A Commonplace Life

We have a Save-A-Lot in town. Save-A-Lot sells groceries cheap. They sell mostly their own distinctive house brands, and their selection is limited, but it's a great place to stock up on basic canned goods, sauces, crackers, that kind of thing.

We also have a lot of tourist grocery stores. These places are usually out by the lake or where the "main" County Road crosses the river. They sell a little bit of this and a little bit of that, like convenience stores, only considerably more run down (since most of them have been there and unchanged for many decades)and with fishing licenses and live bait.

Canned goods at these backwoods stores are usually the big national brands, labels faded because they've been gathering dust for years; the only thing on them that is up to date is the price tag, which is regularly updated to keep up with the rate of inflation and keep the prices at highway robbery levels. Otherwise that 30 year old can of beans would be quite the bargain by now.

Today I worked late in the field. Coming home from the opposite direction from usual, I remembered that this particular lakeside tourist grocery used to have pretty good pizza. I pulled in and ordered one to take home.

While I waited for my pizza I wandered around looking at the shelves. About half the shelves were empty; it appeared the store wasn't doing too well.

Then I noticed something else. The mustard, ketchup, and steak sauce were Kurtz brand. The beans were Cowboy Billy's. I will stop now before I list every brand Save-A-Lot sells in their discount grocery store a few miles north of this market, but that's what they were, Save-A-Lot brands.

Apparently what the Backwoods Tourist Grocery Store of Today does is goes to town, stocks up on the specials at Save-A-Lot, marks the prices up by 300%, and re-sells them.

I guess that would work.

Oh, trillium? Why that? Haiku, that's why.

Ghost of snow that was
The forest floor is white with
Trillium blossoms

1.

I've passed this way a hundred times
I've seen these trees a hundred times
But not all.
So for those of you today
Just raising your first shoots to the sun,
Welcome.

2.
Two blue butterflies
Feasting on a dried dog turd:
Life's what you make it

Behind me the sky had opened. It was a downpour out there now. "I shoulda worn my poncho in."

"Yeah, who cares what it looks like long's you stay dry. Sit anywhere you'd like."

The four open tables were the big ones, each set for eight places. All the smaller tables were full. There were even three guys crowded around a little table sized for maybe two, rather than use one of the big ones. One of the three had a vest labeled DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORTATION.

I shrugged and sat at the big table nearest the wall. It wobbled. There was a whiteboard on the wall that had TODAY'S SPECIALS handwritten in green above a large blank space.

"Anything to drink?"

"Coffee, please. Any specials?"

"I'll ask. I just got here myself."

She poured my coffee, then walked to the far end of the building, which wasn't very far. I could probably have heard what the cook said except that the two quartz clocks on the wall chose that moment to cut loose with their cheesy electronic chimes, marking the three-quarter-hour; quarter to twelve, for the clock in the corner, quarter to one for the one on the back wall by the Department of Transportation guys.

They were being a bit noisy right then too. They were having an animated discussion of soil borings, and getting the vault toilets, picnic tables, and trash barrels set up at the roadside park. And that danged pump handle. Have to find that danged pump handle. I hope Jim took it off and put it somewheres for the winter like he was s'posed to, and didn't leave it there all winter so some sumbitch stole it on us again.

The DOT guys were part of why I was here. They, the plumber, the electrician, and the three retired farmers. When you're looking for a place to buy lunch in one of these small towns, look for trucks. Working trucks, mind you, not the boy racer trucks with the chrome pipes and the painted flames, and not the shiny yuppie trucks the summer people drive. If you find a restaurant with a row of work trucks outside, you know it is the best place in town. It may also be the ONLY place in town, but in any case you won't find anything better.

The waitress wandered back. "She says we have an Italian Panini. Comes with soup or salad for $5.99."

"What's in it?"

"Italian stuff."

Not such an encouraging description, but what the heck. "I'll try it with the soup. please."

"All right, but we're running slow. The rain. All the guys came in for lunch at once."

"That's all right. I did the same."

She was back with my soup right away, though. And I had just enough time to examine the two clocks-- both had smiley-face stickers on their fake pendulums that said FOR SALE; both were done in a horrible 1960s pseudo-space age fake cuckoo clock style, even though they weren't cuckoo clocks, studded with log-looking sections of tree branches varnished with the bark on; one was painted with green flower stencils and had a barometer, hygrometer, and thermometer in a row below the clock face, while the other was almost covered in a rainbow of random glass beads-- before she came back with my Italian Panini.

