This is Your Life

There’s a fall crisp in the air, and we've switched headquarters from the family cottage on Burt Lake to my parents' house in Petoskey. Mitchell Street, in the middle of town, is being repaved, so there’s a roundabout detour to get almost anywhere. Detours are a drag, of course, but I forget to be annoyed because this one runs right down Memory Lane. It follows State Street past the house where I lived from the time I was born until I left for college, continues uphill along the route I walked every day to school, then zigzags over to Hill Street for a view of the high school before rejoining Mitchell just beyond the Lutheran church my family attended. It’s like an episode of “This is Your Life.”

On daily walks, Maisie and I have been exploring these landmarks at a slower-than-driveby pace. While Maisie pauses for frequent, focused sniffing of recent happenings, I am busy recalling episodes from the past. Here’s a sample of where our wandering takes us.

• Home is perched on top of a hill, so we always start by heading down. First we pass the yard where two of Maisie’s pals, black labs Buddy and Louie, greet her with woofs and wagging tails. As we round the corner, her friend Teddy bounces out and they race and leap in dog delight. As we descend the steep front hill, I look out over the wide blue sweep of Little Traverse Bay while Maisie checks out chipmunk holes along the bank.
• It’s a few blocks into downtown, and I regularly head for the new brick library. Across the street is the old Carnegie building with the wide front steps that was home to all the books until just a few years ago. I suppose the shelves were cramped back when I was little, but I never noticed – I was too busy checking out every Narnia chronicle and Bobbsey Twins adventure in turn and then skipping home with my treasure.
• The downtown shops are a mix of upscale and down-home. Many cater to the “fudgies” (a semi-affectionate local term for tourists), with Up North wear, cherry products, polished Petoskey stones, and (of course) fudge. But there’s also Meyer Hardware, where you can buy bolts or paintbrushes or snow shovels, and McLean and Eakin, the bookstore where I held my first “real job” during summers in high school and college.
• A tunnel under the highway leads to the waterfront, where the bike trail follows the shore in either direction. Sometimes we stroll the wide wooden piers past docked sailboats with mast wires jangling in the wind (Maisie likes to watch the ducks) or venture out the breakwall into a stiff wind. A stretch of rocky beach beyond the breakwall is my favorite place for hunting Petoskey Stones, and was the venue for a workshop I devised one summer about these celebrated 300-million-year-old fossils. I recall a rosy-sunset evening as the workshop was wrapping up, when a savvy young participant pocketed a few choice samples and tossed his less-than-perfect finds back into the water. “I’m putting them back for the tourists,” he explained. “Because we need tourists for the economy.”
• Back on the other side of the tunnel is our natural-foods co-op, the Grain Train. When I was a kid, it was a little hole-in-the-wall on Howard Street, with narrow aisles and creaky wood floors. I was under the impression that it sold only “weird health food” and rarely stepped inside. I started frequenting it when I discovered the Moosewood cookbooks and labeled myself a vegetarian. Now it fills a much bigger space, complete with automatic doors that sweep you inside, and contains almost anything I might write on my shopping list. Just up the street is the site of the Friday morning farmer’s market, new in town and a welcome, colorful addition to the scene.
• A block further is a significant intersection where Howard meets State Street. On one corner is the office of the local paper. Across the street is the post office, with a pole outside where I loop Maisie’s leash (or Siri’s or Sandy’s, family dogs past) while I run in to mail a letter or buy stamps. On the opposite corner is the Catholic church, St. Francis, with its tall landmark steeple rising up over town. And the fourth corner is occupied by Central School, a historic old building which housed the middle school until I finished 7^th grade. Among its more remarkable features were shiny stone staircases worn smooth from decades of shuffling feet and huge wood-framed windows without any screens. The heating system was old and erratic, so teachers often propped windows open to cool off steamy classrooms even in winter. Once a friendly dog stuck its head into a ground-floor social studies class, much to our amusement. Another time, a charismatic math teacher threw a student’s shoe out a second-story window. It was a ploy to get our attention - and I believe it worked. I also distinctly remember sitting in English while the first fluffy snowflakes of the season fell past wide-open windows and the church bells at St. Francis caroled a rich, ringing noontime song. In 8^th grade, we moved to a new building behind the high school with digital clocks on the walls, color-coordinated hallways in shades of mauve and teal, dependable heat, and no character. Now Central is Petoskey’s fourth elementary school, and the grounds are filled with colorful playground equipment befitting its new role. But I still remember rousing post-lunch games of Koosh-ball keep-away in the open space that now holds a pirate-ship play structure.
• Two blocks up State Street is a blue-gray stucco house with brick front steps and a bank of windows across the front. Home. My parents moved to their current house on the hill after I left for college, so this house holds all my growing-up memories. I can’t help looking curiously up the driveway, noting that the white-berried shrubs still grow along the stone wall, the ones we called “pop berries” for the sound the fruit made when you stepped on it or threw it down hard on the cement. And a detour down the alley provides a peek into the backyard, where I can check on the elegant Japanese maple that stands at a corner of the garage. Beneath its deep red star-shaped leaves was an old stump where I would sit when I was very young. I called it my Quiet House; it was a place for thinking.
