Great Meals

An older gentleman told me that sermons were like his wife’s meals.  Most pastors probably think (or at least wish) that all their sermons were great, that all of them had a lasting impact on members of the congregation.  Pastors often complain about people walking out the door and within a day, if it even takes that long, forgetting what the sermon was about.  As if it is a fault with the congregants.  The pastor thinks he is the next Rick Warren, or Bill Hybels, or Max Lucado, or Billy Graham, or C.H. Spurgeon, or Jonathan Edwards, or George Whitefield, or Philip Melanchthon, or John Chrysostom.  So the gentleman was asked mid-week by an elder in the church about the pastor’s previous sermon, with which the elder was deeply impressed.  He couldn’t recall it.  He was asked if he paid attention, if there were any sermons that he could recall.  It was in that context that he said sermons were like his wife’s meals.  All of them sustained him that day.  Most of them were tasty, and he does not remember ones that weren’t, but he thought that probably some weren’t.  Most of them were made with planning, forethought, and delivered with care—at least he doesn’t remember the ones that weren’t.  Still you know, he told the elder, none of them sustained him for more than a day.  And thinking back on all the years of her serving him meals, he hardly remembers any of them.  Yet he is alive and healthy today, so they must have done what they were supposed to do.

While I too would be hard pressed to recall any great sermons, I can recall some great meals.

Fifteen years ago I ate for the first time at The Manitou.  It is a small restaurant on M22 north of Crystal Lake.  It is almost hidden on the south side of the road right near Long Lake (there are dozens of Long Lakes in Michigan).  It specializes in local fare with fresh ingredients made from scratch.  They only do dinner.  After they seat you, while looking at the menu you are given a small crudités tray with dip.  With that alone, you know this is a special restaurant.  Then the music.  I remember that first visit, listening to Shawn Colvin “Sunny Came Home.”  The music is what is known in the radio world as Adult Contemporary.  The menu includes enough items for those who are not adventurous.  But even that isn’t plain.  Please order soup.  I can remember great French Onion soup, and Southwest Tomato soup, and Potato Cream soup.  I almost always get fish, almost always whitefish since that is always fresh, never frozen.  Usually I have it broiled, but once (shame on me) I had it beer-battered deep fried.  Whitefish is too good to have that done to it.  But I had never before (or since) had it deep fried, so I wanted to try it at The Manitou of all places.  Prices are affordable for me.  An “Early Bird” (which, being interpreted, means “senior citizen”) menu is available 4:30-6, with prices right around $12 for an entrée with soup or salad (and get the soup, especially in the cooler months).  Portions are smaller, which means they are right-sized.  You can also order from the full supper menu, with prices right around $22.  I think The Manitou is terribly romantic.

About eight years ago I ate at a restaurant in Alexandria, Virginia.  I was at a philosophy conference.  I can’t recall, nor would I be able to sleuth it and find out, the name of the restaurant.  But I remember the meal.  Spinach linguine with morel mushrooms in a Marsala sauce.   One might expect that there might be half a dozen morels, maybe sliced, in the pasta dish.  No, there were fifteen or eighteen.  Granted they weren’t the three inch long morels; they were more like half that size to two inches in length.  Never before and never since have I been at a restaurant that served morels.  Maybe I just don’t get out enough.  That is true.  I don’t eat out a lot.  For the $15 I might spend at a restaurant, I can fix three very good meals, with equally exquisite ingredients.  Still, at some point it seems I would have been at a restaurant serving a dish containing morels.

