Experiences

In Holland, Michigan, single female travelers of my skin color are clearly a rarity. The old man sitting at the window of one of the many downtown restaurants nudged his wife and pointed at me. The old couple on my left at the restaurant couldn’t stop staring at me or the food I ordered. The middle-aged couple on my right were startled when I requested them to take a picture of me with my camera. The vacuous young woman at the counter of the local museum asked me, “Have you come to look at the museum?” when I entered. The lady at the cafe couldn’t understand my simple request to open a juice bottle. Hell, a lot of people didn’t understand me in Holland. It was all mildly racist or I am just spoiled rotten by Midwestern hospitality. I should cut the Hollanders a little slack really. This is a small town the size of Peoria, (population about 250,000) on the western side of Michigan State. It is situated on the eastern end of Lake Macatawa, a dinky little lake (6 miles long and 1.2...

When you secure yourself a table at the sunlight-flooded coffee shop at Borders, overlooking the modest spire of the Northern Suburban Church and the uninspiring mien of Stein Mart, trying to find a little corner of peace on this summer-adjacent Saturday on which you have been stood up by not one, but two men, to ruminate about how it was thus, Bill Bryson’s “Notes from a Small Island” is the last book you should choose to read. You were perhaps going for sombre. What you end up is being this bundle of unholy mirth and almost toppling over in the effort to laugh silently so as not to make a spectacle of yourself. I like Bill Bryson. I found his “Short History of Nearly Everything” the kind of science book I wished I had in school (he explains Avagadro number as the number of popcorn kernels required to cover all of US nine miles deep!). His “Made in America,” a densely packed account of American history examined through a linguistics prism, was unputdownable. I love his breezy style, h...

Dandelion. Dent-de-lion. Lion's tooth. What a heavy name for an ethereal weed. If only one could swing on its many parachutes and float away into some magic world, as Disney characters very often do. If only they didn't make the back of the throat itch. There were thousands of white gossamer dandelion seeds in the air this surprisingly summer-like weekend, floating silently and gracefully like first snow flakes of winter. "They cause allergies," S frowned and warned her son and me to steer clear. "Here, blow it," six years old T brought me a seed-head in the park this morning, while his mother was away. He watched me blow it with delight. Then he took the stalk from me, ran with it like it was a live cracker, and threw it away in the air some distance away. Sun dappled shade in the park, inquisitive chipmunks and sparrows for company, a friendship sealed with a gift of dandelion...heaven! S lives in Oak Park, a western suburb of Chicago, establish...

Is good food too much to ask for? Is it unreasonable for a hard working girl to expect some consistency in the quality of food she gets everyday? Is it a crime that I can't handle bacon, salami and pastrami on a daily basis? (It may be because I was raised as a vegetarian, but too much meat induces violent and scary nightmares with possible sexual subtext involving ghosts, mobsters, zombies, and ravening beasts.) I have been having a week in hell. It all started on last Sunday at The Claims Company. It is quite a nice restaurant with a fun looking bar at the local mall. It boasted southwestern fare, so I decided to check it out. As a lot of you might know, southwestern is an indigenous, heart-unfriendly cuisine involving indecent amounts of cheese, cream, animal fat, white/red meat, and spices and flavors borrowed from Cajun and Mexican communities. I went in expecting chowder, gumbo, barbecued meat, deep fried everything, and grilled something. Apparently the "mother lod...

Came across this trivia: the etymology for Orchid is from Orchis, which in Greek means testicle, so named because of the shape of the plant's roots. Roots? Dude these are orchids? Plants with the most exotic flowers? You couldn't see them? Oh well, it was Carl Linnaeus who named them so, and we all (at least all of us who have read Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson) know that he almost entirely named things with explicit genital names. Ok, now that I have made a sexual reference to catch your attention, let me move on to the main message. Mercury rose steadily through the week - from low 8 - 10 degrees last weekend, it burgeoned to up to 17 degrees and even touched mid 20s a couple of times. Viva el sol! Weather Channel was sensationalizing a storm system caused by Jet Stream that was going to sweep across the south west and come up to Chicago with tornadoes and hail the size of golf balls, but it all came to bupkis. Now that they have got the ...