bonnie works with my sister K, and Paul knows K and her husband MP from remodeling the house across the street from them. MP knows Tony my lawn guy from high school (amazingly, the lawns in town are well kept up despite the lack of illegal immigrants to do jobs that “Americans won’t do”!). Paul’s wife Mary graduated with MP, and Barb knows a lot of people from teaching their kids. Sometimes Paul brings in other guys to do little jobs on the side. The guy who trimmed my big ash (whose ash you calling big? oh, it’s a tree; never mind) turned out to be the brother of the woman who was so excited to see me at Mickey-Lu’s a couple years ago, though I had absolutely no memory of her. The brother, Niles, remembered my family too. (Where was I?) I know it’s not a huge surprise to “know people who know people” in a town of ~9,000 (close to 20,000 if you count Marinette, WI, and we do), but it still intrigues me. In my youth I opted to go to a large university, in part to be anonymous. Now I’m learning to enjoy being known a little bit.

going nuclear

…the tortured dynamics of nuclear-family life: the roles children never grow out of, even after they’ve become adults; the close-quarters intimacy that simultaneously binds and enervates…; the ever-shifting alliances; the short-lived feuds; the commiserative phone calls about how loco everyone else in the family is.
—New York Times, 9-17-06

This is the tricky part, talking about my family. With people I don’t like or who will never read this, I don’t have to worry about being fair. I’m a whore for a laugh, you know that. But writing about my family, I want to be honest without hurting feelings if I can help it. This isn’t an annual holiday letter, where everything is amped up to impress, or at least bland enough not to anger any of the recipients. My goal here is to get at the contradictions of living with or around folks whom you care about deeply but who don’t necessarily share your beliefs and certainly don’t share your experiences. There, I’ve covered myself the best I can. Let’s dive in….

During my first year here, I felt like I had fallen in love. Everything was wonderful, from the beautiful Christmas light displays on every block, to snow fluttering down, to sitting in a funky bar eating pizza or fried lake perch. It was easy to take everything at face value, give everyone the benefit of the doubt, want for nothing to be different. As with my expected transformation from recluse to bon vivant, I believed that I would be wonderful, too, and to that end I vowed not to correct my family’s grammar or judge them in any way. You can imagine how that turned out.

K said to me a while back, “You’re just like everybody else now.” Oh no, my worst fear! But it’s not true anyway, except in the sense that it is. (How’s that for a riddle wrapped in an enigma?) I feel utterly at home here. The bloom is not off the rose; the honey has not gone off the moon. I’m just more realistic now. One either stays on the surface, making no real connections or commitments, or one settles in to Reality and accepts that life is more than pretty lights and the intoxicating smell of fish-fry grease and stale beer.

We have our differences—political, philosophical, cultural, and, of course, personal. For example, Barb is a born teacher, and I am a born editor. Often, the teacher resents being corrected and the editor resents being lectured. I often find myself struggling to: disprove the Internet stories offered as fact; accept without comment the clichés and oft-repeated anecdotes; fend off ingrained sexism and racism (the C-word, the N-word, the G-word [stop me when I run out of letters]); argue for my interpretation of the Iraq war or gay marriage or whatever. Recently, MP—to provoke me, I’m sure—complained, “Now we have to vote for a fuckin’ [N-word]!” Which I know sounds bad, but what I took from that comment is that somebody’s going to be voting for Obama.

There are some funny disconnects, too: One time, after I had ranted about George W. Bush for 5 minutes, my 27-year-old nephew Joshua exclaimed, “Aunt Mary said ‘Fuck’!”

Often, the disconnect is mine. K and Barb and I were on our way to Green Bay to get our fix of Target, Sam’s Club, and a real (for Wisconsin) Mexican restaurant. I’m driving, and K and Barb are chatting about this and that, and suddenly I realize they’re discussing Russia’s invasion of Georgia. Like the nephew who can’t believe his old auntie says bad words, I’m the oldest sister still thinking of my younger siblings (both in their 50s) as somehow still naive and uninformed.

Mostly, we all get along really well, and of course the waters run deep, even if they aren’t always still. Also, my sisters and I have our somewhat shared childhood—I say “somewhat” because I was incarcerated first and was paroled first, so we remember lots of things differently. There’s an ongoing debate over who was treated the worst: I received way too much intrusive attention, Barb was criminally neglected, and K was made to go to beauty school.

English, motherfucker! Do you speak it?!
—Samuel M. Jackson, “Pulp Fiction”

As for the grammar, I used to cringe when I heard people say “between you and I.” But it’s common usage around here to say, “Her and her husband went to the movies,” or “Me and him are good friends.” Waitresses often ask, “Do yooz know what you want?” Sometimes I have to clamp my hand over my mouth to avoid saying something, especially when it’s someone who should know better. I try not to flaunt my advanced knowledge of the English language, but it leaks out sometimes. MP doesn’t like my using “75-dollar words,” but after I thanked him for valuing my words so highly, he doesn’t say it as often. Besides, I think he likes to play dumb. I’ve been wanting to hit him with the line, “I refuse to have a battle of wits with an unarmed person,” but I don’t want to push it. We have fun, though. Me and my guy friends. Who knew?

I’ve always accepted that the initial ecstasy of union and re-union would dim eventually. How could it not? I’ve had a few serious disappointments, all beyond my control. I had looked forward to being involved in the lives of my sisters’ grandchildren, especially Summer and Sarina, with whom I spent quality time when I first moved here. But they’re now in their mother’s custody after a divorce, and even Barb doesn’t see them. I also imagined I’d be close to my nephew MJP, as we were when he was 14, but he’s a grown-up cynical (divorced) man now who has apparently cut all family ties. I’ve enjoyed spending time with his brother Joshua, but he’s divorced now, too, and caught up in his new job (long-distance trucking) and new dating life.

Mostly, any letdown I feel is minor and short-lived. K, MP, Barb and I (and Joshua, when he’s in town) get together every Friday night at K&MP’s house and either go out to eat or get takeout from the Marine House, Mickey-Lu’s, Applebee’s, or Taco Bell. (I wish I were joking about Taco Bell. The culinary options here are slim indeed, though the consequences are not.) One night we were having burgers at Mickey-Lu’s, a ‘50s diner that has never been gussied up to look like a ‘50s diner. It was a favorite hangout of the kids who had money to waste on junk (as my mother would say) when I was in high school. The burgers and brats [sausages, not children] are still grilled over flames and wrapped in butcher paper and plopped down in front of you on a Formica table. And the waitresses call you “hon.” It could star in its own sit-com. So here’s the scene: K, MP, Barb, Barb’s son Brian, and I are crowded into a corner booth, and the air is festive as all get out. It’s just a few days after Christmas, the decorations are still up, and the place is rapidly filling up with folks coming in from the latest snowstorm—red-cheeked, bundled up, and cheerfully stamping their boots. The noise is quite loud in this small space, and someone is playing the jukebox. MP and I sing along to the music, and he amuses himself by blowing straw wrappers at me. I feel like I should be having one of those honeymoon frissons, seeing myself and my family as if we’re extras in an Adam Sandler movie. But it’s just… what it is. No more the glistening-eyed romantic, the California expatriate, the prodigal sister, the city mouse moved to the country. I’m just like everybody else now. Except in the sense that I’m not.

Every week, after supper, we spend the evening watching TV or a movie I’ve gotten from Netflix. If it’s a movie I really want to see, I watch it at home ahead of time, because the peeps (or peops, as my friend Van logically spells it) don’t always have the longest of attention spans and are known to suddenly start talking to the cats or mentioning who stopped by today, or did you fill in the check register when you got home from Menards. Barb does most of the talking,  accustomed as she is to addressing a captive audience in her classroom. (Meow.) K points out that we get together to visit, but it’s hard to do that and also pay attention to a movie plot. Plus, they have a grandfather clock that chimes every 15 minutes, and the police scanner has to be turned up so MP can hear if there’s an accident he has to go to with the wrecker. It’s quite a contrast to my quiet household of three—two of us being dumb animals, and I’m not going to tell you which two.

I complain, I kid, but our Friday nights are a lifeline I would hate to do without. One night I went home and wrote down what I could remember of the latest news about Barb’s son Brian, because it reminded me so much of the “News from Lake Wobegon,” if Lake Wobegon had any young people living there, and if they beat each other up—oops, spoiler!

One of the best-kept secrets of middle age is that the personal dramas of one’s 20s and 30s (and 40s and 50s, in my case) are a thing of the past. Instead, I get to observe the personal dramas being suffered by my younger friends and relatives. One feels for them, and one freely dispenses advice based on one’s own youth (though, strangely, those fascinating stories from the ‘60s rarely seem to impress), but one doesn’t have to suffer them oneself. (Is a person less self-centered if she uses “one” instead of “I”? One is just asking.)

Here’s a condensed version of the stories Barb told us.

Brian’s (now ex-) wife Deb’s brother J broke up with Deb’s friend and married this new girl. No one else in the family likes her, so she won’t let any of them in the house, and he won’t answer the phone. Their sister Amanda thought it would be a good idea to tell him their mom had a heart attack and was clinging to life, just to get his attention. His father went over there to borrow a ladder that happens to belong to Barb—she didn’t even know he had it—and J made him talk out on the porch.

Brian sold the trailer. Deb was OK with it at first, but then she wished he hadn’t, because she and Amanda and their sister Mary wanted to go camping at Shakey Lakes and they would have to take Mary’s little trailer. They wanted the guys to go up and get everything ready for them and then leave. [The new feminism.]

One night, with her kids in tow, Deb’s friend Wendy showed up at Brian’s house and accused him of breaking in and stealing her safe. After a brief argument, Brian denying it and inviting them to search the house, Deb and Wendy walked over to Mary’s house to accuse Amanda of stealing the safe. Brian got angry at being accused, and also at not being asked to go along. He got in his truck and left.

