Thinking inside the (wine) can

"Well, that's pretty low brow," a customer muttered as she stopped and looked at the shelf. She was gazing unimpressed at a display of Underwood pinot noir, from Oregon, and yes, in 12 ounce cans. 

The nice salesman told me that the Chicago area is a test market for the packaging. I tried it and liked it (they also make a pinot gris, yes, in a can), and agreed to take a chance. It's selling. The pinot noir is so delicate as to make one question, a little, in this world of jammy "fruit bomb" wines, what is the difference between delicacy and meh-ness? Not that Underwood is meh, not at all. In fact I wonder if the winemaker is not sharing with us all a very sophisticated joke -- a pinot noir as ethereal as possible, in a package that the uninitiated will call "low brow."

And I say uninitiated for a reason. The customer who wasn't impressed also probably wasn't impressed by other innovations in the drinks industry, which she now buys happily. I am thinking of flavored vodkas, cocktails in foil pouches, screwcap-closure wine bottles, Beaujolais Nouveau for Thanksgiving, and so on. She got initiated. And at some point, she will buy wine in a can because it makes sense for a certain need. Just for a start -- it's unbreakable, light-protective packaging in a perfect size for two people on the go. 

It is a fascinating glimpse into human nature, though, to see people rear back and instinctively reject something ... and then slowly come around. In some matters they never do come around -- wasn't there that car, the Edsel? -- in some matters they have to be coerced (the mercury-filled CFL light bulb) -- in some matters they shouldn't come around at all. But that's another story.  

Flowers, amateur and professional

My fatheads! When was the last time you saw the fuzzy yellow caterpillar of your childhood? Here he is. I forget what butterfly he develops into. This one may not have developed into much of anything, because when I came out to give him a better look a few minutes after taking this picture, he was gone. Either he developed a tremendous burst of energy and went somewhere, or he went into the fixings of some bird's dinner.

He had been exploring the tall fronds of a cleome gone to seed. They are the lovely "spider flower" of midsummer, seen in shades of pink, magenta, and in white, with their long green spokes striking out from the delicate flower head and the upper stem. When was the last time, also, you saw a moonflower in bloom?

I'm told that once these settle in, -- being perennial -- they become rampant, which is fine with me as perhaps then it will help hide an ugly garage back.

You do have to position yourself judiciously to get a good photo of some of the things in your backyard garden; at least I do. Below, some decorative grasses and black-eyed Susans.

One is all the more impressed with a professional effort. Below, a bit of the ever changing beauties of the Lincoln Park Conservatory. Just think, they have the same light as I do. It's the glass walls and the heat and the humidity and the staff and the knowledge and the sourcing and the professionalism that make the difference.

My favorite room in the Conservatory is the Fern Room. My gentleman friend thinks it's boring. I like the huge but subtle variety in all these ancient plants. Some of them are huge, really. Scale is difficult to see, but an adult could stand in the base of these fronds and they would almost reach his head.

 Up close, you see the various species' delicacy.  "A small dinosaur would be at home in this room," the sign says. That is part of the fun, too.

After the Fern Room there are the sumptuous and garish and profligate orchids. We like those, too.

VanderGhinste oud bruin sour ale

The retro art! The men in straw boaters, à la Maurice Chevalier! That deep French (or rather perhaps Flemish) blue!

And that delicious taste. We know how we love sours. VanderGhinste ranks right up there with our favorites, the Duchesse and Ichtegem's, which is now hard to find.

Now my fatheads, I have just finished a three year project, writing, polishing and re-polishing my memoir/novel, so you must pardon me if I use Pluot, at least for a while, as an excuse to relax a bit and still write, but perhaps polish less. There above, you have your sour to enjoy; and what else?

Quite a while ago, some nice people at a p.r. firm sent me a copy of Adam Rogers' new book, Proof: The Science of Booze (Houghton Mifflin, 2014). It's full of good information and interesting stories from his travels in the researching of booze, and I especially like the organization. The eight chapters take us right through the making and ingesting of drink, from microbes up, "Yeast," "Sugar," "Fermentation," "Aging," etc., all the way to chapter 8, "Hangover." What I find difficult about it is the style. It's written in very conversational, abbreviated guy-magazine talk, into which old-fashioned prose formality still creeps from time to time. All of it becomes halting and distracting. "That'll be where we go next," "what'd be the difference if it did?" and so on. But if you are going to use constructions like that in a book, I suppose for the sake of hipness and accessibility, why not maintain them? He jumps from "would've" and "it'd" in one sentence to something like "it would not have been the first time that" in the next. Shouldn't macho hipness and accessibility in language be good all the way through? 