Thirteen years ago in Switzerland we did a day long hike.  We were staying in a chalet in Huemoz, in the Villars-Gryon area, just east of Lake Geneva about twenty miles.  We had some friends drop us off in Solalex for a day long hike.  Prior to going to Switzerland we had seen an episode of Rick Steves’ Europe Through the Back Door where he visited some small villages near the area we would be staying.  He raved about this small “Heidi-like” village, Taveyanne, that had a small restaurant worth the hike.  For that reason, Taveyanne was on our itinerary for the hike, our lunch stop.  The restaurant is small.  Were it in America, the local health department would shut it down.  Inside is a round hearth where some of the cooking is done.  There is also seating outside, with the views, well, it is Switzerland.  It was early June, and we sat outside.  The menu is written on a chalk board.  Two choices.  Jambon cru, and Champions au croute.  For my wife and fifth and sixth grade children, I ordered Jambon cru, thinking it was cured ham: thin slices of ham served with fresh bread and an assortment of vegetables.  I ordered them that because I knew they didn’t like Champions au croute, mushrooms served in a brown sauce over hard bread.  My meal was excellent, three different kinds of mushrooms.  The sauce was delicious, soaking into the hard bread.  But I was wrong on their meal.  What they got was more like prosciutto, a dry-cured ham very different from Southern or Virginia or salt-cured ham.  Thin slices of Jambon cru served with bread and some fresh vegetables, including small onions.  They ate the bread.  I ate the Jambon and onions, in addition to my Champions au croute.  I thought it all delicious.  They were hungry the rest of the hike.  And it was a long hike, perhaps twelve or fifteen miles.  From Taveyanne we went over to Encex, down to Bretaye, up to Chamossaire.  At Chamossaire Beth and Jayne boarded a train back to Villars, then walked down to Huemoz .  Kevin and I continued our hike down the back side of Chamossaire eventually to our chalet in Huemoz.

Until I was twenty-four, I did not like mushrooms.  Until I was eighteen or nineteen, I liked almost no vegetables.  If they count, the only vegetables I liked were corn and potatoes, what some might call livestock feed.  I grew up in poverty, at least what various government and social service agencies would call poverty.  I was never hungry, at least not involuntarily so.  If I was hungry, it was because I refused what my mother served.  At our house, with very limited funds (but not limited resources—my mother was very resourceful), you ate what was served or didn’t eat at all.  And if food was put on your plate, you finished it completely.  It was a sin to put food on your plate, not eat it all, and scrape some into the trash.  We didn’t scrape food into the trash.  If anything, we scraped it into a bowl to take out to feed the dog.  Our dog was hungry.  I remember sometime in my early elementary days having my mother put peas on my plate.  Similar to the scene in “A River Runs Through It” of the boy required to eat his oatmeal (“man has been eating God’s oats for a thousand years; it’s not the place of an eight-year old boy to change that tradition”), I could not leave the table until I finished my peas.  Finally when they were cold, and probably worse tasting than had I got them hot, I bolted them down.  Then I ran to the bathroom and puked it all up.  Involuntarily, as I thought.  The taste was so disgusting I just puked, like retching when you smell fetid roadkill too intimately.

Sunday dinners at our house were one of the following: fried chicken (mmm better-than-finger-lickin' good), baked breaded pork chops (“Shake ‘n Bake, ‘cause I helped!”), or roast beef.   Almost always it included mom's home made rolls, her version of Parker House rolls, but the best.  To this day, anyone who has her rolls declares them the best they have ever had.  If we are having a family gathering for a meal, her task is always the rolls.  As well, no one makes roast beef as good as my mom.  It was a cheap cut of beef; we were poor.  Slow cooked in an iron Dutch oven with potatoes, carrots, and onions.  It was so tender and tasty, the meat flaked apart.  No knife was needed.  But I couldn’t take the carrots and onions.  I barely could take the potatoes.  I didn’t mind potatoes baked or mashed.  But in a roast or stew where they took on the flavors of the other ingredients—that was not to my tastes.  If the Sunday dinner was roast beef, my mom made enough for leftovers.  Then what would she do?  She’d destroy them, at least in the mind of this twelve year-old.  She ran all the leftover beef, potatoes, carrots, and onions through a grinder and turned it into what she called “hash.”  She’d spread it into a 9”x13” baking dish, top it with ketchup, and bake it.  That is what we’d have Monday or Tuesday or both.  That was another day I was voluntarily hungry unless there were any of her rolls leftover, which fortunately she did not grind into the hash.