Somehow I think this delicacy is something they could only have invented here in Northern Michigan.

What they had done was they had taken a veal parmesan patty-- what they call veal parmesan here, a patty of ground veal (probably), breaded, deep fried, slathered in spaghetti sauce and sprinkled with cheese that is as likely to be mozzarella as parmesan, no matter what the name of the dish may be. They took the whole thing and slapped it between two slices of bread that looked vaguely Italian in one sense or another. Then they'd grilled it in some kind of sandwich press until it was thin, golden brown, and the cheese and sauce had become integral parts of the bread.

It was delicious, actually.

After work I walked out with a Carl. He said "We're having a barbecue at my house. Fresh venison."

"Grilled venison?"

He nodded. "You'll notice one of the F-150s is missing from the motor pool row."

I groaned. "One of the new ones?" Brand new, and bright red too; the perfect color for a Ford pickup truck, ever since the bright red Tonka toy Ford pickup my grandmother had for me to play with every time I visited. I wonder whatever happened to that thing? But it's OK; I have my own red toy 1950s Ford pickup on my desk. Some of the things of our childhood we never do outgrow.

Carl nodded. "Only six thousand miles on the thing. I was driving it over near Mio and a spikehorn buck ran out right in front of me. PRANG! Smashed the whole front end."

I frowned. "They try to make them look like they're milled out of a solid block of steel, but the front end's nothing but flimsy plastic. I bet it smashed the hell out of it."

"Sure did. Smashed the grill, the bumper cover, messed up the hood latch. She was leaking coolant too, so we're looking at a new radiator. It'll probably be two, three thousand dollars worth of damage-- or if it isn't, they'll be sure to charge the State that much to fix it, anyway. Honest Businessmen."

"Cheap plastic grill, but you can bet Ford will charge hundreds for that alone."

"Probably cost 'em six bucks to make."

I snorted. "More like six cents. Bob hit a deer the other day too. I heard him talking about it. But he's not going to spend any three thousand dollars to repair the damage."

Bob drives junk cars. That's wise, actually; I'd do it myself, if I had any sense. His minivan wouldn't cost three thousand dollars, and it's too rusted to stand extensive body work anyway. He said he'd picked up the shattered bits of his grill and glued them back together. The front edge of the hood was munged up, but one of those acrylic bug deflector spoilers glued on there covers most of that, and then a twist of wire will keep the hood tied down in place of the busted latch. Done.

"That's different," Carl said. "I was just driving along minding my own business. Bob was half in the bag, coming home from the bar."

"Maybe. It makes a better story if he says he was drunk, and you know how Bob is about stretching a story."

"Yeah. Almost as bad as you are."

"I represent that remark... but anyway, I don't think it matters whether you're drunk or sober, when a whitetail decides to do a kamikaze on ya."

"Yeah. My girlfriend hit one last week, too. Or it hit her. Ran out of the woods and right into the side of her car. Thousand bucks damage, and the deer didn't even stop; it just turned around and ran back into the woods."

Most of the people I know have hit deer. One person I know has hit six. Another ran into an elk- American Elk, that is, also known as wapiti, not moose, which is our equivalent of the European elk. She hit the elk, got out of there, and went back later to pick up the dead elk, because when you grill a critter around here you get to keep it. But someone else had already taken it away. Venison is an acquired taste, but elk tastes just like beef, or so THEY say. Whoever THEY are.

You think hitting a hundred-fifty pound deer's going to mess you up, try a thousand pound elk.

It's just a fact of life around here, and aside from drunkenness on snowmobiles it has to be the number one cause of accidents. There are two kinds of drivers; those who have hit a deer, and those who will some day.

I remember when I worked on a survey crew up here, many years ago now. For a few days we worked along a gravel road that provided a shortcut between two "major" paved roads, or as major as any in that area.

This particular road was only a mile long, and it wasn't even in the woods; just empty potato fields on both sides. As I was walking along that road at sunset, ending my day, I wondered what all the litter in the ditch was. Where had it come from? There wasn't even a fast food place in that county. And what was it? The shapes were kind of strange.

And then, with horror, I realized what it was. The litter was a layer of deer bones, skulls, antlers, of all the deer that had been road-killed along that mile of road. Mouldering with scraps of hide, moss growing on them. I could have walked the mile on them and never have touched the ground.

I never got along with ham radio operators.

