Beautiful Granddaughters!

Exercise in Gratitude

Fixed to the floor and fastened nearly forever
to five uniform black and chrome seats,
"you" face "Gate 7" for more than human lifetimes.
You are sat upon by manifold types and sizes
of people who foul your surfaces.
But like earth you are not horrified or humiliated
by a chocolate smudge or crumpled candy wrapper.
Blessings to you, airport terminal seating.
You are the last best chair for me, a weary traveler.
You are a safe firmament before I take flight
into the unbounded realms of uncertain air.




by Randy Evans

Harbor Springs Boat Trip

What to do in a nursing home...

We visited my father-in-law in the Providence Memory Unit in Zeeland, Michigan (get the "zeal" in Zeeland) this past Sunday, and we attended the church service with a guest preacher who was a senior at a Bible College.  His text was Colossians 1:9--"For this cause we also, since the day we heard of it, do not cease to pray for you..."  A woman stands next to us and looks at a chair, and says, "I've heard a lot of good things about this chair," and sits down. The preacher comes in and shakes everyone's hands, and a recently "saved" Latino man hands out hymnals.  We sing two gospel hymns, and then the sermon begins:  "You all know more than I do about all of this, but being saved by Jeeeezus, is like cannin' green beans.  Once that jar is sealed, how long are the green beans good for? (Man answers, "about a year").  They are good foreeeeever! You are seeeeealed by the Lord!  Ameeeen! And once you are saved, when your body dies, you will go to Heaven, and when the Rapture comes, in 1/165th of a second, you will be taken bodily out of your graves in a blink of an eye--if you are saved (at this point, my father-in-law asks to be excused for a bathroom break).  Nextly, we need to ask ourselfs, what can we do here in this nursing home where you all don't do anything?  Why, you can pray--not so much for yourselfs, not so much for your families, because everyone prays for their families--you can pray for other people like your pastors, people who do things.  So while you're here taking it easy, you need to make intercessory prayers, and you need to pray for our country, because our country is in a whole lot of trouble, and you have to do it with desire, fervent desire, you have to desire what you are praying for--Ameeeeen!  I know that we all have to do this for ourselfs, because my prayer life is a battle with Satan, but what I am convicted by is that prayer mooooves the Hands of God.  You have to believe this 'cause it's biblical, and if you are saved, this life here in this nursing home is the closest to Hell you're goin' to git.  So pray for people who are doin' something, since you all have a lot of time in this nursing home.  Now let's all sing the closing hymn about Calvary--Jeeeezus, Jeeeezus, Jeeeezus.  Ameeeen!"  My father-in-law missed most of the sermon, because he was doing something.

Victoria's Window--Chapter Three

Chapter Three

Victoria’s Arrival

Victoria drove her Honda Element up 31 North through Traverse City, Elk Rapids, Charlevoix, and Petoskey.  Compared to the limited views from the factory windows of her rented flat, a million windows opened before her along the roadway--little shacks and stone cottages, cherry orchards, fruit stands, roadhouse restaurants, white-framed farmhouses and barns, small towns and roadside parks, the infinite glitter and gleam of the Lake Michigan shoreline--scenes of life experienced in far different ways than her own.  She looked through her rear view mirror at a farmer riding his tractor in from a field.  She thought, “How does he see the world?  How does he measure what is going on before his eyes?  How does he think the world ought to be?   How does he assign guilt or innocence?  What does he think of this little burnt orange vehicle passing him by?”

The two-way highway occasionally widened to passing lanes, and along the cinder berm deer lay every so often, dead, hypnotized by headlights then compressed and exploded by the hard rubber of tires and the metallic impact of a car or truck.  White crosses marked the spot of human accidents covered over by weeds.  Victoria thought, “I have been a slow-to-act person my entire life.  I would have stayed working at that mill until I retired had I not been laid off.  I tend to under-react.  Is that what killed these people and animals, not being fast enough, smart enough to do something about what’s coming at you full speed out of a dazzle of light?”

As she headed north out of Petoskey towards her father’s home on the Crooked River, she saw a marina on the western edge of Crooked Lake.  She stopped to see if there was a pontoon boat that she could rent for a week, and that way she could make a “grand entrance”-- arriving at her father’s place by water. She also thought that since she had not visited her father for over a year, she had no idea what she would find.  The house boat would give them both their own space.