[Here’s where it gets a little confusing.] At Mary’s house, Wendy physically attacks Amanda; Amanda’s boyfriend tries to pull her off; Jason and J.T. [who they?] try to break it up; Wendy shoves J.T.; he pushes Wendy to the ground; Deb screams at Wendy to chill out; Wendy attacks Deb, chokes her and gives her a nasty bump on the forehead. The neighbors call the police. Wendy returns to Brian’s house.

Brian gets home to find three police cars there. Wendy has walked away from the cops, yelling “Fuck off!” It takes three police to pin her to the ground. They get her into the squad car. She kicks the back window out. Her kids stay the night at Brian’s.

Brian is mad at his daughter Summer [who’s 12 going on 30] because “she’s such a drama queen and wants attention all the time.” As he’s telling Barb this, he’s holding his head in his hands. He says he hates his life and asks if she has any food so he can feed the kids.

A few days later, Mary, her son Devon, and her boyfriend are in a car accident near J.C. Penney’s. They’re hit head-on by a guy in his truck who admits to the police that he did it on purpose because he wanted to prove to his family that he didn’t care if he lived or died. Everyone seems to be OK, though Mary has to wear a neck brace and little Devon is called back to the hospital for a CAT scan when his face starts to swell up.

At the hospital, Brian tells Barb that he, Amanda, and Sean [Mary’s ex-husband—the guy Deb was cheating on Brian with] [you will recall that Deb and Mary are sisters] are all under suspicion for the theft of the safe from Wendy’s house. Sean, who didn’t have enough money to pay his water bill last month, magically came up with $3,400 to pay on his credit card. At the Nite Court bar the night before, Sean walked past Brian three times, smirking at him, and telling everyone in the place that he’s going to “nail” the third sister, Amanda, next. Brian goes outside and sees Sean letting the air out of Deb’s tires. Sean had told the two bouncers, who are friends of his, to look the other way. Brian punches Sean in the face.

Oh, and it doesn’t stop there, no siree. It’s a continuing soap opera that rivals anything on daytime TV. Although I feel for all the people involved—and also see that they are the agents of their own troubles—it’s kind of nice to be the onlooker for once and not the star of my own ridiculous melodramas.

Update: Sean is now in jail for drunk driving; Brian moved to Texas after the divorce; Deb is living with a new guy; and the beat goes on….

There are other things I could write about: my delightful kitties, my backyard “wildlife sanctuary,” the born-again cable guy, class in America, Pat & Rayleen’s new restaurant, and, of course, death. But I figure I should leave yooz begging for more. Au revoir.

[Mary McKenney]

BEWARE…

it’s the…

“increasingly midwestern”…

family-values…

no-coast-just-a-shore…

cute-kid-stories…

KMart-shoppin’…

Packer-rootin’…

snow-blowin’…

Great Lakes state

that ate…

the mary‘zzzzzzzine!!!

Subscribers protest: “What up with this Midwest shtick?”

I can only say, “Hey! It’s not that bad!”

November, 2004

As you may have noticed, this is the first mary‘zine to come along since the summer of aught-three. I have a lot to tell you.

One of my favorite e-mails that arrived last summer, after mary’zine #29 came out, was this one from the lovely Maria of NM.

I have been reading your increasingly midwestern preoccupied Mary’zine with conflicted interest these last two issues. The last one I had about had it. My thoughts midway thru the issue were “OK Miss Mary, you have just gone over the line with this one. If I have to read one more, I MEAN one more, cutely amusing email from Barb, I am going to cancel my subscription!!” But of course, they kept coming… AND I kept reading! I finally settled into it this last issue. I settled into the fact that I am truly happy that you have found the SOUL of your family life. You make it all so very interesting and, of course, funnier than anything! It really makes me want to break out of my little comfortable rut of Calif/New Mexico and see how the rest of the country lives their American life. But the food (except for the cherry pies)!!! I think I will bring my salad makings with me. May you live your bliss…. it sounds like you have found it.
All love, Mary!

I was glad to hear that Maria had successfully navigated the stages of grief—or of excessively midwestern preoccupation—and arrived at acceptance. I hope that my idyllic tales of small-town, family-bosom living will be of aid and comfort to you all.

a new life

I still can’t believe it. This has been the strangest, most uncertain, most exciting year of my life. It’s been the same for Pookie, except for the “exciting” part. Here we are in Michigan’s beautiful green (and orange and yellow and red—soon to be black&white) upper (U) peninsula (P) in the northern Great Lakes region. Menominee, humble town of my birth, is way down in the lowest part of the P, right next to Wisconsin, 50 miles north of Green Bay (which explains the plethora of green-and-yellow football bobble dolls and cutouts that decorate many yards). And Menominee is where I am now the proud owner of a four-bedroom house in a quiet neighborhood where the trees outnumber the residents, one block from the bay (Lake Michigan) and Henes Park (my refuge when I was growing up) and three blocks from the house where my family lived before my father became disabled with multiple sclerosis. (Can I pack information into a paragraph, or what?)

[See pics at end of post. There’s a mixture from different time periods. If the house is white, it’s back when I bought it. If the house is green, that’s how it is now.]

The upstairs of the house features a large open area (“the loft”) that I have taken over as my home office. There are tall, south-facing windows all across the loft and the adjoining bedroom, which has double French doors leading into the loft, and more windows facing east. There is a 30-foot-long attic bedroom on the west side and another bedroom on the north side. And a tiled bathroom with shower. Downstairs is a large kitchen, a semi-enclosed dining area with bow window, an L-shaped living room, and a large bedroom with vaulted pine ceiling, bow window, and window seats. There is beautiful woodwork throughout the house. The downstairs bathroom is tiled and features a large magenta (!) Jacuzzi. There’s a 2.5-car garage (so important to get that .5 vehicle in there) and a large basement.

Outside, there’s a sizable back porch off the kitchen, a patio off the garage, and a large lawn in back, surrounded by a chain link fence, with several trees, including an apple tree. Pretty large front lawn, too, with a big (maple?) tree. There’s also a birch tree, my favorite. The house is on a corner, with wide streets and no sidewalks. I’m 4 or 5 miles from my sisters and their families in Marinette, Wisconsin, over one of three bridges, because Menominee is tucked in between the bay and the Menominee River. Water water everywhere….

I love being here. It’s great to have Barb and K and K’s husband MP (and their kids and some of the grandchildren) nearby, and to be able to do ordinary things with them instead of just flying in and visiting for a few days. We go to Friday fish fry, rummage sales, shopping, breakfast or supper out, birthday celebrations… and who knows, maybe snowmobiling in the winter. Just kidding about that last part… I hope. One day K and MP drove me to Escanaba to go furniture shopping, and I made quite a haul: at a 25% off sale, I found a big red armchair & ottoman, solid oak sleigh bed, couch and coffee table, Tiffany-style floor lamp, and side table. With the furniture I brought from California, I still have plenty of room to spare.

I’ve become such a materialist. I want to (or at least think I should) write about everything that puts the heart in heartland—and I’ve discovered lots of it, from little kids to a personal banker—but my real interest seems to be in my shopping list. Thanks to the wild disparity in housing prices between California and the Midwest, I sold high and bought low, so it’s the first time in my life I’ve had enough money to get pretty much whatever I want (assuming I don’t want a villa in the south of France). Shopping here is limited to Wal-Mart, ShopKo, Kmart, dollar stores, and rummage sales, so people make biweekly or monthly treks to Green Bay or Escanaba. K and I went to Green Bay recently because they have a Target, where I bought a wok, placemats, flatware (I’ve had only two forks for as long as I can remember), driving gloves for winter, and a “mad bomber’s hat” with ear flaps that hang down. (When I tried it on in the store, K said, “You look like Mom when she took her teeth out!” I bought it anyway.)

OK, this is getting out of hand. I have an almost overwhelming urge to make a list of things I’ve bought for the house … wait …

•    things I’ve bought… kitchen island, TV, stove, washer/dryer…
•    things I’ve done… (lots of boring stuff plus) framed and hung 11 of my paintings; one of my nephews tried to tell me that “demented” is a compliment…
•    things I still have to do… buy real toys for visiting children so they don’t have to play with snakes and eyeballs from my sand tray collection…
•    things my peeps have given me… an electric drill & screwdriver set, our grandmother’s oak table, four dining room chairs, many sparkly things to hang from my sun-filled loft windows, a plaque that reads “Home Is Where They Love You”…
•    things my peeps have done for me… rescued and refinished the oak table, painted almost all of my rooms, cleaned out the gutters…
•    things I’ve hired out… lawn care, furnace repair, carpet cleaning…

What brought me here was my family, and they’re still the anchor, but I have a strong need for solitude. So now I have ready access to human companionship but can still be alone a lot. When I need a break from work (euphemism for “whenever I want to”), I sit by the loft window in my big red armchair, put my feet up, and watch the sky, the trees, and the birds, while I dream, perchance to nap. It’s so peaceful here, and such a change from my old neighborhood—no fights outside my bedroom window, no midnight ranting, no blaring rap music (until I get the new Eminem CD, that is), no police megaphones. Any sound that reaches my ears is completely benign… the drone of a lawn mower (they’re lawn fetishists around here)… the somber but romantic sound of a train in the distance… the screech of gulls out for a good time. I’ve set out to woo the passing birds and local squirrels by putting up feeders in a couple of the trees. One morning I raised the bedroom blinds and noticed a squirrel in the middle of the road down by the park. As if on cue, it came running in my direction. It got closer and closer, then veered off the road, slipped easily through a hole in my chain link fence, and made a beeline for the tree that holds a metal squirrel feeder. It climbed the tree, flattened itself briefly against the gray bark (did anyone see me? no? then let’s go for it!), zipped around to the front of the feeder, lifted the lid, and dove in head first, just the tail hanging out like Davy Crockett’s coonskin hat. It popped back out and paused for a second to turn the peanut around in its paws—checking for an expiration date? carb content?—and then stuck it back in its mouth and bolted down the tree and up the neighbor’s wooden fence and away. I like that my tree is a favorite destination of the local critters. And yes, I know they’re just “rats with fur,” but they were smart enough to take the “cute” evolutionary path, so I’m fine with that.