Since I was a teenager I've listened to shortwave radio broadcasts-- also far-away AM radio broadcasts at night, what tephra or tephralynn calls "Listening to Static." There's no real reason to do it any more; you can get all the foreign information you want, direct from foreign sources, over the Internet. (Until the Tea Party brings the McCarthy Era back and starts protecting you from truths they want to pretend don't exist.) Back then, though, if you wanted the foreign perspective on the news, uncensored, you got a shortwave receiver.

( Story! )

North of the highway, side by side, are
Evergreen, Hebrew, and Grace Lutheran Cemeteries with
Holy Cross Catholic Cemetery across the road.
You would think that here, at least,
We could all be together.

I walked into the house and straight to the computer. I told Teph "I have an idea for my LJ post, and I have to get it done while it is.. heh heh.. fresh. So to speak."

She eyed me suspiciously. "What does that mean?"

"You shall see."

***

My latest shipment of Coffee from the Company Formerly Known as A&P, from the exotic Land of New Jersey, is still most of a month off, and I'm running low. So I was in the coffee aisle at Shifty Acres picking out a plastic can-oid thing of Folger's Black Silk when the manager walked by. I looked at him, opened my mouth, closed it, opened it again.

"Can I help you find something?"

"Well, no, um, ah, it's not really a.. I mean, I don't think I should, ah.."

"Really, I'm here to help you. What do you need?"

I cleared my throat. "I wondered if you knew you had a truck from a rendering plant parked out in front of the store."

He gave me a blank look. "Rendering?"

I nodded. "From Rose and Company." That's not the real name, of course-- I almost never use real names here-- but the real name is just about as ironic. "It's a rendering plant down in Saginasty. You know how they talk about making glue out of cattle hooves? That's the factory where they send the dead cows to do it. Not the hooves alone, of course, the whole dead animal..."

He paled. "Are you telling me we have a truckload of dead cows in the parking lot? Just parked out there like one of the customers?"

I shook my head. "Nah. It might be dead horses or pigs. I've been hearing of bovine tuberculosis in the captive deer herds at some of the game farms, so it might even be captive deer."

I knew about Rose and Company because I used to work down near Saginaw, or Saginasty if you prefer to call it that, as many of us do. Frank and I went out to check on a complaint there once.

Let me tell you about Frank. Descendant of dying farm towns that I am, I had never worked much with any Black guys until I worked with Frank. Now, he was and is just about the sweetest, most courteous, soft-spoken men I have ever known. Killer handsome too. He's also about five feet twenty-seven and looks like if he ever had a dry throat he could punch down a stone wall and squeeze water from the cobblestones to slake his thirst-- but he wouldn't, because somebody worked HARD on that wall and knocking it down would be impolite.

I was brand new on the job at the time, so Frank went in to talk to the rather angry, abusive, and unreasonable old man who ran the place (who for some reason was more polite with Frank than he ever was with me). I walked around outside and documented what we could see and, more importantly, what we could smell.

Even that was no great treat, let me tell you. I never got within 100 yards of the place, but the smell just about made me hurl right there on the street. I would say the smell was enough to gag a maggot except that there was ABUNDANT evidence that the smell didn't inconvenience maggots in the least.

Flash forward about 20 years, and I'm facing a pale grocery store manager who has realized that he has a tractor-trailer load of dead cattle-- or perhaps diseased deer, if he's lucky-- in front of his store on the hottest day so far this summer. Rapidly decomposing. At the meat market entrance of the store, no less.

"So what do I do?" he whispered.

I shrugged. "He's parked out there like a customer, so probably he is. If he leaves soon, no problem."

"I'll keep an eye on it. Thanks for telling me."

I smiled and nodded. Then I went over to the wine section and bought a bottle of something strange.

See, I'm an air quality guy, so if that truckload of dead animals is wandering around the county and a phone call gets made, sooner or later it gets to me. However, we have an absolute zero tolerance policy with regard to alcohol. So if I have any alcohol in my system whatsoever, I'm required to say "I'm sorry, I've been drinking, so I can't go out on this call."

Because twenty years ago the smell of a rendering plant would make me puke if I caught it a hundred yards away. And you know what? Some things haven't changed.

The "wine" is imported from Denmark. It's called Cherry Kijafa, described as "Cherry Wine with sugar beet alcohol and other natural flavors added." It sounds horrible, but it's actually borderline delicious.

Of course the sugar beet alcohol bit, by coincidence, reminds me of another stink I encountered on the job. Another stink that almost made me puke right on my boots. But that's another story.

