It's 4:30 in the morning and the birds have begun their pre-dawn chorus. Penny and I have just come in from the rain. She ate her breakfast while I made a cup of coffee and has settled down next to the chair where I sit in the dark, smelling coffee and wet fur and the cool morning breeze coming in through the window with the birdsong.
And I realize just how much I have become my father.
But that is where I have found myself this second summer since my Father’s passing. I’m living more often than I had intended, in the very home I grew up in, same bedroom and all, as we prepare the house for its next inhabitants, whoever they might be.
Even some of the same music is here. I did not know I had retained all the drama and subtle nuance of Nancy Sinatra’s “You Only Live Twice” until we put it on during our Rummy 500 game the other night, but I have. Dad could not resist the James Bond mystique, so by paternal decree a portion of my brain had to be dedicated to retaining key sound tracks. I do a pretty mean “Goldfinger” too.
But what I didn’t expect to find was the way people welcomed me back. In fact, it seems they welcome everyone. I had taken this for granted when I grew up here and feel blessed to have been given the chance to give this place a second look as an adult.
Miller Beach, which you won’t have heard of, is a small blue collar town bounded on either side by the steel mills of Northwest Indiana. The highways leading in are festooned with billboards announcing 6 for 1 Fireworks Specials and “gentlemen’s clubs” with names like “The Industrial Strip”. Once you get off the highway, the gentlemen’s clubs appear decidedly less gentle and the motels are hourly but assure patrons that they are, nonetheless, “classy.” Chicago money has been trying to gentrify the area for years, in fits and starts…a nice restaurant here, a gourmet popcorn shop there. The Balinese import shop failed but the Art Gallery is hanging on. One day, like the beach grass clinging to the great sand dunes which surround this community, these places might set a firm enough, deep enough root to survive but for now the negative forces still hold sway and persistent erosion of good efforts is far too prevalent.
And yet, in a tiny corner just off the beach is a little gem of a coffee shop in what used to be a gas station. Coffee on one side, acupuncture, aromatherapy and massage on the other. Incredibly, it’s survived here for fifteen years.
I, who dated back to the gas station days of this establishment, wandered in last summer on a whim and was immediately greeted by an old friend who quickly signaled the woman behind the counter that he was buying. I had not seen him in 26 years. The last time I had, it was to return his engagement ring. Without the slightest awkwardness between us, we laughed and chatted and he told me his mother still talks about the vegetarian lasagna I made for her all those years ago. I was so astounded at his reception that I had to thank him and apologize for the way things ended but he stopped me, “We were kids and that was a million years ago. I’ll always think the world of you.” It was delightful and humbling to be so graciously received. It reminded me that I have known some truly fine men in my life.
Next to arrive was a friend from high school who had recently returned to the area after some years in Chicago with her 6 month old twin girls in tow. I had not seen her in at maybe fifteen years. She promptly handed me a child and said, “Would you mind? It would be a luxury to be able to use the bathroom without having to hang on to a baby at the same time.” When she returned she told me the coffee shop community and the acupuncturist adjoining saved her life (maybe literally) during a very difficult pregnancy.
I got my bagel, freshly warmed in the single tiny toaster oven there and let myself get carried along by the parade of people who streamed in and out of the six table café.
When I returned the next day, Lorie, the barista, remembered both my name and my order.
After seven months away she still remembered when I returned this week. Then she introduced me to a girl who went to my grade school. My high school friend’s twins are walking now and all the patrons are doing their part to help them identify their noses and cheeks and to learn their colors and shapes.
None of these people are wealthy. No one cares much about wearing makeup or has much interest in what anyone is wearing. All the cars in the lot have seen their share of winters. I haven’t seen an iPod in the place and have never seen anyone send a text. People step outside to talk on the rare occasion a cell phone rings. I have been one of only three people with a computer there the entire week and that was just so I could write to you.
But what I have seen is a man walking in to ask if he could fix someone’s flat tire. He had been driving by and noticed one in the parking lot and he happened to have a compressor in his truck. This was the day after the man with the organic brown eggs stopped by to see if he could give away the eggs he hadn’t sold that morning and who appeared genuinely surprised when we all insisted on paying him. “You want to pay me? Well, okay! God is Good!” He sold all he had and left the shop grinning wide, “See, you just never know what will happen.” The eggs were so thick shelled and heavy, with such brilliant yellow yolks you wonder how anything in the grocery store could ever be called an egg by comparison.
I never knew Chicago, which I can see so clearly across the Lake from here, was really that far away.
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