If I recall correctly, Bethanie, the woman who once shared her life and home with Bill, loved to call you Olo. I was wandering into our Trader Joe's on northbound Woodward, just a skosh north of Eleven Mile Road, and there was Gabrielle giving Bethanie a huge hug with cheek kisses and all that. I wanted to say hello, and there was no choice. The two were embracing at the corner where Trader Joe's hands out free samples of pie and stir-fry, coffee and juice. So I patted Bethanie on the back and quipped, "Well, you don't have to give me one of those juicy hugs, but do say hello". Gabrielle saw who I was and she said, "Oh, it's you. I see you all the time."
Which is true. I've been in town for three weeks, and when I'm at Borders Woodward, she's in the yoga section reviewing books for sale. When I'm at Starbucks at 3rd and Main in downtown Royal Oak, she's sitting in the front window area on the new formal wing chairs, keeping conversation with another new man. When I pop into Vinotecca for a nice red off the by-the-glass list, she's sitting at the bar corner, talking over champagne with a different new man. I guess the only place I don't see her is on a date with me. After years of seeing her in town, I'm happy to have a pleasant acquaintance with her. Why screw that up with dating?
Bethanie demanded to know, "Where have you been, under a rock?" "Close, I've been in Virginia all summer and autumn". I don't mean that, but it's funny to say when I'm a Yankee who has returned to Michigan and to north of the Mason-Dixon again. Bethanie had no chubbiness left in her cheeks; she's taken on fully the yoga lifestyle. We went back to shopping, and we both checked out at the same time, shoppers and shopping carts lined up into the aisles on a busy Sunday. She didn't have many items in her shopping cart, so she must be living on Yoga and bottled water. I didn't think to say that Lolo sends her love from St. Genevieve, Missouri. I am sure the two would happily learn that you are ensconced in a lovely arts complex on Main Street, with a genuine community coffee house tucked underground, the very hub of downtown St. Genevieve. I wouldn't be surprised if a yoga class had started meeting on your enclosed porch now that the floor was clean and clear enough for yoga mats.
This morning, I was sitting in the Bean and Leaf, formerly the Sweetwater Cafe, and I spotted her tramping down the metal steps from that busy Yoga Loft on the second floor, her curly, abundant auburn hair enough for me to identify her. It's great drinking ones morning coffee downstairs from a thriving Yoga loft. It's similar to watching pilgrims entering and leaving a shrine except pilgrims don't carry rolled up yoga mats. The more advanced students hide the yoga mats in sling bags thrown over the right shoulder.
I've dropped into Bean and Leaf hoping to see Bill the wandering prophet, but three or four visits haven't found him there. Maybe he's taken a train ride to Santa Fe to live with his friends there, dispensing sage advice to new friends gathered around him in one of the plentiful coffee houses near the old plaza. I see folks from the earliest part of the 21st century who hung out with us at Caribou Coffee, now hanging out at the Bean and Leaf. Katrina, who does landscaping under the moniker "The Garden Guru", was studying her laptop screen and taking calls on her Blackberry this morning.
A year ago or so, Katrina showed up mornings at the coffeehouse with a bird she had rescued, a happy animal roosting on a bonsai oak tree she kept in a traveling basket, her friends capturing house flies to be snapped up by an eager beak. Today, she had a framed photo print leaning against a chair, a copy from the wall exhibit currently hung salon style on Bean and Leaf's walls. Katrina had accepted delivery today, at the coffeehouse. It's not ironic that she made the purchase. Katrina once hustled in downtown art, hanging oil landscapes and portraits done by friends on the walls of coffee houses, spaces now occupied by boutique retail.
Today, she's researching the purchase of wood stove; she's dismissed the purchase of a biomass stove that runs on shelled corn because she doesn't believe one can cook on it. Her plan is to move into a newly purchased cabin in a woodland far north of Detroit, another coffeehouse friend making the emigration onward from Detroit.