So I would suggest you want Proof as something to consult, not to savor. Full disclosure: I must admit that for me a little chemistry goes a very long way. My gentleman friend would probably roll his eyes and sum up. "You females like your romance novels, don't you."

What else? We've been through this before somewhat, but the new opera season is starting and I have also surfed a bit on the station's "Chime In" comment board and so have seen the way people unburden themselves of their opinions there, so we'll revisit the issue --  

-- I have a sort of love-hate relationship with our legendary local classical radio station, WFMT. I love the fact that it exists, that it educates me and often plays nice things; I hate the fact that, for example, its potentially most interesting program, "Exploring Good Music" with Bill McGlaughlin, is hosted by a man whose "dese dem 'n' dose" diction should drive anyone to madness ("an' den Bayd'ven wrote a sym'fny, over by dere"). I furthermore hate the fact that so much of its late-night programming is so awful. After 10 p.m. is precisely when I want WFMT to lull me to sleep with nice things, harpsichords mostly. And yet, on four or five nights out of seven, 10 p.m. is precisely when the station chooses to be awful. Monday is "Critical Thinking with A---- P------" (liberals, nattering). Wednesday is all about the Chicago record company Cedille, which might be all right as a subject except this hour, too, seems to involve little else but liberals nattering. Friday: hoary rebroadcasts of Studs Terkel -- more "dese dem 'n' dose" diction, and liberals, nattering. Saturday is folk music: liberals nattering.

This leaves only Thursday as our prime hope for good late night music, followed by the smaller hope of Tuesday. Thursday gives us "The Baroque and Before," usually sheer delight, and Tuesday gives us the Tuesday Night Opera. Sometimes this is screechy -- to this day my son, who sleeps in the bedroom next door, remembers the time he couldn't get any peace for an hour because the opera was a very early and awkward Verdi -- but sometimes it is Handel. (We have forgotten to finish the tally of our nights of musical hope from WFMT. Last of all is Sunday's 10 p.m. "Pipe Dreams" and its organ music. We can't count it, because it's simply strange beyond reckoning. That people go to churches and applaud what sounds like one-dimensional calliope or baseball park thundering is fascinating in itself. We wouldn't even know they did so, except that "Pipe Dreams" always seems to play live concert recordings, from churches, where the people clap sacrilegiously after the organist is done.)

At any rate it happens that on a recent Tuesday, the opera was Handel. Rinaldo. Lovely and pleasant. Some weeks ago, sometime in August, it was Vivaldi. Griselda. Also lovely and pleasant. And, yes, full disclosure, I did fall right asleep both times.

However, I did also rush to YouTube the next afternoon to look up Handel and listen to whatever I might find. Can there be anything more lovely than Joyce DiDonato singing "Dopo notte" (after night), from an opera called Ariodante? Or, than Ann Hallenberg singing Rinaldo's "Laschia ch'io pianga" (let me weep)? We must have more operas in which medieval Crusader princesses resort beautifully to prayer after being abducted by an evil sorceress. I even bought a CD of Joyce DiDonato's Furore, to play in the car. ...a bit screechy.

Now company has arrived for a visit, so I must go.


VanderGhinste oud bruin, retail, about $5 for a 12 ounce bottle.

Navan, or -- "you need to start being more shy"

Since in a few minutes we are going to try a Navan sour -- a cocktail made with Navan, a vanilla-infused liqueur that the Grand Marnier people no longer produce -- it seems appropriate to have a little discussion about retiring things.

My daughter and I were having this talk the other day. She happens to be the youngest and newest hire at her workplace, but is also tagged as "acting manager" when the manager is not around. The air quotes are put in for a reason, because her "title" causes problems. Surely no normal twenty-two-year-old enjoys telling fifty-year-olds what to do, just for a start. And it's not easy for the personality type uncomfortable with do this and go thither to say those words. The difficulties are compounded when everyone knows so much of the thither to be commanded is unworkable and silly.