The weather is turning cooler, but I love it, and I’m eagerly anticipating the first downfall… oops… Freudian slip… snowfall. Everyone—and I mean everyone—thinks I’ll change my tune around about February or March, when it’s still cold and the snow has degenerated into dirty slush. But I don’t really care. I’m home.

And what does Pookie have to say about all this? After several months of travel (three road trips between California and Wisconsin/Michigan), strange motel rooms, strange houses containing rival cats and a couple of dogs, and a lot of disruption on the home front, Pookie is starting to trust that we have at last reached our final destination. I don’t like the sound of that—final destination—but let’s face it, where am I going to go from here?

So, to back up a bit, in early May I made the pilgrimage east to spend some time with my peeps. It was a working vacation: I stayed with Barb and edited a book called The Bacterial Chromosome on her dining room table. I wanted to find out if I could really live here, or if I had romanticized the idea of home and family on my previous visits. Going into the experience, I had no idea what it would bring or how it would end. But I understood that it wasn’t about “deciding”—lists of pros and cons clutched in fist—but about “finding out.” Process painting has served me well.

Unbelievably, my old friend P agreed to drive me and Pookie all the way here in her Lexus SUV. I wasn’t willing to take Pookie on an airplane, and I didn’t think he’d enjoy hitchhiking (no opposable thumb, for one thing), so driving was the only option. P lives in southern Oregon now, so it was an extra day’s drive for her. As we were loading up her car in my carport, trying to cram Pookie’s carrier, litter box, plastic sheeting, towels, water and food dishes, and the big lug himself in the back seat so our suitcases and my reference books, work files, office supplies, radio, and laptop could go in the cargo area, P said, “Why didn’t you bring Pookie up to my house for the two months and fly out from Medford?” I just looked at her. Brainiac that I am, I had never thought of that. So basically, the 4-day drive, plus another 4 days for P to get back to Oregon, were not strictly necessary. But I was glad we did it that way.

The trip itself was uneventful—unlike our big move in the early ‘70s, when we drove from Maryland to California with a dog and a cat in a U-Haul truck towing a VW and had many adventures ranging from a tornado to broken windshield wipers, a flat tire, and a close call with a motel sign (OK, so I hit the sign). On this trip we were fortunate to have good weather instead of the tornados and floods that came a couple weeks later. P stayed for 3 days, and, happily, she and my peeps got along great. But when she was leaving to begin the trek back home, I felt like I was being abandoned. Suddenly it didn’t seem like such a great idea to camp out in Barb’s spare room for two months and attempt to replicate my work and financial life in every detail, waiting for my future to reveal itself.

For the longest time, I didn’t know how Pookie and I were going to get back to California. I figured that if worse came to worst, I could rent a car… a big car. I had a target departure date of early July—I figured that was ample time to decide if I wanted to move. Most people said I should make one more visit, in the dead of winter, to see how I really felt about the place. But I brazenly (and I hope correctly) announced that I didn’t see winter as the big drawback that everyone else did. If I have to eat my words, so be it. But I ordered some cool (warm) clothes and boots from Lands’ End, so I should be fine. [Insert knowing laughs of family members reading this.] I bought a snow shovel the other day, too, and talk about knowing laughs—everybody blows around here. I have a lot to learn about living in the northland. (But this just in: the Northern lights. Wow.)

Anyway, I knew that something would come along to get us back to California, so I put my desire out into the “universe” (of my male relatives): “Gosh,” I’d say, “your Ford F150 truck with the snarling grizzly bear decal that fills the entire back window would be just the thing to drive out west.” Nearly everyone around here has a truck or two, so I seriously thought that someone would eventually say, “Hey, I was going to get a new one anyway—take this, and God bless.” No one did. But one day MP called to say that the Ford dealership where he works had just gotten in a used ’03 Jeep Grand Cherokee Laredo (do you think it has enough names?) and would I like to take it for a test drive. By then I had realized that I should buy a car rather than waste money on a rental. My ’89 Honda wouldn’t be much good in the U.P. winters anyway. So I bought the JGCL. Barb enjoyed teasing me about it: “Sure, I spoil my cat LaMew, but at least I’ve never bought him a car!”

One day, several of our peeps were over at Barb’s house, and Barb pointed to all the F150s and Explorers parked out front and said, “Looks like Ford Country around here.” I quipped, “I guess that makes me the black jeep in the family.” Ha-ha.

(Note that I have not yet rationalized my sudden endorsement of SUVs. But I cannot deny it: an SUV got me here, and another would take me back, and then back here again. I am comfortable with the fact of life that four-wheel drive is an absolute necessity in these parts.)

Living with another person in a chaotic household was a challenge, but one I mostly enjoyed. Little children and grown-up (30-something) children were always coming by to borrow a ladder or bring some spaghetti for our supper or install window fans or see what Grandma had in her refrigerator. I had a short working day, because Barb would get out of school at 3:00 and bring Summer and Sarina (8 and 4 years old, respectively) home to wait for their parents to get off work. Most of our mealtimes had to fit into someone else’s schedule. I’d wake up from a nap at 4:00 and Barb would announce, “Oh good, you’re up—we’re having supper at Brian’s in 10 minutes.” As a teacher, Barb works predictable hours, but most of the others do shift work, sometimes with mandatory overtime. So I had to be the flexible one, because I could work any time, unlike factory, shipbuilding, and retail workers. One day nephew Josh came in and saw me working at the computer, and he shook his head: “Must be nice.” (Summer was impressed, though. She said when she grows up, she too wants to have a job where she’ll “never have to leave the house.” I’m not sure I’m being a great influence.)

When Sarina and Summer were there, I’d be trying to work on a chapter about E. coli or a paper on pediatric cardiac surgery while they watched the ubiquitous reruns of “Sister Sister” on the Disney Channel. I’d turn around occasionally to see who said what or to ask if the mother and father of the separated-at-birth twin girls were going to get married. I sometimes paid more attention than the kids, who often fell asleep in the recliner or played with dolls from the toy box or (in Summer’s case) helped Barb grade spelling tests.

So my real work and alone time had to come after midnight, when Barb had gone to bed and it was just me and Pookie downstairs, eating snacks and listening to iTunes on headphones. Well, Pookie didn’t use the headphones, but he would sit on the back of Barb’s couch and look out the window at… well, nothing, because it was completely still out there. When I was visiting the previous summer, I didn’t understand how Barb could leave her drapes open at night, with the lights on so anyone could see in. At home in my condo, I was always barricaded, blinds down or cracked only slightly to let in some daylight or fresh air, constantly aware of movements and noises outside. So feeling safe was a pleasant change. Sometimes I stayed up until 6 a.m.—another reason (vicious circle, really) why my days were so short, because I’d sleep in until 10:00 or so.

I really enjoyed the kids, though, especially Sarina, who had blossomed in the year since I had seen her last. She was less shy and had become a talker, so would ask me endless questions about what I was doing. For some reason she was dying to know the password for my laptop (one day, she crowed, “One of the letters is an ‘n’!”) One morning when Brian came over to fix Barb’s washing machine, I invited Sarina to come along on my daily walk to the Mobil station to get coffee. It took ever so long to get there and back, what with Sarina looking at every leaf and bug, and cautioning me not to walk in the road and to look both ways when crossing, and I had to figure out what sort of drink to buy for her, not knowing the ins and outs of children’s beverages of the 21st century. We finally settled on some sort of Kool-Aid concoction with cartoon animals on the box and a top that only a child could open. On the way home, between asking if we’re almost there yet and bragging about how much juice she’s drunk, Sarina asks, “Aunt Mary, can we go for another walk?”

Barb and I, sometimes with K and MP, spent all of May and most of June driving around, looking for For Sale signs and checking out neighborhoods in both Marinette and Menominee. I’d say to Barb, “This is weird. I’m looking for a house and I don’t even know if I want to live here yet.” I didn’t want a three-bedroom ranch-style house, and I didn’t want a 100-year-old “charmer” that hadn’t been renovated since aught-whatever. But I believed strongly that finding the right place to live and “choosing” to move would go hand in hand. One day I remembered listening to the Eagles (a guilty pleasure) on iTunes the night before and singing along with “…I’m allllllready gone… and I’m feeeelin’ strong,” and it hit me. I was already gone! The “decision” had been made!

My fantasy dwelling was a house or condo on the water, but none of the ones I saw said BUY ME—or they said BUY ME IF YOU DARE. A house on First Street was practically in the bay it was so close, but the inside of it looked like no one had stepped foot in the place since ‘89…. 1889. I seriously considered a five-bedroom house down the road from Barb’s that had an asking price of $118,000 (!). It had Flower-Power-pink carpeting, horrible orange-patterned tile kitchen counters, and no appliances, but I loved the open-plan, all-vinyl-floored upstairs—the closest thing to a loft I figured I’d ever get. I alternated between thinking, “Am I crazy?? FIVE bedrooms?,” and “It’s the only place I’ve seen that isn’t a stuffy, cramped old-lady’s 2BR with orange shag carpeting.” Summer immediately loved the big house—she lives across the road from Grandma Barb so would be a close neighbor to me also—and announced that it would be fun, “We could sleep over all the time.”

Whenever we went driving around, looking at possible properties, Barb or K would say, “Oh look, there’s a fenced-in yard for Pookie!” And I’d say, “I already bought him a car, I’m not going to buy him a house!” And yet, that’s exactly what I ended up doing.