 While she was in the marina office, the afternoon sky darkened, and rain started to pour down.  The temperature dropped ten degrees in just a few minutes.  She noticed that all the rental boat slips were filled, and asked if the small house boat at the end of the marina docks was available.  It was about 25 feet in length with an aqua-colored sliding board at the stern next to a 60-horsepower outboard.  On top of the three pontoons, a white squarish cabin sat like a large ice cube--it was a cross between a meat locker and a beer cooler--something that would have burnt her cheeks with embarrassment in her adolescent years.    On the outside of the cabin, a large-lettered sign advertised, “Rent Me” with a phone number.  It reminded Victoria of her Honda Element that she had affectionately nicknamed, “Lunch Box.”  Scratchy saw the boat as a giant litter box.  At least they both would be out the weather; neither Victoria nor Scratchy were nuts about baring themselves to the wind and rain.

When the dock boy came up to Victoria with his clipboard, he did not know he was dealing with a former quality inspector.  Victoria wanted to make sure her deposit was refunded, so she found scratches, cracks, and other flaws in the boat for the record--a crack in the outboard engine cowling, paint nicks on the gelcoat, gouges in the bumpers, a faulty microwave, and many more notations--the boat had been well-used.  Finally, she cast off and followed the channel markers in the lake to the entrance of the Crooked River.  After negotiating both a lock and a swing bridge, she was on her way.  She had kayaked to her father’s place some years ago, so she knew the bends in the river.

The ancient Inland Waterway was created when the last great ice sheet retreated from what the native people called Lake Algonquin 10,000 years ago.  Victoria entered the waterway at its southeastern edge near Lake Michigan at Crooked Lake.  The Waterway then connects through the Crooked River to Burt Lake, through the Indian River to Mullett Lake, and finally through the Cheboygan River to the town of Cheboygan on Lake Huron--about 48 miles of woods and marshes across the "Tip of the Mitt" of Northern Michigan.  This was a major trade route whereby the early people could travel by canoe and avoid the harsh wind and currents of the the Great Lakes.

Victoria sat in the captain’s chair in the cabin just off of the bow deck.  There were no windshield wipers, but she could crane her neck and squint her eyes enough to see where she was going through the rain.  Her large round brown eyes worked slowly and methodically over the seascape as she kept looking for the next green channel marker.  

She saw a bald eagle with a huge fish in its beak coming in from the big lake, two minks playing in the shore rocks, and a lone fawn in the marsh by the river with its head turned back towards the woods that bordered the marsh.

As she gently turned the wheel from left to right and back again, she said to herself, “What is this that I am doing?  I feel primitive moving through this meandering flow of water.  I don’t know whether I am floating or sinking, leaving or arriving, and if one or the other, am I floating, sinking, leaving, arriving in a place or a state of being?  I feel like I am dreaming and waking inside one of those gray clouds above me.  Am I seeing with my eyes or with my imagination?”  She cycled in and out of a trance-like state as she progressed, at one moment in full sensory awareness; in another, seeing with her imagination.  She was physically and figuratively going around bends in the river.  “I’m going through an experiment right now,” she thought, “something like I did with materials in the quality control lab but without the controls in place.  Isn’t this interesting?  I wonder what’s going to become of me?”

Her awareness jolted to full alert as she saw her father’s cottage looming up quickly to her left.  She pulled the throttle down in sharp reverse, but not in time to avoid an abrupt landing into the side of the deck.  As the boat began to swing stern end out into the current, she saw her father appear just in time to grab the bow line.  She turned the propellers in towards the deck, and let the boat come back while Nick quickly tied the bow line to a post.  At last, he grabbed the stern line and secured  one of the ugliest pieces of watercraft he had ever seen.

“Since your life has to be so ungodly boring up here in the north woods, I thought I would drop in and bring you a bit of excitement,” Victoria yelled over the weather.

“You’re so right, sweet daughter,” he replied, “I have been just so bored, I’ve broken down and started doing charity work.”

“Is she part of your charity work?”  Victoria looked at Mindy as she limped out onto the deck.  Mindy looked like she had just been jumped on and injured by a large animal.  Her hair had come undone, and her blue eyes were watery and wide, bouncing between Nick and Victoria, wild and wary.  Her forehead looked cut, and her knees were skinned.

“Your father just jumped on me when your boat hit the deck,” Mindy said. 

“He does that once in while when something sudden happens.  It’s a left over from Vietnam.  He jumped on me once, too, when we were walking along a trail, and he thought woodpeckers were small arms fire,” said Victoria.