I said to her that her situation reminds me of my years teaching Sunday school. Just as her co-workers know that going out "prospecting" -- accosting innocents at the spa, dunning them to sign up for more services -- causes clients to flee in impatience, so my students and their parents knew perfectly well that Sunday school was fake school. Yet, in both those situations, if you as the authority figure don't carry on smiling and enforcing the pursuit of fake work, pretty soon nail techs are lounging around your desk gossiping instead of prospecting, or nine-year-olds are ignoring you. Pretty soon you have people above you saying, "you need to be more assertive."

Upon hearing this the retiring person unsheathes, at least mentally, that sword he will likely never use. You'd like me to be more assertive? Really? As in, get away from my desk and go find clients, it will help you run off some of those extra pounds? As in, fake school or no, if your home life were different I don't think we would be seeing these behavioral problems? .

Oh, of course not. That would be going too far. People who ask the reticent to be more assertive always have rules about it, unspoken shape-shifting rules, which they don't dream of obeying because aggression comes so naturally to them anyway. They don't need guidelines. And it's very curious that no one ever seems to ask the bumptious to change their personalities, except perhaps in school, which is just exactly when everybody has one thing in common. We're all children then. After that the world seems to throw up its collective hands at the bumptious, and leave them to the coercion of law and other forces. Or the world politely marvels: "such a strong person." Anyway while a teacher may say "quiet down" she doesn't dream of telling some six-year-old, no one ever tells any adult either in that flat judgmental way, "You need to start being more shy."

There is no answer for it, I suppose. The quiet and the slaveringly pushy must simply reconcile themselves to sharing the same planet. The pushy rush about founding charitable non-profits and not taking no for an answer when someone does not care to attend an event -- say, the annual golf outing and shrimp boil. "It's so much fun! I'll call you again in a few days." The quiet remember Marcus Aurelius' injunction to live for the gods, and stealthily write everything down.

We mentioned the liqueur Navan at the outset. I unearthed a tiny sample bottle in the back room the other day, peered anxiously at the difficult-to-read label, identified it as a cognac and decided to take it home and try making a sour with it. It's all right to attempt cognac sours, our master Charles Schumann allows it in his American Bar.

Out came the mixing cup, the dab of sugar, the half lemon, the lemon juicer, the cocktail glass, the barspoon and the tray of ice cubes. The little sample bottle was of course the perfect jigger, as sample or "airplane" sized bottles tend to be. I measured, squeezed, mixed, dropped in the jingling ice and stirred and poured. And the sweet, sweet vanilla, wood-like and faintly smoky aftertaste of a Navan sour reminded me exactly of the smell of my local liquor store. This is not a slur, only a description. Every time I push open the door of this place, to toddle in and buy my inexpensive and delightful bottle of rum to make my real after-work sours, I sniff the same smothering aroma. The fresh air of the outside world rushes away behind me and I am enveloped in the scent perhaps of a few old cigarettes, but mostly of -- what? I am not sure still, but the smell calls to mind stacks and stacks of old wooden liquor crates, soaked in vanilla and sitting in the back room for years. And now, it calls to mind Navan.

Navan was once made by Grand Marnier. Flavored with Madagascar vanilla, it was produced for a few years in the early 2000s and then discontinued when its sales did not please. I gather the complaint about it was too sweet. (It must be frustrating to develop sweet liquor products for the sweet-loving American market and then find out you've, inexplicably, gone too far.) ...the retiring tend to be that, too.

Peach, sun, Spanish wine

The last day of August is not the last day of summer, far from it. But the date, even in writing, has a sort of ripe and conclusive feel, doesn't it? The angle of the summer sunlight at around five o'clock in the afternoon on this day is just the same. Conclusive. Not too much longer .... A ripe Michigan peach casts a shadow, just so.