I wasn’t quite ready to commit to the Lincoln White House (well, it was on Lincoln St. and it was white…), so I looked at a few more places. I had an agent sending me fact sheets from the multiple listings service, but this is how a small town really works: Barb’s sister-in-law lives down the street from one of my former English teachers, who died this year. She had heard that the late Mrs. T’s daughters were going to put her house on the market, so she arranged for Barb and me to see it first. It seemed like my dream house—on Henes Park Drive, right on the bay, with a cedar-paneled studio, a large back porch, three bedrooms, all in immaculate shape. It seemed appropriate, somehow, that I could end up working in Mrs. T’s beautiful studio with its built-in bookcases and desk. It’s true that I was far from her favorite student, being kind of a smart-ass in my own quiet way, so there was a tiny part of me that wondered if her ghost would haunt me for taking over her beloved house. It was a moot point anyway, because they were asking over $300,000 for it. Technically, I could have afforded it, but I wanted less mortgage, more nest egg, so I let it go.

By this time—mid-June—I was beyond idle speculating and really wanted to find a house. It would be a lot easier to sell my condo and finalize moving plans if I had somewhere to come back to besides Barb’s spare room. And yet, I felt I was asking for the impossible: to find “the perfect place” that would cinch my decision to move away from my “almost-perfect place” in the Bay Area and give up all the perks of living there—the weather, the beauty, the restaurants, the gourmet take-out….

2000 miles I roam… just to make this block my home…

And I found it! It’s close to Mrs. T’s, and though I’m not right on the water, it feels like the perfect spot. Barb and K and I fell in love with it right away, despite the fact that it’s huge. (The sellers, with their two kids, wanted to downsize; it was a minor scandal among some folks that I was buying such a big place for just me.) There was much humorous speculation about Barb and K moving in with me. (Also, MP wants to live in the big downstairs bedroom, and nephew Brian wants the garage.) After we had toured the place for 15 minutes, I told my agent that I wanted to make an offer. (Barb claims she saw the woman’s knees buckle.) She was happy to present the offer to the sellers but informed me that she could no longer represent me, because her company was the one listing the house. She said to consider her “the same as the seller” from that point on. And so I descended into Real Estate Hell. I had no way of knowing if the asking price was reasonable, and I had no information about the history of the house. The agent swore she couldn’t tell me anything, that I’d have to “do my homework.”

The house was listed for $169,000, and I offered $165,000. The owners’ counteroffer was $167,000, the standard “split the difference” in bargaining. But Barb and I had gone to city hall in the meantime to see what we could find out. We ended up meeting with a really cool woman who’s the city assessor. Jill took an interest in me and loved the fact that I was moving back here from California. She was impressed with my work and the fact that I’m an “artist.” (Yes, I used the “A” word; it saves time.) In fact, she wanted to hook me up with someone from the local paper to interview me! I said that all my clients live elsewhere, but at least I would be spending my hard-earned dollars at Schloegel’s and Jozwiak’s, so I’d be contributing to the local economy. What she said next really astonished me. She said, “There’s also something about a soul coming home.” I couldn’t believe that came out of the mouth of a tax assessor! She told me to “be brave” and stand firm on my offer, because “no agent in her right mind” would advise her clients to turn it down. She later followed up with a phone call to Barb to see if I got the house, and even left a message on my home phone in San Rafael. We’re going to have lunch together soon, and I’m hoping she will have forgotten about the newspaper interview by then.

I also want to mention another cool woman I met. Actually, she was the first one who made me realize that not every smart person who’s born here grows up and moves away. Heidi is the bank manager at a Wells Fargo branch in Marinette, and also my personal banker (first one I’ve ever had). She’s extremely helpful, and I trusted her immediately. She has a very dry sense of humor and reminds me of the comedian Paula Poundstone, so we have lots of laughs when I stop in to see her. When I was mistakenly charged a service fee two months in a row, I called her and she said, “I set it up so you’d have to call and talk to me once a month.” We’re having lunch next week. Who knew I’d be hobnobbing like this?

OK, it’s time to start making this long story shorter. The agent was amazed that I wouldn’t back down on the price. But Jill was right: the owners accepted my offer just in time for me to leave for California on July 5. Pookie wasn’t too thrilled to be on the road again, but Barb had decided to ride back with me, so she fussed over him and we all survived the trip—in my case, barely. At a motel in Oregon, I fell OUT of a bathtub. It was the oddest sensation. The tub was slippery, I lost my balance, and before I knew it I was falling through the shower curtain, hitting the toilet with my right shoulder, flipping over, and landing hard on the floor on my left side. I got a massive, colorful bruise out of it but wasn’t otherwise hurt. But I can still vividly remember that feeling of “Nooooooo…..” as I flew out of that tub like a slippery bar of soap.

When we finally made it back to San Rafael, Barb stayed for only a few days, because she was anxious to get back to LaMew. (All the women in my family have the cat gene.) I gave her a quick tour around San Francisco one afternoon—through Golden Gate Park, past UCSF, through the Castro, the Mission, past the painting studio and some of my former apartments. Then she flew back home and left me to put the condo on the market and get ready to move.

I had my work cut out for me. Fortunately, I had a great agent—the antithesis of the one here. With the help of Connie, her partner Fletcher, and Julie the “stager,” we got the place looking pretty good. P happened to be coming down to the Bay Area the next week and spent two days helping me pack. The hardest part was having to keep the place spotless for 9 days in a row, and take Pookie off somewhere while agents and buyers were looking the place over. Usually I would drive to the civic center and park by some trees and read for a couple hours. Pookie had become quite accustomed to riding, but he did look at me strangely when we made these little jaunts and never even got out of the car.

The day after the open house, I got four offers. I met with Connie and Fletch to hear the details and almost fell off my chair when they told me that one offer was $27,000 over asking price, for a grand total of $425,000. The prospective buyer had no demands and was, in fact, offering to buy it as is—no worrying about the bars on the back windows or the sluggish garbage disposal, though I disclosed everything but what I’d had for breakfast that morning. I was so relieved when the buyer’s financing came through and it was a done deal. I then had to arrange to have all my furniture and stuff packed and shipped to Michigan. Barbara and Jean helped me pack dishes and other fragile items, for which I was grateful. I made several trips to the dump, the movers came, I put in a change of address at the post office, and took to the road again… just me and Pookie this time. I went the northern route so we could stop at P&C’s in Oregon. I was so exhausted from the move that we ended up staying for more than a week; it was bliss after all that lifting, hauling, and bending. My body is still sore.

The trip back was uneventful—no bathtub accidents—but horribly tedious. Achhh…. I never want to do that again. It took five days, and Pookie and I again bunked with Barb while I waited for the Fourth St. people to move out and the movers to show up with my stuff.

Once I moved in, the real work began. I had remembered unpacking as “the fun part,” but my memory, as they say around here, is good but it’s short. I was still getting editing work, which I had to fit in between the gazillion things on my to-do list. And of course nothing was simple—it felt like two to-dos forward and one to-do back… and much to-dos about nothing. I had to arrange for lawn care, get the locks changed, have the furnace checked, and start up cable, high-speed Internet, and phone service. I had to get a driver’s license, register the Jeep in Michigan, get car and homeowner’s insurance, and pay off bills from the condo. I’m still trying to get settled and catch up on everything. Every day I have to ask myself… Do I clean the garage or make another stab at installing Mac OS X on my computer? Do I prepare invoices, buy lamps and a rake, or assemble the kitchen island? From the trivial to the mundane and back again—when all I want to do is curl up in my big red armchair and do the New York Times Sunday crossword, while the red and yellow and orange trees out my window whip themselves into a frenzy.

On her days off, K would come by early (like, before 6 a.m.) to paint my bedroom, loft, and kitchen. She’s here again now, painting the living room and dining area. She wants to get to the downstairs bathroom next. The former owners had decorated the whole place in country kitsch, including a (fake) Christmas tree in every room and Christmas trees hand-painted on the bathroom walls. With K’s help, I’m gradually making the space my own.

One of the highlights of my week is on Friday nights when Barb, K, and MP and I go out for fish fry. You can only get not-frozen lake perch around here one day a week: the supply ain’t what it used to be. We could go to the VFW or various taverns for this ritualistic event, but we always go to Pat and Rayleen’s, a little family restaurant on Highway 41. We always have the same waitress, and she always remembers what we like. We laugh and carry on like we’re the only ones in the place, but just about everyone there is a regular, so there’s lots of yelling across the room and joshing with the waitresses and other customers.

It’s fun to talk about old times and trade memories and dispute versions of long-ago events with people you’ve known all your life. I still don’t believe I was part of a conspiracy to throw Barb’s Raggedy Andy doll up on the roof… but for me, being back here isn’t about nostalgia; it feels more like time travel… like Back to the Future—“Where we’re going, we don’t need…. roads….”—except that the trip was taken in real time, and I didn’t have to change anything in the past to make the present acceptable. There are enough of the old-timey places—the decrepit deserted gas stations, hulking gray asphalt-shingled early 20th-century bleak houses, defunct department stores put to new uses (mostly selling “antiques”), taverns that haven’t changed one iota since I was born, old factories that look like something out of a novel by Zola, Mickey Lu’s BBQ and Jozwiak’s bar, Henes and Red Arrow parks, the Interstate, Menekaunee, and Hattie St. bridges, the smokestacks and historic lighthouse, and the grand lumber-baron mansions on First Street—where I get jolts of remembrance that take my breath away. But at the same time, I can hardly believe that the past is well and truly—madly, deeply—gone, and I can weave the old and the new together—like the old neighborhood with its all-nouveau riche residents—into an adult haven. This is not your father’s Menominee-Marinette.

This year was the first time I’d been home for my birthday since I turned 17. Barb, K, MP and I went out to our favorite “occasion” restaurant, a roadhouse-style supper club in Peshtigo called Schussler’s. It’s a very friendly place—one big happy family, whether you know the other people or not. The first time I walked in, I felt right at home. There’s a bar with a lovely bartender who makes a Cosmopolitan as good as any I’ve had in the Bay Area. After the first one, I complimented her and confessed my snobbish California assumptions about midwestern libations. She was gracious about it.