Mindy felt like everything was reversed.  Here were two truly bat-shit crazy people, and yet, she had to admit that she was the one who appeared to be insane.  It was the glitter of humor in Mindy’s eyes from this revelation that endeared Victoria to her at once.  She had no idea who this woman was or how she was related to her father, but she seemed okay.  As Victoria stepped off the boat, her big eyes blinking a little, she looked Mindy full in the face, gently gripping her arm, and said, “Let’s go inside and get acquainted--I’m shivering to death out here.”

And so these three began to talk into the night, a bit awkwardly at first, like roots reaching to grow into the rich, moist subsoil of the marsh. Other than their quiet voices on the deck by the water, the only sounds were water lapping against the moon-bleached rocks, and the rustle of wind through the reeds and snake grass.

By ten o’clock, Victoria had heard her father tell the story of his life to a woman that he had only known for a few hours.  He told the truth as she understood it, but he selected certain things for emphasis, and glided over topics that Victoria knew in much greater depth.  For example, in covering his career with the Navy, he described how much he wanted to be a Navy Seal, and how rigorous the program was.  He did not tell Mindy that his two tours in Vietnam involved working with the CIA to track down American deserters, and in some cases, kill them.  He did not mention that for the last ten years of his career, he wore a pony tail and did sexual harassment training for the Navy and Marines.

When Mindy asked Victoria to tell her story, she opened her window of self-disclosure more widely than usual, and slowly removed the flimsy protective cocoon that she used for self protection.  “I was the middle child in our family.  We were always moving around when father was in the Navy, and then settled in West Michigan when I was in high school.  My parents argued about money a lot.  My mother grew up with money, and liked to have a lot of nice things that we couldn’t afford.  My father would do most anything for her, but things weren’t all that easy, and I always felt like there was a thin line running through our family--between getting by or not getting by, between getting along or breaking up the family.  So when we all could, we left.  Ruth Ann got a scholarship, studied drama in college, and then married a cattle rancher in Texas.  Jim joined the Navy out of high school and was killed in Afghanistan.”

“So you wanted to be on your own and be independent,” remarked Mindy.

“Yes, so I went to work for this paperboard mill after high school.  I got myself a loft apartment in an old factory building, and I would still be there if they hadn’t laid me off.”

By the time it got to Mindy’s turn, it was pushing midnight, and everyone agreed it was time for bed.

Nick said, “Victoria, you don’t need to sleep on that boat.  Why don’t you take one of the bedrooms down the hall, and Mindy, I think you should stay over.  I’ll set you up in the boat house loft so you have some privacy.”  So Nick helped Mindy out of the house and up the boathouse stairs, gave her fresh towels, a flannel shirt, and a chaste kiss on the forehead, an act that pleased Mindy so much, she smiled sweetly back at Nick, and said, “Thank you, handsome.”

Nick then returned to the house, and found Victoria already under a comforter in the smallest bedroom.  Nick said, “You probably wondered whether to come up here and visit me.  I’m glad you did.”  He also bent over to kiss his daughter, but she placed her hand on his arm, and said, “Father, tell me a story like you used to when I was a young girl.”

“What about?” Nick said.

“Tell me about the minks we saw playing in the rocks tonight.”

Without hesitation, Nick began.  “Mr. and Mrs. Mink live in a comfortable little den in the rocks by the river.  They are very busy because they have over six hundred children and grandchildren, but not so busy as the beavers whom they despise for being over-achievers.  Mr. Mink doesn’t work nearly as hard as Mrs. Mink.  He likes to hang out at the local Eagles Lodge for Minks, and takes many days off from fishing.  Mrs. Mink, on the other hand, is always busy, and only takes time once in a while to paddle her pink paddle boat down the river to visit her friends and relatives.”  

Just as when she was a child, Victoria was fast asleep before the end of the story.  Nick kissed her and shoved an old stuffed teddy bear under her arm that he had been saving for just such an occasion.

"summertime, when the livin' is eaaaaaasy"

My Creative Wife

Chapter Two Part 2 Victoria's Father

The large hall was filled with people of all ages, and Nick knew most of them in one way or another.  The children  were yapping and squabbling like dogs, the adults were trying to socialize and supervise the children at the same time, and there was a group of men congregating around a keg of beer in the back room.  Chuck made a beeline to the tap, almost falling on his face, because the linoleum floor was slimy with spilled food and drink.