I'm fielding dozen of calls from men and women with job orders to fill. Job orders are broadcast by the same computerized means as real estate listings. Everyone has the same ones. I'm feeling a bit better about saying no to the ones that aren't serious enough. One recruiter in Florida had expected me to travel on my dime to an interview in Boca Raton. Payment for travel expenses sorts out the prospects nicely. On Wednesday morning, I enjoyed a cross-Michigan trip to a prospect located in a harbor town on Lake Michigan's western shore, expenses covered which makes driving by stark boles in leaf-naked woodlots relaxing. The prospect offered to pick up my dinner, and so I made south on the Blue Star highway, passing alas twin cities Saugatuck and Douglas, making for Fennville road. I had verified by calling ahead that Journeyman had open hours Wednesday. Journeyman has dining hours only from Wednesday through Sundays. Only fast food requires the gaucheness of serving meals to all comers 24 hours by 7 days, 365 days of the year.
On Fennville Road on that six mile stretch between the Blue Star Highway and downtown Fennville, there's a barn loaded with antiques and leftover farm equipment and implements. Passing it at 65 miles per hour, dark now fully fallen, I was surprised to see an open sign illuminated, and I slowed down and turned my car around. I had visit the barn in spring of 2006, eighteen months before. The owner has a side business in stain glass windows, craft supplies for amateurs and classes. He had once made a batch of possibly 5000 crosses from stained glass scrap, gifts he had set out on a hewn barn timber for anyone to grab. I had picked a cross made of two thick strips of cobalt blue and I had kept it on my coffee table. In the late fall of 2006, I had met a woman at Tom's Oyster Bar in downtown Royal Oak, and she had driven me home in her sports car, leaving mine on the street to be ticketed, perhaps. When we sat down on my couch, she picked the blue cobalt cross and admired it, but she refused to accept it as a gift. After all, we could go to a secret place on the western coast of Michigan to fetch another. In a few minutes, she explained, "I'm sorry. I'm sure you're really turned on, but all of a sudden, I'm really sleepy." And she fell asleep on my couch until it was time to drive to Royal Oak to pick up my car before the morning ticket police impounded it. I wanted another one of these powerful crosses, no matter the effect of that power.
As soon as I pulled up before the barn, the lighted word open turned off, and a man came out to greet me.
"I'm sorry. I'm always closed by now. I was just wrapping up a stained glass. You'll have to come back tomorrow."
"Sir, that's all right. But could you give me a stained glass cross? You can pick it out for me."
"Alright. There's only a few left."
And when he came back out, he handed me a three-inch high cross made of opalescent white glass, toothpick-thin strips fused together. I thanked him, and he made off in the dark to his house next door. He walked uncomfortably, a bit bent over. It's possible he had loaded the barn with summertime straw bales back in the days when agriculture was the only venture in Fennville, before the tourists came. I set the white cross into my ashtray as a reminder to not smoke, or at least to not smoke in the truck.
I had come to Fennville for the first time because of three attractions. First, there's a movie titled Secrets of Fenville, but that Fennville exists in a screenwriter's imagination. Second, during the goose festival, the Pere Marquette makes its only stops in downtown Fennville. I wanted to see all the stations of the Pere Marquette line. Third, I had a picture from the internet of the depot, but that building no longers exists. So as a dining car man I met on the Pere Marquette told me, the train blocks Main Street for ten minutes as five or six people from Holland get off. I went looking for the depot, unsuccessfully, after a tasting room visit to Fenn Valley Vineyard just northwest of town, on the western shore of Hutchins Lake. That's when I discovered Journeyman, almost next door to the Gebben - Gray Gallery. Arriving there at night in the middle of November 2007, first thing, I had checked the storefronts for Gebben - Gray, but Thirdstone Gallery and Framing Shop had taken over its space. Where the window lettering had read "Gebben Gray Gallery", the lettering now read "Gallery" in the lower right hand space.