I had decided to open my birthday presents in the bar, because it’s festive and I like to spend time there before being seated in the dining room. I had no idea there would be so many—I had already seen the oak storage cubby they’d given me back at the house. The presents kept coming and coming, and soon they covered one whole end of the bar. Everyone who came by remarked on how “someone must be loved.” At first I was embarrassed, but after about half a margarita I was holding each treasure up to be admired by the crowd—the bar was now filling up, despite the fact that it was only 5:00. After a delicious steak dinner (never thought I’d eat steak again) we drove back to K and MP’s, all four of us singing along to the radio—the Beatles’ “We Can Work It Out.” A sweet sound and a sweet feeling.

Faith-based initiatives? The destruction of the World Trade Center was a faith-based initiative.
—George Carlin

I must say, the politics up here leaves something to be desired. Even though Michigan and Wisconsin did end up in the “blue” column, billboards touting the pro-life-except-when-it-comes-to-the-death-penalty-and-war-and-innocent-deer agenda are rampant. My favorite: “Unborn babies are Americans too.” So Iraqi, French, and Chinese fetuses are actually American citizens, at least until they’re born? Wouldn’t that be a good argument against war? Think of all those unborn babies that will die! And shouldn’t we be championing the unconceived as well? Those that do not exist are Americans too! These people seem to think that the separation of church and state was the result of some horrible misunderstanding on the part of the Founding Fathers that must be corrected by any means necessary. They’re starting small, according to one sign: “Jesus Christ Is Lord Over Menominee County.” Today, Menominee! Tomorrow, the rest of the U.P.! But seriously. The separation of church and state was originally meant to guarantee freedom of religion: Let a thousand beliefs bloom. Not Christianity über alles.

There is so much more I want to tell you—did you know you can buy a salami in the shape of a beer bottle with a Pabst Blue Ribbon label on it?… have you ever seen a pickup truck with a shield that runs across the front of it with the words SCRAMBLED EGG or OLD GUY?—but I feel like I’ve come to the end for now. Working on this issue sporadically over the past several months has felt like trying to be cautious at an all-you-can-eat buffet when you’re starving. Too much too soon can lead to indigestion. I’ve only started digesting this amazing experience of returning to my roots after years of insisting I was beyond all that. It’s one of the secret pleasures of middle age, that life can still surprise and delight—it isn’t about sitting around waiting to die, as we all think when we’re young. To me this whole journey has been a lesson in the limitations of the will. Far from not being able to go home again, you can repudiate your birthright with what you think is every fiber of your being—and it can still come back to claim you. The will has the fiber. But Being is made of sturdier stuff—the Spirit. That’s the lesson, I guess, in a nutshell. But you’d better grab that nutshell while you can, because there’s a squirrel down the road that thinks its name is written all over it.

Postscript

It’s so beautiful here—less spectacular than the Bay Area but rich in color and texture, fresh air and water, and very quiet. The fall colors have mostly… fallen… but the sunsets are awesome and the lake changes color daily. Last Saturday was as warm as a spring day but with a hint of burning leaves in the air. Brian and Josh came over to replace the framework around my garage doors, so while they worked on that, I hauled out the redwood-and-metal 6-foot cross I had made in California and dug a hole in the back yard to stand it up in. I caught a whiff of something I had been dreaming of for years: the smell of the earth in this part of the world. Places near the ocean have their own good smells, but I like this one the best. I breathed in deeply, feeling rejuvenated by it, taken back to the times when my cousins and I would make little holes in the soft spring earth and shoot marbles, or build hills with roads on which to “drive” our little cars. It felt oddly satisfying to be working outside. I replaced some nails and screws on the cross and got it stabilized in its hole with bricks I found in the basement. I had convinced my nephews to accept money for their work (going against a long family tradition), because I felt it was mutually beneficial. I needed those damn garage doors fixed, they needed the money, and if they didn’t do the work to my satisfaction, I could always sic their mothers on them. K came by in the afternoon and put my new mailbox up for me. Then we sat on the back steps in the warm sun and talked. Blessing upon blessing upon blessing.

[Mary McKenney]

Cherries is the word I use to describe…. (I have a feeling this issue is going to be full of in-jokes. Take what you can and leave the rest.)

Well, it’s been quite a month or two in Lake Ibegone. First I be gone to Wish/Mich for 10 days, where I had the best vacation ever, and since then I be gone in my head trying to figure out what’s next. My whole world has been turned U.P.side down.

didn’t expect a miracle

You may recall that when I went back to the U.P. last fall for my brother-in-law Skip’s funeral, I rediscovered my family. (Funny, they’d been there all along.) To refresh your memory, here are the main players: my sisters Barb and K; K’s husband MP; nephews Brian (and wife Deb), Josh (and wife Jana), and Mike; niece Lorraine (and husband Aaron); and great nephews and nieces A.J. (8), Cody (2), Summer (7), and Sarina (3).

To come into this acceptance of family at my age seemed like a miracle. I have spent my entire adult life in a gay family circle—my ex-partner is as much family to me as anyone I share DNA with—but I had always downplayed the importance of the blood connection. Now I have to admit that seeing myself in Barb’s face, and having a long, strange history in common with her and K, even though we experienced the family in distinctly different ways, does feel special. The primeval feeling of the place where I grew up, on the shores of the Green Bay of Lake Michigan, adds to the miracle of acknowledging my attachment to that chain of life. I won’t go so far as to describe myself as the prodigal daughter, but I left home at an early age to make my way in the big world, and now I’ve come back with my “fortune,” which will someday benefit my sisters’ progeny and their progeny, and so on and so on. Someday they will be saying, “Boy, that great-aunt Mary really was great!”

My mother always made a strict distinction between blood and non-blood relations. When Lorraine (Skip’s daughter from his first marriage) was much younger, she went to hug my mother, who said, “You don’t have to hug me, I’m not your real grandmother.” I think Lorraine was scarred for life, but then so were the rest of us. For me, blood doesn’t really enter into it, except as a starting point.

So I was looking forward to going back for a longer visit, preferably one that didn’t include a funeral. I expected to have a good time, but what I didn’t expect was another miracle.

back from a future

I arrived on a Thursday night, and it wasn’t until a week later that I got around to taking Barb’s big purple truck and tooling around downtown Menominee by myself. I especially wanted to visit Spies [pronounced Speeze] Public Library, where I had spent many happy hours reading and conjuring a future for myself. In the children’s room I had read every adventure story they had, and when I was allowed upstairs in the adult section, I read every book I could find about girls at college, a world I desperately wanted to join.

The library had changed, of course. There’s a new addition and a new entrance, and the children’s room, instead of feeling underground-cozy down a flight of marble stairs and through a dark anteroom filled with glass cases displaying Indian arrowheads, an ostrich egg, somebody’s old bones, and pictures from the bygone logging and shipping days, now has big windows that look out on the boats in the marina. It’s appropriately modern and cheerful, and there’s a computer for looking up books. Except for the Hardy Boys, I couldn’t remember any titles or authors, just feelings I got holding certain books—books about deep-sea hidden treasure, or the Black Hawk Indians, or a boy who ran away from home on the back of a great bird. Unfortunately, librarians  have not yet figured out how to catalog books by feeling. Subject, Title, Author, Thrill, Desire, Aching Loneliness.

The display cases are gone, and there are no longer any dark rooms. My old haunts have been spruced up and brought into sync with the future. I don’t begrudge the changes. The past is continually being remodeled—razed, amended, reinterpreted. I had hoped to find an artifact, a long-lost book that I wouldn’t remember until I saw it again, but instead I felt that I was the artifact, the bridge, rooted on both ends of a space that seemed to encompass all time. I felt perfectly synchronized, in tune with my pastpresentfuture—oneword, onereality. And I realized that when the present aligns with the past—when there has been a complete exploration and acceptance of what brought you to this moment—then the future is aligned also. It’s like a lock that slides home and holds fast. Anything that happens from now on happens on that same continuum, because you are the continuum. I’m done defining myself in opposition to everything I experienced as a child. It’s all One. And it’s all good.

In the marina, dozens of boats are bobbing gently in the water. The bay is a rich, dark blue. It’s a beautiful sunny day, not too hot yet, and I inhale the fresh air with pleasure. I’ve always described the sky in my hometown as overcast and oppressive, like raw space curving right before your eyes into a bell jar every bit as confining as Sylvia Plath’s. So this feeling of freshness and possibility in the air is invigorating. Gee, when did everything change?, I wonder.

As I stand there, taking everything in, I feel surrounded by and deeply connected to this completely familiar, old-new place that seems surprisingly benign, considering how I had demonized it when I was aching to leave. Although my sisters and their families live over the river in Marinette (WI) now, it’s Menominee that still touches me, that makes me want to drink in (or drown in) the miles-long stretch of bay. The ocean is impressive, but it’s too vast for me to feel a part of. The bay that laps along the edges of my hometown and its twin city, the watery horizon that was so important to my dream of leaving that earthbound institution called the family, has a deep hold on me. Its little whitecaps on a windy day are dearer to me than the biggest surf in the Pacific. My “lake sisters” DH and KM will know what I mean.

Both Menominee and Marinette seem more prosperous now, although well-tended ranch-style houses with monogrammed awnings and cute flags and weathervanes on the front lawns still sit next to 100-year-old boxy two-story Scandinavian-immigrant houses with gray asphalt siding and rotting porches. The ubiquitous taverns are one-story gray asphalt boxes with no windows, sparkling on the outside with neon Old Milwaukee beer signs, dark as pitch inside and unchanged since before I was born. I kept wishing I were a photographer so I could go back and document the decay, a.k.a. history, of the place. Many of the buildings that housed thriving businesses when I was a child are now boarded over, torn down, or turned into something else. Meyers’ bowling alley, St. Ann’s Catholic Church, Niemann’s IGA, and the Gateway Cafe (where I had my first independent social outing in the 7th grade, having scrounged up a dime for a cherry Coke) have been demolished to make room for McDonald’s, Subway, Taco Bell, KFC, and Jiffy Lube. I know it’s a cliché to even mention the march of time, let alone the march of corporate America, but that’s each generation’s old fogies’ job, to miss the old and diss the new. Someday today’s kids will wish Wal-Mart hadn’t been replaced by wireless shopping pods installed in their foreheads at birth.