“Hi, handsome!” shouted Mindy, a fair-skinned,  curly-redheaded year rounder who taught at the community college.  Mindy had a Ph.D. in psychiatry and religion from Union Theological Seminary in New York City, and had moved here to take care of her elderly parents who lived in a retirement home in Harbor Springs.  She had been divorced twice, the second within the past year, and she knew Nick was single and available--she did not know how available.  He certainly never went out of his way to mix with people, but rather seemed to crawl around in the protective colors of his environment out on the river.  She was surprised to see him at a fundraiser.

At the same moment that Mindy had turned to greet Nick, she reached for a piece of garlic bread straight from the oven, and recoiled as if she had touched a hot iron.  She had burned her hand, and she was embarrassed.  Nick reached out, and held her hand open for inspection.  He was adept at recognizing the severity of burns to the skin, and engaged her immediately in help, comfort, and conversation amid the noise of the hall.  Mindy was astounded by the focus of his attention to her.  It was if the two of them stood alone in solitariness, like two blue herons in the middle of a marsh filled with song birds. He seemed liked a bright sun, drawing powers within himself.  She felt dizzy as hell, and when she stepped back to sit down, she slipped on the wet floor, shoved her toe into the leg of a folding chair and felt a searing pain.  She turned bright red, laughing and crying at the same time, and fell to the floor.  Her attempt to openly flirt had quickly devolved into a first-class fiasco.  When she tried to rise, she fainted, then revived a few moments later to see Nick’s eyes a few inches from hers.

“ I think we need to take a look at your foot--if you broke a toe, there’s nothin’ we can do but tape two together,” Nick said.  “Let’s go to my place, I have a first aid kit.”  She nodded, and Nick helped her hobble out to the truck.  “It’s a good thing I had a pedicure today,” she thought, “but I think my foot’s going to look pretty ugly anyway.”  After she had been carefully placed in the passenger seat, Nick hopped in on his side, and pulled a checkbook out of the center console.  “Forgot one thing,” he said.  She watched him write out a check for $500, and then disappear back into the the hall. He also told Chuck that he would have to get his own ride home, and he didn’t like the insinuating smile that Chuck gave as a response.  

When they arrived at the cottage, Mindy had some second thoughts, but she still felt bowled over by him.  She looked around the interior of the bungalow. The living room looked as if it was in original condition with beautiful quarter-sawn oak.  Everything was so neat--much more so than her place.  The house had been ordered from a Sears catalogue in 1908, and shipped by rail to Boyne City, assembled on site.  The eight-room floor plan was named, “The Modern Home No. 125 ” ($1500 constructed). The middle of the house boasted a large living room with a brick mantel and open fireplace in front of a kitchen at the back of the house with a nook.  Two large and four small bedrooms were arrayed around the center, three on each side.  There was a 33-foot front porch, and a cellar.   The front of the house faced the woods, and in later years, a bathroom was added, replacing one of the large bedrooms.  Nick built a covered deck on the back that hung out over the river’s edge.  There was a boathouse next to the main house that had a second floor sleeping room and bath.  Nick had bought the house after he retired from his Naval career ten years earlier for about $150,000.

Nick invited Mindy to sit down in a Stickley rocker and placed her legs on a leather ottoman.  He pulled off her shoes, and examined her bruised and swollen foot.  “It looks like you broke your little toe,” he said.  “Let me get some tape, and a few Tylenol.”  He disappeared for a few minutes.  While he was gone, Mindy kept looking around the room, scanned the books in his bookcases, and checked the polish on her toes.  He came back with a warm, damp towel with a wash basin, and washed both feet, then carefully taped her little toe to its partner.  “We can take you in to the ER to have it x-rayed tomorrow, but this should do for now.”  He then left a second time, and brought back a bowl of cool water.  “Here, soak your hand for about five minutes, then I’ll apply some aloe vera gel.

So there they were in Nick’s living room, both thinking about “what’s next?” when there was a loud, dull thud outside, and the whole frame of the house shook.  Mindy had just stood up, and in an instant, she was on the floor under Nick.  He “hit the deck” as his body learned to react to incoming mortar in Vietnam.  So for the second time that evening, Mindy ended up on the floor, this time under Nick.  She felt the terrain of his body, and all the dreams, visions, and fantasies that close proximity to an attractive man’s body can configure in the space of a few seconds.