I remembered a brilliant evening in early April 2007 when the gallery celebrated the opening of its exhibit of Kathleen Sullivan paintings. Sullivan had executed a series of paintings of people, clothed in scarlet silk robes, seeking health and connection in an imaginary Turkish bath, the viewer's need to identify the sex of her bathers denied by steam and robe. Twelve or more of these were hung for display, the most mysterious one on display in the street window. Dozens of faculty members from Hope College and Ox-Box turned out, and the guest were treated to roast almonds, assorted olives, French wines and Heinekens, tops popped by an extraordinarily handsome young man with Elvis sideburns and a genuine silver cowboy belt buckle. It didn't shock me when I noticed the name change of the gallery space. It was too sublime to last. Every art professor and painter attending the opening had made reservations for 8:00 PM, when the gallery exhibition was scheduled to end. At a restaurant featuring artisanal bread and cheese, locally sourced organic vegetables from the Black River watershed and grass-fed beef from local pastures, no one really had reservations at 8:00 PM anymore. But since Journeyman has a great bar serving western Michigan wines and Intelligentsia coffee, surely misery was held at bay that night by offerings of artisanal bread and Sonoma Valley olive oil and glasses of local vintage. When I left the gallery, I peered through the windows of the bustling restaurant and was glad that I had dined at Journeyman in the late afternoon, well before the gallery opening.
On that Wednesday in mid November, high winds were blowing through the wind-tunnel of Main Street Fennville, and two waitresses, beautiful woman also locally sourced, so to speak, were struggling with Journeyman's fallen street sign. I held the door as the two wrestled it indoors, but taking in the sign didn't mean the end of the evening. Surely overhead lighting was turned on, but all I remember were the reflected flames of the wood stove on walls towards the back and the candles on bar and tabletops.
Two interesting woman were sitting at the bar and I didn't see a table occupied in the place, so I asked for a stool two or three over from the twosome. The twosome were sharing a selection of cheeses from local farms and olives imported from Sonoma The first woman, Roberta, who had wrestled the sign indoors had waited on me back in Spring 2006, and I remembered she had feared cougar attacks as she ran along the Blue Star Highway. She lived with her husband in Covert, not far from the Palisades Nuclear Power plant, which had had a fuel-refueling and a license renewal pending that spring. The second sign-wrangler, Rochelle, had answered the telephone when I had called to see if Journeyman was open, and she is the one who asked for my order when I sat down at the bar. She knew all about the closure of Gebben-Gray, and she introduced me to Kristin Gebben, nearest of the seated twosome, who blithely offered to show me Sullivan's Turkish bath series again, should I wish. I grimaced, reflecting my current financial status, my grimace surely wrongly interpreted as disinterest, or worse, disenchantment and annoyance. When I dined on the slices of artisanal bread given as an appetizer, I eavesdropped on her discussing Theresa Gray's monoprints displayed on Journeyman's walls with the second seated woman, monoprints probably executed in Taos, Mexico. How can any one tune out an art conversation led by a person who gets art deeply?
When your life's journey finally takes one to Journeyman, order the soup before looking on the menu to see what the chef prepared that day. It is never a misstep. This November, he had prepared Kuri Squash soup seasoned with fennel pollen, and Michelle explained that the Kuri squash was related to the Hubbard squash. I wouldn't mind meeting some named "Kuri Hubbard" sometime, I quipped to her, hoping to make her laugh. Rochelle tittered, which is fine by me.
I had no idea what my prospect at the manufacturing plant would willing reimburse, so I reluctantly reviewed the menu for less expensive items, picking out the Chicken Galinade and the hot mulled cider from an orchard only a few miles away. The galinade arrived on a tapas plate, accompanied by a side of organic greens and fig sauce. The chef had spiced his galinade with walnuts and bacon, and no one could judge the serving as small when the flavor was so savory. I enjoyed it slowly. Sadly, I now had the bar to myself, with no more art talk for eavesdropping. I knew I could always find a McDonalds open along the road going south to Benton Harbor, where I departed for after my dining. It's impossible to depart quickly from Journeyman's atmosphere, and I ordered coffee with cream and made notes in my journal. Not suprising, the fresh creme had clotted nicely in the tiny porcelain jug delivered by Michelle.
And to sample my journal written at Journeyman's bar in my post-prandial bliss: Remember flattery must be lain on with a trowel or not at all. Take all your morning notions thought upon waking to one thousand words and then face the day. Can I drive close to Rush Lake in Hartford, Michigan without visiting the new casino of Simon Polkagon's descendants? Far worse than a bady drawn boy is a poorly remembered evening.
Don Quixote Jousted with Windmills; Wilbo Copes with Landscape, History and Memory
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