In short, I found the whole area to be comfortable with both its well-being and its decay. Or maybe I’m the one who’s become comfortable with my well-being and decay. Very possible. Very possible, indeed.

If my mother were reading this, she wouldn’t like the fact that I’m on page 3 and am still writing about buildings. When I was back there for a visit some 20 years ago, I went around taking pictures of the taverns, boarded-up gas stations, crumbling buildings of no known provenance, and other peculiar Midwestern old-country architecture that reminded me so much of the 1940s, in which I had spent the first years of my life. I always knew there was a reason I’m attracted to industrial areas, the railroad tracks and smokestacks and tall machinery framed against a blue sky, the Fuel & Dock and ships coming on the great waters and leaving perfect black and white pyramids of coal, ore, and salt. Back then Mom complained that I wasn’t taking any pictures of people. But I knew what they looked like, I wanted to have a record of Prescott foundry, Tiny’s Tavern, the Koffee Kup Cafe across from the train depot, places my father worked, drank, or hung out.

I’m spending a lot of time thinking about the place itself because I’m considering moving back there. (That’s the miracle, thank you for your patience.) For 30+ years I’ve considered the San Francisco Bay Area the only place in the world I’d want to live. But in my ruminations about the old and the new, and the lake so blue, I was stunned to realize that it would be an entirely different experience to live there as an adult, compared with when I was wriggling to get out from under Mom’s thumb. I can conduct my business anywhere there’s computer capability, and I would have a greater choice of housing for much less money than I could afford where I live now (I want to bring my inflated Bay Area dollars and Californicate the U.P. housing market, just as they’re doing up in Oregon). Most important, and the whole point really, I could bask in the glow of being part of a close-knit family system but retain my independence, or try to, by announcing over and over again that I don’t like to be dropped in on. That, or I may come to like it. Expect another miracle.

I just realized I hold two opposing beliefs: (a) that there are endless possible pasts and futures, endless “me’s,” and (b) that I was meant to live exactly the life I’m living now. If that life moves in the direction from which I came, it will feel like my destiny, ironic but true.

Yes, the drawbacks are legion. The winter. The summer. The lack of world-class restaurants and California farm produce. The lack of my favorite radio stations. The lack of large independent bookstores. The distance I’d have to travel for painting intensives and to see my Left Coast friends. But there are a few things there that I will never have anywhere else…

• bombing down the road (oops, “25 [mph] in town,” cautions Barb) with my sisters, singing “We Are Family” (“I got all my sisters in me….”);

• hopping on the back of Barb’s all-season John Deere tractor, this time lugging picnic supplies instead of blowin’ the snow doncha know, across the road to Barbaraland to roast wienies and marshmallows with my peeps;

• sitting in a comfortable lawn chair sippin’ on a Mudslide, watching two muscley dudes build a deck on the front of K and MP’s house while K watches their every move and demands perfection—and MP says to the guys, “Don’t ask me, she’s the boss”;

• hanging out on the new deck later that night, drinking only water or Fresca but gettin’ jiggy wid it when MP brings out the boom box and turns up the oldies station and we get up/get down and boogie to “Baby Love,” “Think!,” “Heard It Through the Grapevine,” “R-E-S-P-E-C-T,” “Sugar Pie Honeybunch”…. I’m transported back to MSU at the height of the Motown era, how lucky I was to have Aretha and the gang as a soundtrack to my debauched college life…. But we really get down with the Village People. Oh to have a videotape of me and my sisters in a chorus line, facing the dark street, singing to the night as we shape our middle-aged bodies into the Y the M the C and the A, right out there on the front deck, no railing yet so it’s like a stage, on the corner of a tree-lined street, kids coming by and dancing to our beat, other kids mooning us as they skateboard down the street;

• staying up late with Barb, each of us playing Bejeweled or Spider at our separate work stations, singing along to the radio until 3:00 in the morning, talking about anything and everything between periods of companionable silence. I couldn’t remember a particular time when I cracked up at Barb’s antics, so I asked her. She replies,

There were 2 times when I left the room and we laughed about things. One time I had changed into my nightgown and came in dancing King Tut style. At this you cracked up right away. The other time you were standing facing the printer dancing and I put on that Patriotic Cat in the Hat hat and was dancing behind you, waiting for you to turn around, and you finally did….

• going out to breakfast with whoever calls first (everybody works different shifts at their factory or car dealership or welding job, so the shopping or rummaging or eating-out group is constantly changing), meeting K and MP, sometimes Josh and Jana, at Pat and Rayleen’s (a little family restaurant on 10th St.) for bacon and eggs, staying in constant touch throughout the day on cell phones, Brian stopping in to drop off some mattresses he had to move out of his in-laws’ place or to cut Barb’s lawn, Josh and Jana wanting K and MP to go with them to see some modular homes, so we all troop over there and the salesman says, “I see you brought the whole herd!” As we move onto the lot to look at model homes, Barb emits a quiet “Moooooo….”

surreal i can taste it

I had been practicing driving Barb’s truck, so on the Monday after I arrived, I take ‘er out for my first solo run, over the Hattie St. bridge past the old paper mill to the Menominee airport to pick up KM, my friend and coworker from the University of Michigan/Graduate School of Business Administration/Bureau of Business Research, whom I hadn’t seen in over 30 years. Her husband Don has flown her UP in his private plane to have lunch with me and to see how the other half (of the state) lives. I take her (with many fits and starts—I keep thinking the brake is a clutch) to Pat and Rayleen’s where she has a burger and fries and I have more bacon and eggs. (Don’t they say that there are no calories when you’re on vacation?)

I am aware, as are all people who are growing older, that my reality has too many layers.
—Jon Carroll

After lunch, I take KM on a tour of the area—she lives in the woods downstate but fantasizes about living on Lake Michigan, so I show her the house on North Shore Drive where I lived from age 0-7. I stop outside, hoping the man whose face we see briefly in the window will come out and invite us in. (How weird would it be to stand in the rooms in which I experienced so much early trauma and joy?) But he doesn’t come out, he’s probably calling the cops, and then KM looks up and sees a Cessna flying overhead and it’s her husband! He’d said he was going to practice landing and taking off (or vice versa, I suppose), so he’s following the shoreline and, I don’t know, it hardly qualifies as serendipity let alone synchronicity, but there is something so delicious about all these different realities coming together in the same place—the adult me and the child me with the friend of 23-year-old me looking up at her husband in the sky with diamonds. I am immediately reminded of being 4 years old and telling a friend that I was going to Chicago to ride the “train in the sky” (the el) and she should watch for me in case we flew overhead. In that moment (and pretty much for the whole week) I felt like a living stratum of time, a future fossil that in the fleeting, eternal present encompasses all the layers of a life, all folding into one another in constantly changing forms, a kaleidoscope.

I drive KM around Henes (pronounced Hennis) Park to see the bay up close and then down the highway to First Street past all the grand old houses, built by the old lumbering and iron-mining families in the robber baron-slash-grand philanthropy days, and the beaches with wide lawns running down to them and the boats in the marina, and the library (built in 1903), the Menominee North Pier lighthouse (1877), and then across the Menekaunee Bridge, past all the bars I imagined Barb snow-blowing past last winter, and then, since we’re in the neighborhood, I show her Barbaraland (which KM later, in a typical flash of brilliance, dubs the Barbaretum) and bring her inside to meet my sister, who’s making bead necklaces (I seem to have gotten all the slacker genes in the family; home alone, I would have been taking a nap) and even drive her past K and MP’s house (they’re both at work) so she can see the new deck where we danced and sang the night away until it started pouring rain and I called my peeps pussies for going inside.

Then it’s back over the bridge again to Colonel K’s Pasties where we stop so she can take some of the nasty things home on the plane. She gets frozen ones (rutabaga [!] and beef) so we schlep up the road a piece to look for ice and a newspaper to wrap them in. Then back to the airport, where Don has been having a fabulous time trading pilot stories with the local flyers. I see their plane up close—it looks smaller than the purple truck!—and we hug and say our good-byes. KM e-mails me later to say they got home safe and that they’d had perfect flying weather both there and back. She pronounces the whole trip a surreal experience and I have to agree, though probably for different reasons.

When I get back to Barb’s, we pick up some sub sandwiches and head out to Porterfield to visit Lorraine and Aaron and the kids on their beautiful old farm with umpteen acres, yellow farmhouse with a red living room, donkeys, and a dog and a cat peeking out of different holes in the side of the 100-year-old barn. It’s the quietest and most peaceful place I’ve been in a long time. Not that their lives aren’t usually hectic, but on the afternoon we visit, the setting is the very essence of idyllic—visually stunning, with long green fields, the sun slowly setting, not a breath of wind and not a sound except for our own voices.

A.J. is shy, but he finally invites me upstairs to his room to show me his books. I take notes on what he likes and what he already has… the Magic Tree House series, Captain Underpants, Harry Potter. He thanks me many times for sending him books. He’s a big fan of dinosaurs but has branched out to race cars and now, according to Lorraine, plans to be paleontologist-slash-race car driver when he grows up.

I’ve known Lorraine since she was A.J.’s age. She’s smart, and I always assumed she would go to college. But to see her now, in her element, being mother, wife, farmhouse restorer, animal tender, hay baler, helper in Aaron’s workshop where he builds beautiful furniture, makes my heart stand up and holler. You ask, whither the family farm? It’s hither. Between the two of them, Aaron and Lorraine are the Jack and Jill of all trades. (Aaron also works fulltime in a foundry.) Sometimes Lorraine seems apologetic about her life, as if I must think she’s not living up to her potential. In high school, her vision of the future was to “go to college, get an M.B.A., and move out to L.A. and hang with Motley Crue.” Now she’s got a sweet husband, two kids and a bunch of animals, with plans to get some cattle and chickens, restore the master bedroom, rebuild the barn and other outbuildings, and make the furniture business self-sustaining. I am so happy for her.