To accompany our peach we are sipping 2013 Oro de Castilla Verdejo, a fragrant white wine from Spain. We do mean fragrant. The aromas of cream and flowers waft right up from the bottle, and settle happily in the top of the glass. (So important to leave room.) The taste is at once crisp and lusty. Verdejo is the grape, the region of Spain, Rueda D.O. Why then the name, Oro de Castilla, "gold of Castille"? Because Rueda lies within the larger region of Castille. Conclusive.

That book you glimpse, beside the glass, the peach, and the rather tired nasturtium plant, is an old copy of The Greeks by H.D.F. Kitto (1951). Someday, when my scathing and funny divorce novel/memoir is a runaway bestseller and editors beg me to do whatever I want, I plan to write a brief history of all those mid-twentieth century English classicists and historians whose names we encounter on the title pages of dog-eared Penguin books. For some reason they all only went by their first initials, and there were plenty of them. H.D.F. Kitto, E.V. Rieu, A. R. Burn, C. Day Lewis, S. A. Handford. Of course I am assuming that behind the initials and the long years spent translating Greek and Latin, they also had scathing and maybe funny lives. Possibly not. Still, they interest me because they strike me as perhaps one last cohort of modern men who were soaked in the wisdom of antiquity, and made judgements, about it and life and everything, before the progressive mania set about forbidding impure thoughts. (Before it set about forbidding classical education at all. David West, translator of The Aeneid in prose in 1990, "notes with sorrow that his career would not now be possible, since the departments of Classics at Aberdeen and Sheffield are now defunct.") What scholar today, for example, is going to so far forget himself -- or forget what fiercely open-minded martinets are in charge of tenure -- as to write of the "resigned immobility of the steppe-mind"? H.D.F. Kitto did.

City life, where it developed, was always conscious of its background of country, mountains and sea, and country life knew the usages of the city. This encouraged a sane and balanced outlook; Classical Greece did not know at all the resigned immobility of the steppe-mind, and very little the short-sighted follies of the urban mob.

H.D.F. Kitto also wrote a travel book, "highly praised and little read," as the title page here allows, called In the Mountains of Greece (1933). Since I think he is a fine writer I would like to unearth this one. Oddly enough this is a bit of a challenge even in our information age. Will posterity hear warning bells? It probably has, long since. Both my Kindles are shall we say defunct, the local library no longer keeps old books, though to be fair this one is quite old, and even Amazon struggles. "Out of print -- limited availability."

Meantime, I forgot to show you the attractive porcelain dish that holds the peach. As luck would have it, the stamp on the back bears a classical reference. "Homer Laughlin, Genesee."

Shaker lemon bread

Now my fatheads, you mustn't imagine I have abandoned you. It's just that tearing up the carpet exposes one, not only to all that wood-floor craftsmanship circa 1893, but to unexpected necessities. One mops a lot, and rearranges furniture, and goes shopping for little things that have been on a "to do" list for ages, but never taken care of actually. For example I am looking forward to getting my first "Brown Betty" teapot in a few days. And then if one has to go out and buy a new router for the old exhausted computer, why, there's a day spent hooking up machinery and telephoning the Geek Squad for assistance. What luck that a new computer arrived in the mail, a hand me down from (wait for it) the ex-husband's ex-girlfriend's young son. (Thereby hangs a tale.) If only one could get the kid's picture off the home screen. It's a Mac. They were all artsy and everything.

So I haven't abandoned you. And you may have some lemon bread.

From The Best of Shaker Cooking, 1970.

1/2 cup shortening
1 and 1/2 cups sugar
2 eggs
1 and 1/2 cups sifted flour
1 and 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 cup milk
1/2 cup chopped nuts (optional)
Grated rind, and the juice, of one lemon

Preheat oven to 350 F. Beat together shortening and 1 cup of the sugar until light and fluffy. Add the eggs, one at a time, beating well after each. Sift the dry ingredients together and add alternately with milk to the sugar mixture, beating well after each addition. Add nuts and lemon rind.

Turn batter into greased 8 and 1/2 inch bread pan. Bake 50 to 60 minutes. Blend remaining sugar and the lemon juice. Pour over bread as soon as it comes from oven. Makes 1 loaf.

2010 James Mitchell cabernet, and craftsmanship

Measure twice, cut once. Take a look at the craftsmanship of a hardwood floor built, as far as I know, circa 1893.