Chapter Two Part 1 Victoria's Father

A week before Victoria arrived, Nick Randall was standing on his deck watching two swans float by in the current.  The cold spring had finally given way to warmer weather, the steelhead run was over.  The pike and bass were spawning in beds under the lilly pads and yellow flowers sat on top blooming brightly in the morning sun.  He was one of the few year-round residents on a stretch of the Crooked River where mostly summer people kept old cottages.  The docks and boat houses that lined the river were mostly neglected with missing planks swept away by the fast-moving currents.  He was painting his small bungalow what he called, “the color of spring,” a light, pine green.  The day was opening humid, a feeling that he had not experienced since the year before. Soon the rent-by-the-day pontoon boats would begin floating by along with occasional bow riders, canoes and kayaks.

Nick was 64, a retired Navy Seal.  He liked being near water. He was so close to the water in this place that he could dangle his feet in the water from his deck all day long if he wanted to.  He swam in the strong currents each morning before breakfast to stay fit.  Early in the year at ice out, he pulled on a wetsuit, and used it again in the late fall, careful to avoid the many duck and deer blinds that dotted the marshes by the river.  

Early this morning, a friend had emailed him some specs on the new Navy triple-hulled pirate chaser, the USS Independence, “faster than any ship in the Navy.”  He nailed a photograph of the ship to one of the posts supporting the roof over his deck.  “Torpedoes, missiles, machine guns, and helicopters at 60 knots,” he mused, “enough to get me out of dry dock.”  The truth is, he and his widower neighbor, Chuck, an avuncular automotive retiree, had been “out of dry dock” the night before, all night.

A meth lab had been operating deep in the woods near state land for about two years.  The local police were aware of it, but did nothing.  “Around here sometimes relations affect law enforcement,” Chuck had said.  Chuck, also a Vietnam Veteran, helped Nick plan their project over a few weeks, laying in marsh grass about 500 yards away from the run-down shacks and barn that made up the complex.  They noticed several people coming and going, and recorded their observations until they established a clear pattern.  

“We can’t kill or injure anyone, either accidentally or on purpose,” Nick stated.  We need to get inside on the night we blow it up to make sure no one, not even a dog or cat, is inside.”  So on the designated night, the Fourth of July, while Chuck waited in the dark,  Nick fast-roped down inside the lab from a hole in the roof.  He struck one wooden match, and fifteen minutes later the night sky was lit along with the local fireworks displays. People could see the red glow from their blankets on the beaches of Harbor Springs and Petoskey, and the incineration could be seen on the south end of Beaver Island, over 30 miles away. Locals thought it sounded like a propane explosion, a common occurrence in the area.  

Nick’s cell phone went off about when he expected.  He was a volunteer fireman, and he scrambled into town just in time to ride out to a scene of his own creation. By six in the morning, he and his fellow firefighters were laying in the grass exhausted.  Local people came to see, arriving on foot, in cars, bicycles, and ATV’s.  Mrs. Johan brought coffee and donuts.

Just as Nick was finishing his first coat of paint midmorning, Sheriff Lassiter paid Nick a visit.  “We can’t prove nothin’, but I think we know what the fuck happened, and if you step even a little out of line ever again...my bet is that Chuck and you took the law into your own hands.  We had good reasons for keepin’ a watch on that operation without movin’ in--and you will see from the news, these were not locals...some very bad people come from downstate, and you’re I’m not clippin’ your obituaries out the Petoskey News and Review. Do you hear what I’m sayin?”

 Nick nodded, said nothing at first, and then after a long pause replied, “Yep.”

The sheriff jumped in the squad car to head back to Oden, but as he began to head out the long two-track road that led to Nick’s cottage, he said, “We’re having a spaghetti dinner fund-raiser next Thursday night at the town hall.  Joe Beckwith needs a new kidney.  I expect you and Chuck to be there, and write some big checks.”  

And so just like a priest assigning acts of penance to sinners, the sheriff told Nick how Chuck and he could absolve themselves of their transgression through charity.  It was as practical as taking rust off the fenders of an old pickup--the rust of sin polished away through an act of love, not exactly perfect contrition, but good enough for local use.  Nick had to admit that it was a truly stupid thing to do, and he did feel a bit contrite, but the winters were long in Northern Michigan, and Chuck and he had to have something to talk about during the long hours on hard water in their fishing shanty, pulling yellow perch through the ice.  After a black cigar and some nips of Irish Whiskey from their shared flask, this story would just keep getting better with age.

The following Thursday, Chuck and Nick showed up at the benefit supper.

Sheriff Lassiter greeted them at the door, “Well, it’s awfully nice of you guys to stop by.  We just ran out of spaghetti, but pizza’s on the way.”

Fireworks over Lake Michigan Photos by Mike Schlitt

Fourth of July Weekend

No Trespassing