On the way home, Barb and I discover we’re both hungry again (quel surprise!) so we stop at Perkins on 10th St. for a chocolate malt. We feel like naughty kids, sneaking away for a late-night treat. (The joys of middle age are life’s best-kept secret.)

every day packjam

I’m moving all around in time here, so let me back up a couple of days (BEEP BEEP BEEP). Looking back at the notes I scribbled at the end of each day—bare-bones reminders of where we ate, what we did, and who we saw [sometimes my notes are too bare-boned. I jotted down my sister’s K’s hilarious comeback, “Thanks, but I need my ass” without noting what prompted it]—I’m amazed at how much we packed in. I don’t know what we did more of—talking, laughing, singing, eating, or shopping. Usually, I was just “there,” but many times I stepped outside myself and drank in the sweetness of the moment. I knew this trip was going to be special when MP was driving Barb, K, and me north through Oconto after picking me up at the Green Bay airport. Oldies were playing on the radio, and we were all singing along—MP contributing the “ooooooooo” high notes (prompting me to wonder, Why is singing falsetto so satisfying?). I don’t remember which song it was, but during “The Sounds of Silence” (“Hello darkness my old friend”) or “I Will Follow Him” (“wherever he… may go…”), I look out my window to the west and see the red sun blazing as it slowly disappears below the horizon. It’s like having a dream come true, but a dream I never knew I had…. the blessing of being part of a loving family…. of seeing “family” as a positive force instead of an albatross of guilt and obligation. It’s partly a bond of blood, but the bond of history and shared experience, the bond of respect and love are just as important.

On the first full day of my visit, Barb, K, MP and I go out for a fish fry (deep-fried lake perch) at Pat and Rayleen’s (they should give me a free lunch for all this publicity). Sitting there with my peeps, anticipating my long-awaited supper (I had planned my vacation specifically so I’d be there for two Friday fish fries), I’m feeling a deep sense of comfort and freedom because we’re at the top of the heap now, no parents to worry about and appease. So I say that it’s nice to feel like equals, there’s no pecking order. K turns to me, and in a voice that rings throughout the restaurant says, “And you’re the oldest pecker!” We all burst out laughing. I am, indeed, the oldest pecker of them all.

One day we drive out to Riverside Cemetery to see Skip’s headstone and to visit the future site of my “ash-condo,” as I have dubbed it, next to Mom, Dad, and brother Mike. Friends have expressed surprise that I don’t want to be scattered over the bay or something, but I’d just as soon stay contained for as long as possible.

On the day of our picnic in the park, we have to stick around the house to wait for the fire marshal to come and bless the big metal half-tank Barb uses as a fire pit. She spends the time cooking and cleaning while I nap. Later I drive us over to Angeli’s for Barbie-que supplies and to a liquor store for Mudslides, White Russians, and ice. Around 5:30 we all start gathering down in the park, spray each other with Off, and then pig out on hot dogs, salads, beans, fruit, and chips. A sizable portion of the clan is there: K and MP, Brian and Deb, Deb’s brother John, Lorraine and Aaron, and the four kids. MP and I compete for custody of the deviled eggs (let’s just say I get as many as I want). The kids find a snapping turtle in a dirt pile and take it down to the creek, but not before K brings it over to us for closer inspection, eyeeeuu!

In due time, the grapes become projectiles in the hands of kids and adults alike. I try to get Summer to tell me what kinds of books she likes, and she claims to read “everything” (she’s 7). Deb reminds her that she likes fiction better than nonfiction, and Summer exclaims, “Fiction is amaaazing.” Deb says that when Summer writes about her family in school, she always includes “Great Aunt Mary.”

When we (and the mosquitoes) have eaten our fill and it’s getting dark, Brian stays behind to be sure the fire is completely out, and the rest of us go back up to the house. A.J., Summer, and I perch on the back of the John Deere, watching so the ice chest doesn’t fall off, while Barb drives. “The adults” try to find room in Barb’s two refrigerators for all the leftovers while A.J. and I sneak away to the computer room where I supervise his game of Dino Defenders, which he can’t play at home because their computer is “broken.” (Or at least that’s what they’re telling him.) I’ve never even seen a computer game in action before, so it’s kind of intriguing to watch him learn the commands as he goes—the object is for the main character to trap or kill a series of ferocious dinosaurs, but the learning curve is steep and A.J. keeps dropping the guy off a cliff into the river, at which point he has to start over. After about an hour of this, I’ve seen enough to last me a lifetime, but now Cody has come in and wants to sit on my lap and watch. He’s brandishing a green sucker that gets alternately dropped on the floor and stuck to my shirt. Cody says “Da” whenever A.J. has to start the game over. He’s consistent, so I know it must mean something to him, but I have no idea what. A.J. is so grateful for the chance to play that I let him continue until Lorraine comes in to say it’s time to go home. He of course tries to wrangle more game time, saying he just has to trap one more dinosaur (he’s clearly stretching the truth), so Lorraine and I talk while A.J. tries to get his guy over the river, again and again, aiming for the woods where all the dinosaurs are. I’m amazed at his patience.

One evening, when we’re on our way over the bridge to have burgers at Jozwiak’s tavern, we come up behind a large bus. It’s not a regular tour bus on the way to an Indian casino, in fact it looks like it could be a rock’n’roll bus. On the back window are several M&M stickers—I mean the little candies with arms and legs and big M’s on their chests. I don’t dare hope, but… could it be? Would the real Eminem please stand up? please stand up? I can see it now. The great M is heading for an appearance up north—to Marquette? Superior? Houghton? Canada? Somehow I can’t imagine him using the M&M candy logo, but a gal can dream, can’t she? Once I’ve imagined him on the bus, it’s no trouble at all imagining him tooling down Hwy 41 and spotting the big painted letters on the side of Jozwiak’s building—“BBQ and pizza”—and stopping in for a coupla Wabashes, thinking he’s safe from his legion of fans—because who would know him in this rinky-dink town? So he’s chillin’ in the back of the tavern with his roadies, talkin’ about their loves, their losses, whatever rock’n’roll guys talk about, and suddenly who should appear but this big ‘ol middle-aged dyke with blue spiky hair and a Berkeley t-shirt, her “herd” close behind her, whooping it up because oh my GOD, it’s YOU. What UP, Em?

At the turnoff to Jozwiak’s, the bus keeps going straight. I sigh at the abrupt termination of my fantasy, and we go in and eat our burgers while watching a very drunk old man try to make it from his bar stool to the door.

The next morning, Barb and I, K and MP, and Josh and Jana tour modular homes, check out a few prospective lots, and then head up the highway to Seguin’s cheese store so I can get some goodies to mail home to P and C as thanks for feeding Pookie while I’m gone. We’re in there for a long time, because I’m agonizing over what kinds of cheese to get. I’m drawn to the ones in the shape of a cow or Wisconsin, but I don’t think my friends are as enamored of that novelty as I am. I finally settle on some Gouda, extra-sharp white Cheddar, and baby Swiss. I throw in a package of Wisconsin beef summer sausage and some fudge from Mackinac Island. I arrange for the shipping and then join the others in browsing through the tourist merchandise. I buy Barb some earrings for her birthday, and K and MP buy bracelets (MP wears his all the time now, even to work, where he gets teased by lesser men than he). I find a nice canvas cap with M (for Michigan, for Mary) on it. On the way home, we stop for Perkins’ malts again.

That night we’re sitting out on the new deck when “little Mike” calls. He hadn’t made it up for Father’s Day because of some trouble I don’t fully understand. MP talks to him for a while and then hands me the phone. We’ve had no contact for 12 years. I’ve been holding on to an image of him as a sweet kid of 14 who wanted to be around me all the time, who was really funny and smart. Now, of course, his voice is unrecognizably adult, he’s had a bad marriage and a couple of kids and is going through a divorce. The Mike I knew is no more. After some awkward small talk, I decide to just put it out there. I say, “I really want to see you, to see if I can find the sweet and innocent ‘little Mike’ I remember. Are you still sweet and innocent?” He laughs flatly and says, “No… but Josh is.” We say we’ll e-mail each other and I give the phone back to K so she can say good-bye. I’m really sad. I feel like I’ve gained one nephew (Josh) and lost the one I thought I had.

Later, MP and I are sitting out on the deck alone. He asks if Mike and I had “a nice chat.” That starts me crying, and I just shake my head no. He’s quiet, waiting for me to speak. I tell him about the phone call and say that I always thought Mike had so much potential. MP agrees, and we talk about him and Josh and about MP’s hopes for them both. Later, he asks Barb if I’m OK, because I had been crying. This isn’t the brother-in-law I thought I knew. There’s a lot more to him than “the baddest guy around.”

MP is notorious for not liking to be hugged, so I don’t ambush him like I used to (and like my mother used to), as if imposing bodily contact on someone is delightfully sneaky. But one night as we’re leaving, Barb and I hug K, and then I look at MP all the way across the room. As a joke, I put my arms out as if to hug him and the whole room at the same time, and then he does the same. We both laugh, and I feel that we have found a compromise both of us can live with.

But what really surprises me is when MP talks about wanting to have a recommitment ceremony with K. When they got married originally, my mother made all the decisions. She moved the ceremony back to February from June, because she assumed that K was pregnant. (Their first child didn’t come along for another 2 years.) She chose the church (hers), the colors (she had Barb wear her prom dress, so everything had to match that), and, believe it or not, she even chose the best man—Barb’s boyfriend at the time. I assume that they managed to consummate the marriage without her help, but that was about all they had control over.

By the way, I asked MP if there was anything he wouldn’t want me to say about him, and he said to go right ahead. He may be regretting those words right about now.