• From here you can see the house on Grove Street where my friend Jaya lived, and the corner where we met most mornings in middle and high school to walk to school together. She had a wild mass of long curls, a Clinton-Gore sticker plastered to her clarinet case, and a devotion to Star Trek. She was passionate and political; I was the steady, diplomatic one. We had our pictures side by side in the newspaper as our school’s two National Merit scholars, and then went off to polar-opposite colleges (she to Duke, me to Carleton) and drifted apart. But sometimes she still makes an appearance in those bizarre dreams that splice together disparate chapters of life. I'm curious where she is now.
• Another friend, Margaret, lived a block uphill on State Street in a sunny yellow house with a yellow dog named Sunny. Margaret moved away at the end of first grade. Soon afterward her house was painted blue, but it’s always stayed yellow in my eyes. Margaret and I walked to school together, too, and played wildly imaginative games on the playground and picked flowers from neighbors’ gardens to leave on their doorsteps on May Day, ringing the doorbell and running away feeling wonderfully magnanimous. The spot midway between my house and hers was the place where we converged at a run and collided in a fierce, joyful hug on her first trip back to Petoskey shortly after she moved. She came by a few more times through the years, appearing at the door unexpectedly and seeming less and less familiar each time. But I always wondered how the friendship would have weathered our growing up if it had the chance.
• The route to school led straight up State to Kalamazoo Street, where Betty the crossing-guard waited with her orange vest and shiny red stop sign, rain or shine, to usher us to the other side with a cheerful “good morning.” The other day I was out to dinner with my parents and there at the next table sat Betty with her husband. I swear, she looked exactly the same as she did 20 years ago (minus the orange vest).
• A right turn on Kalamazoo will take you straight to Ottawa Elementary. Crossing Lindell along the way, there was an arc-shaped crack beside the crosswalk that we called “the rainbow.” I could never walk straight across that crosswalk – it was necessary to veer out and follow the rainbow arc. On a recent run, I noticed they’d repaved the street and erased the rainbow. Sad. Another little bit of magic has flickered out of the world.
• I stepped inside Ottawa School for the first time in decades this fall, invited to visit a neighbor’s second-grade class to talk about my job at Ranger Rick. The school has been added to and updated since the days when I sat in those miniature chairs, of course. But the first thing I noticed was that it smelled just the same. Not a bad smell or a good one, and not some generic elementary-school smell, either, just a familiar Ottawa odor that my nose remembered and no words can describe.
• Lately Maisie and I have been running past Ottawa and then down the roller-coaster hill of Northmen Drive past the middle and high schools. First we intersect the old cross-country course, where I once doggedly ran at the back of the pack. Now, as Maisie drags me along behind her, I suppose not much has changed. Next we come to the marching band’s practice field. If it’s first thing in the morning on a weekday, the drums will be thumping, horns ascending and descending scales, and several hundred feet stepping in rhythm between the yardlines. Oh, does this bring back memories: lines of footsteps etched in frosty grass, a pair of pink gloves with the fingers cut off, cold metal flute keys, the soft feathery plumes we stuck in our uniform hats, Mr. Brien’s strained voice magnified by microphone as he calls out orders that verge on insults but produce impressive results.
• On we jog, past the stone wall that fronts the high school. Now I'm pulling Maisie as she tries to scarf down tidbits littering the parking lot or snatch wayward tennis balls that have escaped from the courts. Continuing down Hill Street and back to Kalamazoo, we pass my friend Donna’s brick house. Her mom and mine led our Girl Scout troop together; her dad was my cross country coach and calculus teacher. Her parents live here still, now proud grandparents.
• At the end of Kalamazoo, a downhill path deposits us at the Winter Sports Park, bottoming out onto a field that is transformed into a skating rink in winter. Here I spent many after-school afternoons in puffy snowclothes and shiny white skates, dutifully attempting maneuvers in group lessons or just careening in wide circles and launching into the snowbanks.
• Maisie heads for the sledding hill that rises steeply ahead of us, which in this season is just a grassy slope that beckons us to scale it. We do, often, and then duck through a cedar hedge at the top, cross a dead-end road, and skirt the edge of a backyard to a super-steep path that descends into the Bay View woods. A network of trails offers varied terrain to explore, from hardwood hillsides to a hemlock grove and a cedar swamp. When I got my driver’s license in January of 10^th grade, this was my first regular destination – I’d borrow the car after school, load up my snowshoes or skis, and make tracks through the silent, snowy woods lost in introspective adolescent musings.
• These days, my canine companion tends to yank me out of any reveries with a determined leash-tug in the direction of the nearest irresistible scent. But the present is a pleasant place to be, too, especially in the fall in a beautiful woods with a pup brimming over with enthusiasm for life. So off we go down the trail, over hill and dale, and soon enough we’ll be home – until it’s time for the next walk.