Let's see if we can make last week's entry into something approaching a poem. Here goes:

History

Watching the silver mist fall, remembering
abandoned farmhouses gray in mists now gone
and the old apple trees gone wild
last sign of failed farms

Thinking of history and how they tried
and failed to farm this pinewood sand
gray houses falling in

Thinking of history, gray houses passing in the mist
from the front seat of Dad's Delta 88
hunting for hunting places
some game on AM from another world
play by play blanked
by the lightning spark each time
the windshield wipers
hit bottom

And now that too is history, all of it
gray houses crumbled and gone
groves of gnarled apple trees
blossoming in falling silver mist

Thinking of history
and that was what history looked like,
if I'd only known it
looking out at the falling silver mist
thinking about history
And this is what history looks like now.

Atlanta, a little town not far from here, is the first place I can remember. We moved away before I entered school, but we still kept coming back to visit. I think, as I guess I've hinted in a poem I posted here, that my dad loved this area and hated to leave it. I think he might have been happier and lived longer if he'd ignored the siren song of the Bigger Career and remained as Superintendent of a small, remote backwoods town (as it was then).

Be that as it may, we kept coming back. One of the reasons was hunting for Morel mushrooms in the Spring. We'd load up, drive up here, take a motel room, and go out in the woods looking for mushrooms.

I think I might have identified the motel where we stayed, although I'm not sure. I didn't drive, so of course I don't remember how to drive to it. I remember it was painted green. The rooms were paneled in knotty pine, and were larger than most motel rooms. They had a kitchenette built in and were supplied with a few cooking utensils, some plates, an electric kettle and some little packets of instant coffee, tea, and sugar. It was a classic 1950s setup, and being as this was probably in the mid to late 1960s only ten to twenty years behind the times-- remarkably advanced, for here.

Having a kitchenette was important, since a large part of the experience was cooking and eating the mushrooms we'd found. Mom and Dad would fry them up in butter and eat them.

The sad thing is that I hated mushrooms back then, especially morels. They have a distinct taste that's strong, for mushrooms. I didn't want anything to do with them, so I don't remember where we found them or what kind of tree to look beneath.

I do remember that we hunted mushrooms on some hunting land my dad had owned. "Had owned" is the operational phrase here, because he'd sold the land when we moved away. But mushroom hunting introduces a strange form of land ownership. People are fiercely possessive about their prime 'shrooming spots. They'll tell you where to hunt a whitetail buck, and if they're REAL friends they might tell you about a prized fishing hole in enough detail that, if you're good enough, you have some small chance of locating it; but tell you where to find morel mushrooms? Never.

So we'd go out to the land our family had once owned, and we'd come back with bags of mushrooms. And once, with a pair of mushroom hunters up from Ohio we'd collected out there. They were hopelessly lost. "We followed what looked like a phone line, but it didn't seem to go anywhere."

Dad nodded wisely and said "I strung that wire. It goes around the boundaries of this property. The property line doesn't follow any road or natural features. It's hard to make sense of, and easy to get lost out here."

We got them back to their car. They gave us some nice hand-made rugs the wife had made, but they didn't give us any of their mushrooms. And then we went back to our own motel room, and the smell of Morel mushrooms fried in butter filled the place. I wrinkled my nose at it.

I love the things now. I've gone out looking for them, but in the years since I moved back up here I have NOT FOUND ONE.

In the town where I finished growing up we had at least one good mechanic and at least one bad cop.

Joe worked at the Ashland station, until Ashland closed all the stations in the area. Then he moved to, reopened, actually, the Phillips 66 station out by the freeway.

He worked on my dad's long succession of Oldsmobile Delta 88s. He himself drove an old black Impala, which he kept in beautiful shape. I owed Joe a lot; aside from my safety whenever I rode anywhere in the family car, he introduced me to the joys of pornography via the pin-up girl on the tool company calendar on the shop wall. She wore a demure bathing suit, but it was printed on a separate layer of clear plastic that peeled up.

Eventually Joe decided he needed a newer car. He sold the black Impala to Dad, and Dad gave it to my older sister to drive back and forth to the University, about twenty miles away.

The cop-- oh, let's make up a name for him, completely at random. Let's call him Officer Fife. Officer Fife wasn't a bad cop in the usual sense. No, far from it. He was a young kid fresh out of cop school, and he was frightfully earnest. Wore his hair in a military buzz cut. He didn't speak, he barked. Worked out and ran laps to keep in condition and to better attract the future Mrs. Officer Fife, if and when he ever met her. Read the criminal code and training manuals on his days off.