Somehow I think the men who laid this out are resting easier, beyond the veil, now that their work is no longer covered by the barbarism of wall-to-wall carpeting. My next task is to wash it up and keep it up to what must have been their standards. And their women, too. Imagine the long skirts of farmers' wives, trailing over this floor as they set out Christmas dinners, or rocked the baby by the sunny east bay windows. 

I hope they all had a glass of wine, too. 2010 James Mitchell cabernet would have been nice.

Retail, $16, or about $11 on sale.

The Tudor year: July

My fatheads know that I sometimes like to import posts from other places -- my own, usually. 

Theme: survival



Lady Jane Grey's prayerbook, believed to be the one she carried to the scaffold. The pale writing at the bottom is a farewell message in her own hand to the lieutenant of the Tower, adjuring him to obey God's laws. (Image from the British Library online gallery.)

July 6: execution of Thomas More, 1535; death of Edward VI, 1553
July 10: proclamation of Jane Grey queen, 1553
July 12: Divorce of Henry VIII and Anne of Cleves, 1540; marriage of Henry to Catherine Parr, 1543
July 19: Proclamation of Mary Tudor queen, 1553
July 26: Marriage of Queen Mary to King Philip of Spain, 1554
July 29: Defeat of the Spanish armada, 1588

Political events moved quickly in an age when royalty -- and its henchmen -- still governed by divine right. Lady Jane Grey's famous nine days as Queen (she was a scion of the Tudor family through her descent from one of Henry VIII's sisters) sped by in mid-July, 1553, after the death of the teenaged king, Henry's long sought son, Edward. In quieter times July would be a month for the royal court to begin its summer progresses to freshly cleaned rural mansions. Smallpox, the plague, and the mysterious "Sweat" were the scourges of the season, especially in London. Filth, sickness, vermin, and bad teeth were a part of all people's lives to an extent that we can hardly imagine. So was hunger and the fear of hunger. In the country, a supply of beef and mutton would already have been slaughtered at midsummer, and would have to last, salted, till winter. St. Swithin's Day, July 15th, was a day for the farmer to look at the sky with apprehension: rain on this day was thought to mean a rainy summer and possibly a spoiled harvest.

Sources:

Emmison, F.G. Tudor Secretary: Sir William Petre at Court and Home. London and Chichester: Phillimore & Co. Ltd., 1970 (first published by Longmans, Green, and Co., 1961) p. 239

Ibid, p. 253

Fussell, George Edwin. The English Rural Labourer: His Home, Furniture, Clothing, and Food from Tudor to Victorian Times. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1975 (originally published by the Batchworth Press, London, 1949), p. 27.

Cressy, David. Bonfires and Bells: National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart England. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989, p. 28.

Summer: grilled chipotle chicken burgers, vodka marinara, pinot grigio

Ah, my fatheads. Summer. Need we say more? It is one of those wonderful words which apparently means, wonderfully, only itself. "From the Middle English sumer and the Old English sumor, akin to the Greek sommer and the Indo European base sem-, meaning summertime; whence Sanskrit sama, half year, season." Since we at Pluot like culinary things, we will mention that the word cinnamon also leaps to mind as the same type of word. Derive it how you will, it means only itself: "from the Hebrew qinnamon, cinnamon."

Somer is the time for us to cook something very easy for dinner, and to drink a refreshing and surprisingly assertive pinot grigio to accompany our meal. We say surprisingly assertive because we have long since described the pinot grigio (aping Winston Churchill's dismissal of some tepid politician), as "not a grape to go tiger-shooting with." This one at least did well beside a grilled chicken burger. Graffigna Reserve pinot grigio, 2012.

The chicken burgers are very easy to prepare. In a large bowl, combine: 2 pounds ground chicken, about a half teaspoon dried thyme, a half teaspoon dried tarragon -- more of these to taste, if you like, or any different herbs you like -- salt and pepper to taste also, and about a half teaspoon chipotle chili pepper. We picked this up in the spice aisle at the grocery store because we finally ran out of that delicious merquen, or Chilean smoked chili pepper flakes.