I’ve encouraged them to have another ceremony, and I promised to come out for it anytime, even in the dead of winter. I offered to be his best man, but MP didn’t jump at the chance. Now get this. There’s no love lost between MP and his family—he’s the fourth of 12 kids and was physically abused by both his father and his older siblings. So he’s talking of changing his name to McKenney. I don’t know if he’s serious, but his even suggesting it says a lot. My baby brother who died was named Michael. He was 4 years younger than me; MP is 5 years younger. I know he can’t really be my brother, but I like the idea of his being a kind of grown-up representative or reminder of the Michael I barely knew and deeply mourned.

On Thursday, while I’m off having metaphysical insights at the library, Barb and K bake me cookies to take home—Barb makes the chocolate chip and K makes the peanut butter. I should have protested, “No, no, no, I can’t possibly eat any more,” but I was salivating so much that I couldn’t get the words out. Barb also bakes a cherry pie, because the three of us have discovered it’s our favorite dessert. We eat it Friday after another round of birthday shopping.

My last meal is a fish fry, of course, back at Pat and Rayleen’s, of course. Afterward, we drive to the lighthouse pier and walk all the way out on it. We can see across the water to Red Arrow Park in Marinette, so we go there next. We sit on a park bench above the beach and talk and watch some kids who are splashing around in the water. Barb calls Lorraine to leave her a message, and we find out later she couldn’t understand a word of it because we were all laughing so much.

It’s time to wrap it up. We stop by Josh and Jana’s, because Josh has taken half a day off work so we can say good-bye. Brian tries to convince me to stay another day so I can meet his other two kids who are coming for the weekend. Lorraine shows up at Barb’s at 7:00 the next morning to say good-bye. MP has to work on Saturday, so K drives me and Barb down to Green Bay to the airport. As we’re heading out of Marinette, we pass the dealership where MP works. K suddenly beeps the horn and says, “Hey, Michael’s out there!” By then we’re past the place, but I stick my hand out the small window opening and waggle my fingers in his direction. Knowing approximately when we would be passing by, MP had come out to wave to us. I think that says a lot, not only about the family connections, but about the scale of the place.

back to a future

A year ago I could not have predicted and would not have believed that I’d seriously consider moving back to the U.P. (or across the river and through the woods to Grandma’s house in Wisconsin). There are advantages to small-town life that are easy to overlook if you’re used to living the life of a sophisto-cat…

• You can get anywhere you’re going in 5 minutes and park right in front.

• Once you get away from the shopping malls and fast food joints, there are many pleasant neighborhoods with trees and lawns and wide streets and friendly people. If your brother-in-law knows all the police on a first-name basis, so much the better.

• It’s pleasant to live at a slower pace. Here in San Rafael, though my life is as slow as I can make it, I expect catastrophe at any moment. Part of the slowness I felt back there was from being on vacation, but more than that, I felt safe in the bosom of my homies.

• If you don’t have to work at a dirty, low-paying job, and if you have computer contact with everyone else in your life, including clients and bookstores that do free shipping, and if you got most of your traveling and sightseeing and club-hopping out of your system back in the ‘70s, then the down-home life is just fine. The key is money. Most people who get more money will try to swim upstream into a higher class, but they will never feel completely at home there.

• Ambition in a small town (if you’re not in the echelon who want to be judges and mayors) consists of making a decent wage, buying a house, and supporting the kids in the style to which they would like to become accustomed. If you’ve already done all that, your cost of living will be way low. There’s no concern about status except perhaps in the doohickies you choose to put on your vehicle (I saw a pickup that had been covered with newspapers and shellacked), a status system to which I am impervious.

• You feel physically more comfortable there, because a dress code is virtually nonexistent. and no one cares if you have a bad hair day. As long as you’re not a kid or trying to get into an exclusive country club, you’re pretty much free to be, you and me. Hardly anyone mentioned my blue hair, except when all three of us became the Blues Sisters for a day. A lady in an antiques store asked if this was a new trend, and we told her we were trying to start one. We said we were sisters having a good time together, and as we went giggling out of the store, she said she could see that.

• If you want to see people, they’re all within a very small radius. You grab your phone on the way out of Shopko and call to see if K and MP want to go out for lunch or to a movie. Or Brian calls on the “bag phone” in the truck to see what’s up, and you decide to have a picnic in the park. I don’t know yet what you do if you don’t want to see people.

• Here is a very big thing, that I value more as I get older. If you need help, you got it. People will get out of their beds in the middle of the night and come over to give practical or moral support. If you need a ride, a paint job, a lawn mowed—anything up to and including a calf birthed (I think I’m kidding)—your peeps got your back. And they got you, babe.

home again

It was nice to get home (to Calif.), but it wasn’t that “inhale the fresh ocean air and kiss the ground” sort of feeling I used to have after getting back from a visit with Mom. I had been thinking about Pookie all week and anticipating our joyful reunion. When I came in the house, I called his name and there was a long silence…. then a plaintive little “mew.” He came creeping down the stairs as if he couldn’t believe his eyes—she’s back!!!! I think he was traumatized by all that alone time. He got back at me by being very aloof for the rest of the day. But when I vacuumed the next morning, the familiar, hateful noise must have reassured him that we were back to normal, because he warmed up to me after that. Now he likes to sit with, I mean on, me when I’m at the computer. I can’t reach the keyboard when the big lug is sprawled across my lap, but I can use the mouse to play Spider or Forty Thieves while I’m listening to “Loveline.” Life, she is sweet.

home again?

For me, “back home” has become a phrase that no longer denotes a direction. I went back home. Now I’m back home. But should I move back home?

At first I thought the idea of moving was just an idle fantasy born of a fun vacation in perfect weather. And maybe it is. But the idea refuses to go away. It’s not that I’m unhappy where I am now—au contraire. My cup runneth over—but somehow it doesn’t seem to spilleth. One cool, sunny morning, I sat out on my patio, working on a manuscript from Italy about TREM (triggering receptor expressed on myeloid cells) and watching Pookie roll around in the oleander blossoms, and I felt expanded, not divided. My life here is ideal in many ways, but there’s one big thing missing. Barb and I are in daily contact by e-mail, but it’s not good enough anymore. I want to share my life, not just run it by remote from my command post, the computer.

Call me crazy, but I fully expect not to have to give up anything essential—of my essence—to go UP. There will be plenty of trade-offs, I know. I’ll be blowin’ the snow with my sis in tow, or vice-a-versa while I shiver and curse-a. I’ll be screamin’ and kickin’ for Yu Shang’s chicken or Chevy’s fajitas and margaritas. I’ll be like Hawkeye on M*A*S*H* when he wants a BBQ bash and calls Kansas City, askin’ for delivery. At least I’ll have the Internet, you bet.

But I can’t just UP and move, I’ll want to spend a couple months there on a “working vacation” to try small-town life on for size. If I go sometime in the fall, Barb will be teaching and I could attempt to replicate my work life using her PC. The problem is Pookie—and her cat LaMew. How would I get Pookie there, and could the two male cats coexist? LaMew is much smaller and has a shattered front leg from getting shot by some a-hole neighbor several months ago. (He gets along amazingly well on three legs—LaMew, not the neighbor.) Would Pookie take advantage of the wounded rival, or become the big pussy he really is and hide behind the couch the whole time?

For a while, Barb and I were e-mailing feverishly back and forth, trying to work out how I could come this fall and how we would accommodate Their Two Royal Highnesses. She made it clear that her casa be mi casa and that she would welcome me with open arms. That reassurance is better than insurance.

Finally, I decided I would have to drive there, but it was out of the question to make the trip with Pookie in my two-door Honda Prelude. Maybe after 1,000 miles or so, he would realize we weren’t going to the vet, but I really don’t think it would be pleasant for either of us. Could I rent a van? I half-jokingly asked P if I could borrow her RV, and she said “Sure.” Suddenly, Barb and I were making real plans, including her flying out here and driving back with me! We figured we would let the chips (and the cats) fall where they may.

I think it would be a blast to take a road trip with my sister, but if we did it this year she would have to get back in plenty of time before school starts on August 25. So she would have to come out here in a couple of weeks! I went into a quasi-panic, almost calling my therapist J to beg for help in making my decision… but I already knew what it was. I wrote to Barb:

I’ve been thinking about our Crazy plan, and I think I have pinpointed just exactly what is Crazy about it….. One plane trip (yours) and two cross-half-country road trips (1 for you, 2 for me) accounting for more than 16 woman-days (if I did the math right) of hot, tiring travel with the lingering aroma of urine and feces…. why?…. to accommodate a CAT, albeit a beloved one. Not knowing the reception said CAT will get at the other end is nothing compared to all that slogging back and forth.

Just as suddenly as it began, the whirlwind subsided. We had talked about knowing when the time is right, and that includes knowing when it’s not. I still feel a strong urge to be there, but that will have to remain a dormant impulse for now. Maybe I’m gonna wash that vacation right outta my hair, or maybe it will all come together in 5 years when my mortgage and Barb’s mortgage are both paid off and we have some financial elbow room.

******
I’m having a hard time finishing this, because there’s no real ending. The Wish-Mich-or-Bust plans resurfaced when J asked me if I had a friend who would be willing to drive cross-half-country with me and then fly back. I said, “Well, P has said she’d like to do it,” and there was this big silent DUH hanging in the air between us, and I admitted, “I never thought of that.” So I checked with P later, and she has her hands full this fall, what with retiring, packing for the move to Oregon, going to Tahiti for 2 weeks, stuff like that. But by spring she should be Free To Be, Her and Me. Then I could have my 6-week working vacation while Barb is teaching, and maybe a short real vacation when school gets out. The possibilities are morphing daily, this way and that, the kaleidoscope is spinning, and if this were a movie you’d be seeing calendar pages flying off to indicate the passage of time. The scene that follows is still a mystery. All I know is, I’m going to follow my heart. Pookie will just have to deal with it.

[Mary McKenney]