It was after I moved away from home that my repertoire of edible foods expanded.  It expanded quickly.  Within a year I learned to like almost every kind of vegetable.  I was at a place where I had to eat what was served and couldn't afford to buy my own groceries.  I tend not to like canned vegetables (especially peas; serve me canned peas to this day and I am likely to dash to the bathroom retching).  I like most vegetables fresh.  For cooked vegetables, I like them fresh or frozen.  I am sure I would now eat my mom’s hash.  I am also pretty sure I would not relish it; in fact, I might still go hungry if that is all that was on offer.  Now if I go to spend a day with my parents, my mom likes to fix her version of an Irish dinner.  Cabbage, onions, celery, potatoes, and usually smoked sausage, sometimes corned beef.  Pretty good stuff.  I used to hate casseroles.  Like my mom’s hash, I didn’t like things all mixed up.  I am sure there is some Levitical prohibition against eating foods all mixed up (like keeping wool away from flax, or dairy away from meat).  If she made a stew, I’d separate the meat from the potatoes (both of which I could be compelled to eat) from the onions, peas, beans, carrots, and tomatoes (none of which I would eat).  Now casseroles are one of my favorites, especially from October through April.  My wife makes excellent casseroles.  It is almost impossible to find a restaurant that serves casseroles.  Now that would be a niche market.  Making single-sized servings freshly of casseroles.  I have been to restaurants that serve Shepherd’s pie, for example.  But that is rare.  Maybe casserole is too much “home style,” and if people wanted home style they’d just stay home and not go out to eat.  Just as likely, no one wants to wait nearly an hour for the casserole to cook.

When I was perhaps five years old, a memorable meal I had was in the Hankinsons’ work shed, around November 17, around midnight.  My dad and his buddies got three deer, and had a deer cutting party at the Hankinsons’, very close family friends, the sort of friends that you could call on in the worst winter weather if you were stuck in a ditch.  It was a cool night in Borculo at the Hankinsons’.  The men were cutting up the deer, women were packaging it.  Part way into the project, Marilyn brought out to the shed an electric skillet and some butter.  Thin slices of backstraps were sautéed.  Excuse me, we didn’t use the word sautéed; rather they were fried.  I have had lots of venison since then.  But I haven’t been able to replicate the taste from that night of (if I were running a restaurant) “medallions of venison sautéed medium rare in clarified butter, served with red-skinned potatoes and Brussels sprouts.”

Finally, I mention something that was not a meal, at least it should not be considered a meal in itself although I could eat enough of it to consider it a meal in itself.  Georgia Wright made the best German Chocolate cake.  I called her Grandma Wright.  She was not physically my grandma, but a grandma to me nonetheless.  When I got my first deer with a bow at age sixteen, she helped me drag it out of the woods and load it into the trunk of my car to drive out the two-lane behind her farm.  She made great fried chicken, from free range birds (the one’s in her yard), butchered with her own hands.  When I was in high school, in the fall I’d head up north to Hoxeyville most weekends.  If Grandma Wright thought I’d be coming up, she’d make her German Chocolate cake.  One weekend I was there when I hadn’t been there the weekend before and she told me she had made it the previous week expecting me.  It was probably not just the German Chocolate cake that tasted so good.  It was her coffee that she made to go with it.  She made coffee in a vacuum pot.  A vacuum coffee maker has two vessels, an upper and a lower.  The principle of a vacuum coffee maker is to heat water in the lower vessel of the brewer until expansion forces the water through a narrow tube into the upper vessel containing coffee grounds. When the lower vessel has more or less emptied itself, the pot is removed from the stove.  The heated water by gravity runs over the ground coffee through a strainer back into the lower chamber from which the brewed coffee can be poured.  I have never known anyone else who made coffee with the vacuum method.  Compared to contemporary coffee snobs, her coffee would be declassee.  She wasn’t using some special roasted bean, or roasting her own beans.  It was probably Chase & Sanborn or Hills Brothers for God’s sake.  And it tasted so good.  Maybe it was because most of the brewed coffee I drank (and I drank more instant coffee than brewed coffee back then) was brewed in a percolator, which was usually too hot and probably boiled and burnt the coffee.  The vacuum method did not burn the coffee.  Her coffee and her German Chocolate cake are for me a taste of autumn.