Combine the meat and spices thoroughly, and shape all into 8 patties. Brush them with olive oil. Let them rest on a plate while you ready your charcoal grill, using that divine chimney starter which is so convenient and such a saving of briquettes, and which obviates the need for lighter fluid. 

When the coals are hot, dump them carefully into your grill, place the rack over them, and lay on your chicken burgers, arranging them nicely over the evenly piled coals. Place the lid over the grill, with the vents on the lid slightly open. Check your burgers in about ten to fifteen minutes, after which time they should have baked through. All that remains is for you to flip them over and let them sear to golden brown, since now you will leave the lid off and allow the flames to leap up a little.

In the meantime, you can put together a vodka-tomato sauce, following the recipe in The La Bonne Soupe Cookbook (Jean-Paul Picot and Doris Tobias, 1997), or you can open a jar of Mezzeta's "Napa Valley Bistro" Creamy Vodka Marinara Sauce, which if you do that, I won't tell a soul.

From whence-ever you derive your vodka-tomato sauce, you will have it simmering gently just for ten minutes or so while your burgers finish on the grill, and then you will bring them in and slip them into the bubbling sauce. Once everything is heated through and smothered and juicy, you may dish up. Serve your burgers open faced, with toasted buns and a salad, or over rice or noodles with perhaps a side of some zucchini or mushrooms you have slathered in olive oil and grilled over the dying coals. Pour the pinot grigio.

And lastly for the purists among you, here is the recipe for Penne à la Vodka, Pasta Quills with Vodka Sauce, from La Bonne Soupe. It takes about half an hour to make. Experienced cooks may enjoy streamlining this to suit their own convenience, simply noting that the four necessary ingredients are tomato, vodka, cream, and herbs. Since in the middle of the recipe we all find out that we are required to have a cup of tomato sauce already on hand, I grant everyone the dispensation of being allowed to open a can of stewed tomatoes to stand in for the pre-prep "sauce."

La Bonne Soupe's Penne à la Vodka

2 Tbsp. olive oil
4 cloves garlic, diced
3 cups plum tomatoes, peeled, seeded, chopped
1/2 cup vodka
1 cup tomato sauce
1/3 cup chopped fresh basil or 1/2 teaspoon dried
1 cup heavy cream
salt and freshly ground pepper to taste

 Heat the oil in a 2 quart heavy pot. Add the garlic and cook, stirring, until softened but not browned, about 2 minutes. Add the tomatoes and cook, stirring, until they have softened, about 5 minutes. Add the vodka, raise the heat, and cook until the vodka is absorbed, about 10 minutes. Reduce the heat and add the tomato sauce, basil, cream, and salt and pepper. Cook, stirring, until everything is reduced to 3 cups, about 12 minutes. Remove from heat and serve ladled over pasta.

New cocktail -- the Michigan Sky

It's a simple affair. Muddle a small handful of blueberries (Michigan blueberries, of course) in the bottom of a highball glass, then mix the juice of half a lemon, a dash of sugar or sugar syrup (half a teaspoon, no more), and a jigger of rum in a separate mixing glass. Stir with ice, then strain over the muddled blueberries in the first glass. Stir this up and serve, perhaps garnished with a floating fresh blueberry or two. Here at Pluot we like our cocktails very pure, with no carbonated beverages added -- unless it might be champagne -- no shaking in an ice-filled shaker to anaesthetize flavor, and certainly no ice added afterward, to melt and dilute the spirit.

We name this one after the blue of the berry and the blue of the Michigan sky. Do rum and blueberries go together? Why not, if rum is what you packed in your suitcase for your little trip? 

Cheers. I'm thinking I might redecorate my office in the style of the palace at ancient Knossos. Remember those frescoes pictured in your college art history textbooks, showing very pleased-looking griffons relaxing among tall waving lilies, blue dolphins cavorting in white tile seas, happy side-view (Egyptian style) people fishing or diving or carrying jars, and the black-haired lass with the enormous eyes called "La Parisienne"? Wouldn't that be nice to look at, to enter into every day? I don't know what put the idea of Knossos into my head; maybe it came from reading Peter Green's The Laughter of Aphrodite (1965) on the pontoon. Anyway I came home thinking this place needs furbishing up and what better start to make than with the simple fresh colors and pure lines abundant in the decor of King Minos' palace? I could even name the house Knossos. My fatheads know I like the fancy of naming where you live, even if where you live is most emphatically not some sort of estate.   

