Three Days in the Shop, and Wilbo Learns to Enjoy a Winter Walk Again, even Through a Cold Downtown Muskegon.

I remember my days calling a cab ride to work. I cabbed to work throughout the Winters of 2012 and 2013. During the warm months, I cycled six miles to work and six miles home, making me feel great if not perfectly fit. Cab days are back, alas, temporarily. It's too cold to cycle. My car has undergone repairs for three days, available Thursday, tomorrow. A brake hose burst as a brake job progressed, adding to cost & time. Thus, three days cabbing it has been my fate. Luckily, my mates at work won't have me taking the bus home or cabbing home, so we proceed from work to Pigeon Hill Brewing Company, a better buy than paying cab fare. The mates have each had a turn taking me to Pigeon Hill Brewing Company at then accepting a pint as a token of gratitude.

It was almost a year ago when I gave the cabs of Port City Cab up. Still, I know how to make sure there's a cab idling outside my door when it is time to get to work. I place a time call at 5 AM to Port City Cab, requesting a ride at my door by 7:30 AM. I reach the dispatcher who actually likes me and she can assign it right away because many daytime drivers pickup their cabs at 4:00 AM. It's worked two mornings in a row, a cab waiting just as I stepped of my porch. Monday morning, I dropped my car at the shop and a porter gave me a ride to work. He drove me to work and I marveled at how pleasant it was to sit cozy in a passenger seat and be driven.

Monday night, I enjoyed a walk in the cold, which is a plummy overstatement. Walking outdoors when the temperature drops towards zero is only comfortable when there's a business or two along away where one can duck. The Frauenthal Theatre had shut up its doors tight, Smash closed on Mondays. Fortunately, the Hackley Public Library had the lights on, illuminating its great halls and making stained glass windows gleam from within. So I ducked into the stone monument to literature for a warming, and I stayed until closing in the Julia Hackley room, writing and musing.

Third Street has a liquor store that stays open late, and as I walked towards it, I saw a man with a bag of ghetto groceries hanging in a bag on his left arm and griping a quart in his right, any source of food will do in a food desert. Fortunately, my destination stayed open until Ten in the evening, the newly opened space for gourmet, wood-fired pizza with farm-to-table ingredients, Whistle Punk. I had to walk briskly because even on a windless night my wool coat poorly sealed off my body's surrounding microclimate from the cold, heavy air. Arriving, I was gratified to take off that grey wool coat in a chamber furnished with wooden tables and counters, kept toasty cozy by a wood fired pizza oven. I ordered up a Timberbeast Pie, made awesome with mozzarella and chorizo sausage. I tasted Chorizo for the first time in a breakfast spot in Las Vegas, this Las Vegas in the highlands of New Mexico. And I never forgot this sausage fest of the Gods.

Painting by Danielle Burnside

— at Pigeon Hill Brewing Company.