Another Failed New Year's Resolution

I have been feeling remorse or regret the last two months.  I succeeded in my New Year’s resolution all the way until the end of July.  Then I fell off the wagon.  Not in the usual sense.  But I failed.  I couldn’t carry it through.  And I didn’t think I set the bar too high.  I thought it a simple, but deeply important task.  I was going to remember and name one person each day of the year who has had an important positive impact on my life.  I would write their name in my pocket calendar, one each day.  Pretty simple.  I am over half a century old.  In that time, surely there are three hundred sixty-five people in this non-leap year that I could name.  Of course I know the names of three hundred sixty-five people.  But these had to be people who made a positive impact on me.  I got to two hundred twelve: thirty-one in January, March, May and July; twenty-eight in February; thirty in April and June.  Then I ground to a halt.  Actually it was grinding to a halt starting in May.  Getting through June and July was pretty tough.  By the end of July, I was stuck, couldn’t go on, fell off the wagon of my resolution.

January was easy.  I began with family, my dad on the first, my mom on the second, my wife on the third, my children on the fourth and fifth.  I named folks who have had a deep impact on my character, personality and maturity.  These included close friends, and spiritual, intellectual, and coaching leaders who contributed much to my growth as a person.  I identified brothers, sisters, their spouses and children.  I identified team mates and teachers from college.  By February I was reflecting on friends from high school, almost all of whom I have had almost no contact with since graduating from high school.  They probably, most of them, don’t remember me, or if they could if prompted probably wouldn’t unless prompted.  I also was getting on to students of mine for whom I had some mentoring role in their lives, with the natural consequence that I was mentored by them as well.  In March I was on to colleagues I have had, few of whom I was close with, but all of whom I had cordial relations with and all of whom challenged me to think deeper or more carefully.  By April I was getting on to people that made a generally positive impact on me, but for whom I had, shall I say, less warm feelings.  Still, in April there were several named toward whom I have very warm feelings. In April, I had to start digging deeper into my memory.  I began to recall other high school classmates, elementary, junior high, and high school teachers that were good for me and to me.  In addition, having moved to a new area of the country just nine months previously, I was now meeting new people who were beginning to impact me, had been very kind to me, were beginning to welcome me into their lives.

I was starting to think of people who have impacted me but they would have never known it.  For example, I named some living authors of books I had read, whose words and thoughts made a very deep impact on me, some of whom I have met (David James Duncan, Julia Annas, Martha Nussbaum, Nick Smith, Mark McPherran, Nick Wolterstorff, Richard Mouw, Al Plantinga, Richard Swinburne, Alasdair MacIntyre, Ed Dobson, among others) but most of whom I have never met in person (Donald Miller, Philip Yancey, Anne Lamott, Rob Bell, Saul Kripke, among others).  By May and June I was naming dead authors, only one of whom I had spent some time with before they died: Flannery O’Connor, C.S. Lewis, Gregory Vlastos, R.M. Hare (the one I spent time with), Ludwig Wittgenstein, Donald Davidson, G.E.M. Anscombe, J.L. Austin, Bertrand Russell, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Rene Descartes, among others.

Clearly, I was getting desperate.  I began to expand my criteria for “an important positive impact on my life.”  I began to include those who had a positive impact by being an example of the kind of person I did not want to become: an unhappy and mean-spirited junior high teacher; a closed-minded, dogmatic and authoritarian pastor.