The problem with Officer Fife was that he had no judgment. I hope he gained it as he gained experience. Most people do. Some, of course, don't have the ability. At the time I rather suspected Officer Fife was one of these, but of course I don't know.

He first got into trouble with the City Council for wrapping a police cruiser around a tree, about three weeks after he'd done the same thing with ANOTHER one. This was especially embarrassing at the time because they only had three police cars. Singlehandedly, Officer Fife had bent two of these. The third was out of service too because it got wrecked, or ruined at least, in a high speed chase down US-127. They got it up to 120 miles per hour and it threw a rod. Left them sitting there on the southbound lane shoulder at the end of a hundred yard trail of oil and bits of metal. Rather pitiful, really.

What got him fired, though, was taking a shot at a guy for doing a U-turn. It was a motorcyclist who pulled out of one of the angle parking spaces in front of the courthouse, did a yoo-ie, and headed back the other way. Motorcycles are loud, so he didn't hear Officer Fife shout "HALT!" Whereupon Fife, assuming the motorcyclist was fleeing, pulled his .357 and launched one.

He was immediately fired. Too immediately; Fife sued the city for failing to follow due process, and got his job back. My memories may be distorted by the mist of years, but as I recall Fife stayed on the force for several more years before moving on.

Now, I don't know whether they still allow studded snow tires in this state, but back then they did. That was part of another Officer Fife incident, where the good officer knew that the universal small town terrorist, Some Kid, had been shooting out the department store windows with a .22. Fife announced he knew where Some Kid was and was ready to bring Some Kid in and sweat a confession out of him. About that time somebody mentioned that Tony Vivaldi, who ran the little grocery store across the street from the department store, had (for reasons known only to himself) jacked up his car so that one of the rear wheels was off the ground, and had then gunned the engine for an extended period of time, spinning the elevated wheel at what amounted to a significant fraction of the speed of light. And Tony's car had studded snow tires. Sure enough, it turned out that Tony's tire had thrown most of its studs, and several of them had gone through the window across the street. Once again, Some Kid had eluded the clutches of justice!

My sister's "new" Impala came with a set of studded snow tires on. They were kind of old, but they'd serve to get her through the winter. Dad planned to get new ones in the spring.

But he hadn't quite gotten around to it when March came around. It was legal to run studded snow tires, but by the end of March they had to come off. Dad couldn't take them off; he had no other tires to put in their place. Instead, he did the next best thing. He jacked the Impala up, got out his pliers, and pulled all the studs out of the tires.

That left the holes where the studs had been, though. And you know what? Those tires snarled when they went down the road. Sounded just like they still had the studs in them.

One weekend day, after my sister had to cover for another teaching assistant at the University on a day she'd planned to have off, she was driving home, and not in the best of moods. I should mention here that my sister is smart. SCARY smart.

She was coming into our town on one of the back roads when who should she encounter but Officer Fife. He did a bootlegger's turn and hit the lights and siren and came up behind her. She pulled off the pavement, into the slush, stopped the engine, rolled down the driver's side window. Fife strutted to the window, thumbs in his belt.

Sister batted eyes at him. "Oh my, Officer, did I do something wrong?"

"Do you know what the date is, ma'am?"

"Oh, I'm sorry, Officer. I have no idea what the date is, but I can find out, I think. Let me--"

"It's April Fourth. Do you know what the last day for studded snow tires is in this state?"

"My goodness Officer, is there a last day for them? Do they expire, like milk?"

Fife sighed. "The last day for studded snow tires is March 31st. You have to take the studded snow tires off your car on or before that date. Do you have studded snow tires on your car?"

"Mercy me, what are studded snow tires? These came on the car, and you have to put air in them or something. Or they'll break." Sister had WATCHED Dad pull the studs out of those tires. She knew they weren't studded, not any more, but she was in a bad mood and Officer Fife was being a ****head. Even more than usual.

Fife sighed in a long-suffering manner. Then he got down on his knees, in the slush, to look at the rear tires.

He frowned. He got right down, almost face down-- well, I don't think he meant to, but the road was slippery-- so he could examine the tires a little better. He got up. His sharply pressed uniform wasn't so neat as it had been. "Could I ask you to pull ahead about two feet, ma'am?"

Sister complied. Fife got down to examine the areas of the rear tires now newly exposed to his view.

He came back, finally, rumpled, soaked, and muddy. And now HE wasn't in the best of moods. "You may go, ma'am," was all he said.

"Oh my, thank you, Officer."

"Go."

She went.

My sister can be pretty mean when you provoke her. Trust me, I know.