Ancient Crete was overrun and the civilization of the griffons destroyed, it seems, by the warlike Mycenaeans from mainland Greece sometime around the year 1400 BC. I wonder if the king at Knossos opened the ports to them, because he felt it his divine charge to fundamentally transform the nation? And all his court and most of the nobility agreed?

My fatheads! I cannot tell you how marvelous

How marvelous it is, that is, to suddenly learn that one's favorite, one's only vacation spot is available precisely when one has taken a week's vacation from work already. Of course, one says Yes, and books the cottage. One awakens to the dawn coming up like thunder, as Kipling would say, or at any rate to the dawn coming up like a really bright light outside a cottage bedroom window. The bedroom is done in pale cream with softly flowered curtains, and has artworks and Modge-podged puzzles of swans on the walls. Look carefully out the right-hand window and you will spy the lake and the greenery beckoning.

One awakens to the water lilies floating,

 

and to the timeless look of that ancient summer porch. It may sound trite, but when I first revisited this place as an adult two years ago, during an election year, I thought what a pity it was that Barack Obama never had a childhood that included so basic an American experience as a week or two at a summer cottage. It would have gone far, I should hope, toward inoculating him against some of the hate. In fact I wonder how he would cope now, if some political event required him to speak as though he knew what a summer cottage was. He can't throw a baseball and he doesn't know rudimentary poker language -- remember his gaffe-threat "don't call my bluff"? I think even if he were well-buttressed by his friendly teleprompter, he couldn't help but rush to reveal the holes in his soul. Probably mispronounce bluegill. A pity.

Anyway, I think also I will have to start writing a series of mysteries, featuring the detective Robin Michigan, who solves crimes, usually murders of course, in the brutal and dog-eat-dog world of ... southwest Michigan wine and tourism country.

Let us set the scene. The detective's parents, or rather no, perhaps grandparents (tempus does fugit, you know) will have been hippies who came to Michigan in the '60s after having grown disenchanted with the rigors of law school across the great Lake, at the University of Chicago. (Maybe they had a bellyful of Bill Ayers. But no. Being hippies, they might have liked him.) They decided to rebel against society's strictures, among other ways, by changing their name from whatever you like -- Brizzolara, let's say, or Porter -- to Michigan, the name of their adopted state. Robin was named for her mother Mudgeon's favorite bird. Ah, but was Robin a boy or a girl? Is the detective a man or a woman? Could we attempt to leave the reader always guessing? That might be a good "hook" for our series, provided we don't slip and start using pronouns right away. Be it known we want nothing to do with any LGBT nonsense, although I may have pre-killed any chances for publication in the lefty-wefty book industry simply by asserting so. 

Now, what crimes can we expect Detective Robin Michigan to be faced with, in bucolic, blueberry-strewn Van Buren and Allegan counties? I seem to see (as Lucia would say dreamily) possibilities in that gorgeous yacht slowly prowling up the Black River into South Haven on a soaring blue summer day. It's the white one, with the elegant broad black strip along its side, discreetly masking its lower deck windows. Perhaps it is piloted by a winery tycoon pulling into his berth to investigate malfeasance in the account books. Or, what about the big discount store just off I-196, amid the hotels and the gas stations? I seem to see a stock clerk pulling an empty pallet back to the receiving dock, and discovering the body of the much-loathed store manager lying facedown, who had been alive and well and holding court five minutes before. Then there are possibilities in the little shacks and trailers all around the inland lakes, Saddle Lake and Little Bear and Clear and Magician, any one of which could be meth labs and all of which look like they are. Or, perhaps a famed horticulturalist could discover an entirely new species of orchid on a hike in the woods, and then when she got back to her cottage she might find all her specimens had been stolen except that one. Incidentally, below please find not an orchid but, I think, a Turk's cap lily.  

So you see, my fatheads, it is all too marvelous. Look what a few days' relaxing will do for the brain. And, one hopes, for the soul.  

Oh by the way. The wine is good, too. 2013 Fenn Valley "Cabaret Rosé." Retail, about $13.