And now that I am thinking about it, I am beginning to recall more.  I am going back to the beginning of August and starting to add more names.  As well, I am including people whose names I can’t recall, and maybe never even learned: the eighty year old mailman we had in Toledo, the UPS delivery guy (was it Steve?) for our neighborhood in Toledo; Tim and Clyde from Nashville, gentlemen African-American waiters twenty years older than me who taught me in the early 1980s how to be a successful waiter at the very expensive Marino’s Italian restaurant, where we waiters wore white jackets and bow-ties.  I now have August just about complete, and am ready to move on to September.  The regret and remorse are diminishing.  Maybe I’ll just pull this one off.  Check back with me the beginning of January.  Try it.  It is much harder than getting three hundred sixty-five Facebook “friends,” most of whom are not friends but barely acquaintances.

I am, in the process, lowering the standards or broadening my horizon on my criteria for “an important positive impact on my life.”  I am beginning to realize that there were many people who had an important impact on my life without being in-my-face sort of people.  Ben and John at Japanese Auto Repair in Toledo, the most honest and trustworthy car repairmen I have ever known, who always had time to chat with me about anything.  Paul, Mike, and John, guys who ran bicycle shops where you could hang out and drink coffee with them and they didn’t make you feel like you were getting in the way of business.  Housekeeping staff at places I have worked who have been kind and friendly, perhaps too because I respected them and their work.  Doctors and dentists who treated me as a person, not as a thing on a production line.  Clerks at stores or shops I frequented, who genuinely seemed happy to see me, got to know my name, treated me like I mattered to them.

I am now down to the last week of September and, as I write, today is the last day of September.  In Michigan, it is the last day of trout fishing season on the small streams for the small trout.  Whether I make it or not all the way to December 31 identifying three hundred sixty-five different folks who had an important positive impact on my life, I will, in my first post in January 2012, list all the names I have.  And if I missed your name, you will have to let me know about it.

Why is Self-Control So Hard?

From Kindergarten through much of elementary school (in the 1960s), grade cards that I had to bring home to get signed by my parents (and the teachers were wise to forgeries) included not only grades (A, B, C, D, E) for reading, writing, and math, but also grades (O-utstanding, S-atisfactory, U-nsatisfactory) for behavior and attitudes.  One of the behavior and attitude areas was Self-Control, and I almost invariably got a U.  Didn't matter that I got all As on the academic subjects.  My parents would have been prouder had I gotten Cs on academic work and an O on self-control.  In retrospect, I don't think it was lack of self-control; I think it was a combination of smart-aleckiness and quick-wittedness.  I could catch teachers in their grammatical and mathematical mistakes, find humor in their amphibolous sentence constructions, or identify puns based on homophones (like the word “homophone” itself: a telephone for a gay male; that would get me sent to the principal’s office).  I was not a fully passive, fully compliant kid.  I have a history of interest in the topic of self-control.  It ended up being around the fringes of my Ph.D. dissertation on Aristotle on reasoning about action.  I ended up publishing a couple of scholarly articles on akrasia.  Akrasia is the Greek word that refers to the failure to carry out our intentions (a “lack of” krasia “power”).  It is that puzzling notion of failing to do what I want to do, and not because someone else is restraining me.  I know now that tonight I do not want to eat half a bag of potato chips.  And I know that even when, tonight, I open up the bag of chips.  But once I open up the bag of chips, smell the aroma, taste the first few, and get distracted watching bull riding on the television (and get distracted thinking of the amphiboly in that phrase), I end up eating half the bag of chips.

A couple of weeks ago while looking at my library's new books shelf, a book caught my attention.  Daniel Akst, We Have Met the Enemy: Self-Control in an Age of Excess (New York: Penguin Press, 2011).  On the cover is a chocolate covered donut with sprinkles, but attached to the donut is a lit fuse, making the donut look like an explosive.  It wasn’t the cover that attracted my attention; it was the title and subtitle.  The subtitle captures the theme of the book well.  There were good old days when self-control was not as hard.  Think of the days before there were bags of potato chips, days when almost all your food was made from scratch.  You could not just reach in the cupboard, grab a box or bag of ready-to-eat food, and stuff yourself.  You had to plan.  Go down to the cellar to get a couple of potatoes, get a fire going in the stove, get out the fry pan, put in a scoop of lard or bacon grease, slice the potatoes thin, put them in the pan and fry them for thirty minutes.  In the mean time, you have not milked two of your cows, or hoed the weeds in your bean patch, and now your butter or bean supply is going to be short.  Now we live in an age of excess, where distractions to our intentions are all over the place (like the internet on which you are now reading this post).  It is just so easy to be distracted, to procrastinate, to not do what we say we really want to do.

Akst ranges over scholarly work from philosophers, psychologists, and brain scientists.  Humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences.  For instance, near the beginning of the book (around p. 13) he reports Harry Frankfurt's distinction between first order and second order desires.  First order desires are immediate, felt, action-motivating desires.  Second order desires are desires we have about our desires.  Example: "I desire to eat a deep-fried peanut butter, banana, and bacon sandwich" expresses a first order desire, while "I want not to desire to eat such a fat bomb" expresses a second order desire.  Think of the person who has an addiction, and wants to not have the addiction.  On almost the last page of the book, Frankfurt is referred to again.  In between he refers to Homer, Hesiod, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Hebrew Bible, New Testament, and numerous 20th century philosophers who have had important things to say about akrasia and self-control.  From the social sciences he relates large quantities of studies, many of which suggest that humans do not have as much control over their actions as they sometimes suppose. One thing I found fascinating were the studies on "priming."  If I hand you a warm cup of coffee or hot chocolate, and ask you to describe a memorable grade school teacher, I will much more likely hear from you about a teacher that you liked, enjoyed, for whom you have "warm" feelings.  If I hand you a glass of ice water and ask the same question, I will much more likely hear from you about a teacher that you didn't like, didn't enjoy, for whom you have "cold" feelings.  Were I to ask you why you selected that teacher to describe, you would not recognize that I primed you to select that one.  We are not as free or in control as we sometimes think we are.  From the natural sciences, Akst relates much research about recent work on neurophysiology, on functions of different parts of the brain, on neuronal activity in the various parts of the brain, and in varying effects of chemical neurotransmitters (like dopamine and serotonin).  For example functional magnetic resonance imaging of the brains of murderers shows a much decreased, compared to the rest of the population, neuronal activity in the pre-frontal cortices (the part of the brain that has executive, decision-making functions).  Reduced dopamine concentrations in the prefrontal cortex are thought to enhance distraction, to make it easier to not stay on task.  Is your lack of self-control more a matter of natural, uncontrollable aspects of your brain, or is it more a matter of your history of decisions, your environment, things you can control?  We know that serotonin levels are correlated with depressive states.  Serotonin levels can be adjusted chemically (for example, with Prozac).  Serotonin levels can also be adjusted by psychobehavioral therapy (helping the person to identify events that contributed toward the depression, and modifying the behavior to diminish symptoms and feelings of depression).  Prozac is cheaper than behavioral therapy (one therapy session costs as much as a two month supply of Prozac), so for insurance companies it is the favored remedy.  So even if you think it is nature (“I have low serotonin, therefore I am depressed”), it doesn’t follow that you can’t do something about it.  You can take Prozac, hoping it functions analogous to training wheels on a bicycle.  It keeps you from crashing while you learn to balance eventually without it.  In any case, we don’t have all the control of ourselves that we sometimes think we have.

While Akst ranges over the work of scholars and researchers, it is not meant to be a book for them.  It is a book for a learned audience, for people who continue to be curious about themselves and the folks around them.  I dare say that folks in leadership positions (supervisors, coaches), and in positions where they need to influence others for decision making (salespersons), ought to find the book fascinating.  Too, those who are being supervised and being influenced by others might want to read it to gain a greater measure of self-control in their lives.  And for those of you who, unlike me, have issues of self-control, you might learn a few tips to help you in your second order desires.  One such tip is the notion of “pre-commitment.”  In our cool, calm, collected moments, we arrange aspects of our lives in order to fend off in advance likely temptations.  We don’t go to the grocery store hungry.  We buy a year-long membership at the health club, and pay in advance for a personal trainer, so we don’t skip out on exercise.  We have someone else handle our finances and give us a weekly allowance so we don’t blow our family budget on beer and the lottery.  We drive an indirect route to work so we don’t go by the convenience store to pick up a pack of cigarettes and a jumbo soda.  We put a photo of ourselves when we were thin on the refrigerator to keep us from reaching in for the ice cream.  We keep photos of our spouse and children on our desk or in our wallet to keep us from pursuing liaisons that would be destructive to our spouse and children (and ourselves).

Now where did that bag of chips go?  Did someone hide them from me?

Smalltown Bandshell Concerts

Wednesday evening I went to a small town fifteen miles from home to attend their Wednesday evening summer concert in the park series.  I didn’t find out about the concerts until a week ago.  Last week I listened to barbershop music, something I haven’t heard in thirty-five years.  A barbershop choral society, a group of about thirty men, performed eight or ten song.  After a short intermission, five or six barbershop quartets performed three songs each, interspersed with bad jokes.  By bad jokes, I mean the ones that make you groan as much as laugh.  For example: “the title of our next song is ‘Don’t Worry, You’ll Get Your Blanket Back’.”  “No wait, it is ‘Fear Not, For Thy Comforter Shall Return’.”  This week it was Irish and Scots music.

It was another beautiful evening.  The concert began at 7 pm, and they begin on time.  Last week we got to the parking lot right at 7 pm and they were already singing.  So this week we got there ten minutes early.  They run a tight ship.  We joined the over two hundred folks there sitting on collapsible chairs, placing our lawn chairs about in the middle, about thirty yards from the stage.  A week ago with the barbershop music, we were among the few in a crowd of about five hundred who did not have white hair and need a rolling grocery bag cart to haul our lawn chairs.  This week, the average age seemed to be just below our age, and a noticeably smaller audience.  Last week’s audience was also better dressed, with many more having their hair “done” at a salon.  This week, more looked like their hair was “done” at a saloon.  We were facing the northwest, the stage and band shell facing the southeast.  It was partly cloudy, about 80 degrees.  As the music played, I tilted my head back and watched the clouds.  One large cloud was shaped like North America, complete with Gulf of Mexico, Central America down to Panama, Maine and Maritime Provinces, Alaska and the Aleutian chain.  A stunning likeness, as Irish and Scots folk songs played.  The local high school marching band was practicing a quarter mile away, and at times it seems that their drum line was playing a rhythm that matched what was coming from the stage.  The vibrantly red-headed woman who was lead singer, and played bodhran, guitar, and bouzouki (one Irish, one Spanish, one Greek), moved to the rhythm of the marching band drum line.  There was an occasional gentle breeze which, with the low humidity, felt especially good.  Sometimes the breeze would bring in the smells of a nearby dairy, just enough to be pleasant and not offensive.  Just to the northeast of the stage were some tennis and basketball courts.  On the basketball court a sixth grade boys’ basketball team was running drills and practicing with a coach.  They all seemed so coordinated for their age.  They ran plays and made moves that I can’t remember us making when we were their age.  They were skilled.  A couple of seven year old boys rode bikes back a forth a few times in front of the stage, never in anyone’s way, lugging bags of popcorn until they were empty, and then throwing the bags into the trash can.  When the concert ended at 9 pm, the sky was clear and it was 72 degrees.

The band included three men in their mid-fifties to mid-sixties, and a woman in her late-thirties. One man played guitar and sang.  Another played a variety of flutes and penny whistles, playing the lead lines.  A third played fiddle.  The woman, red-headed as I said, late-thirties as I said, playing bodhran, guitar, and bouzouki as I said, was attractive as most folks I know count attractiveness, or at least as most Americans would, who are also most folks I know.  And she had a good voice.  There was a distinct Irish accent to it, and I couldn’t tell if it was native or affected.  The band’s website says that when you hear her singing, “be prepared to be transformed to a different time and place.  Let the music help your soul to remember your own past, present, and future.”  Perhaps.  Perhaps her three band mates wrote that, for when they play their instruments and hear her sing, observing her attractiveness at twenty years or more their junior, they are transformed to a different time and place.  Not that anyone would or could reasonably blame them.

They were entertaining.  The musicians were skilled and accomplished.  I don’t know enough to detect minor mistakes, and I certainly didn’t detect any mistakes.  The vocals were pleasant.  They also told some bad (groaner) jokes.  For example: “Two Irishmen walked out of a bar.”  For many people when they think of Irish & Scots folk music, they think of the fun and happy dance songs, the jigs, reels and waltzes.  Most of the dance songs are non-vocalized.  Some of the sung music tells quite funny stories, some with ironic twists at the end.  Much of the vocal music are Caoineadh (pronounced kwee-nah, meaning crying) songs.  To me (with my weak musical knowledge), these are played in a minor key, and at a slower pace.  Given that many of these songs originate from the mid-nineteenth century, a common theme is exile or emigration, a friend, family member, or lover who is taken away or decides to go away and never returns.  They are songs about hopes crushed, desires unmet, wanting left empty.  You have to have a pretty hard heart to listen to those songs and not feel the pain.  In barbershop music, I doubt that there are any blues, any sad songs; they are all fun and games.  I like Irish and Scots folk music better, and the range of emotions in the music might be an important contributing factor to my preference.

Less than a week ago at the same band shell and for a different event, a local festival and not the Wednesday concert in the park series, I listened to a country music band whose subtitle is ”Real American Country Music.”  They played 1950s and 1960s style country music.  On their Facebook page they describe themselves as “Neo classic Country music band.  For fans of Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, Buck Owens, Lefty Frizzell, Merle Haggard, Jimmy Rogers, and so on and so forth.”  The band was composed of five guys ages 18-32, three of whom, from banter between songs, seemed to have been together for a dozen years, while the newest member, bass player Matt, playing an acoustic bass with an electronic pick-up, looked to be all of eighteen years old.  He had blushed-red cheeks, a big cowboy hat pulled down over his ears like the way the bull riders wear them.  I guessed he was the newest member because he had a music stand set in front of him with sheet music of the songs.  He focused on the sheet music, and between each song flipped the front sheet to the back of the stack. The lead singer is Czech, which has to be rare for country music since few Czechs settled anywhere south of the Mason Dixon Line and the Ohio River or west of the Mississippi. They looked like they were having an awfully good time playing and entertaining.  They played a few Johnny Cash and Hank Williams songs (famously, “Jambalaya (On the Bayou)”: “Jambalaya, a-crawfish pie, a fillet gumbo…son of a gun we’ll have big fun on the bayou”), but mostly played their own compositions.  These were in a style of Cash and Williams, and Owens, Frizzell, Haggard, Rogers and so on and so forth, and in the vocal range mostly of Cash.  To my ears, what they played was not just genuine American country music, it was real.  Like Irish and Scots music, their repertoire included dance tunes, funny songs, and sad songs of loss and longing.  Perhaps again it is the range of emotions that helps explains my preference for “Real American Country Music.”

Real American Country Music, or RACM, was followed by a “Nashville Recording Artist” from mid-Michigan, whose band plays in the style called “contemporary or new country.”  That is a style fusing more traditional country with a pop and rock sound.  I am baffled about the “traditional country” part.  Maybe it is traditional in two senses: the themes that are expressed in the lyrics are traditional (sorry to stereotype: dogs, horses, beer and whiskey drinking, pick-up trucks, infidelity, no-good men and loose women, and family values), and the vocalists have or affect an American southern accent.  See, you can grow up in Michigan or even Liverpool and sing in an American southern accent.  The Nashville Recording Artist, or NRA, was entertaining, her vocals were strong and precise, the band was skilled, and there was a slight change in the audience in the transition from the RACM to the NRA.  The volume amplified for the NRA was significantly more than for the RACM.  And I was getting tired; it was Friday 9 pm after a long week of work.  So after about three songs from NRA, I was ready to head home.

Half an hour after sundown, clear sky, low humidity, temperatures in low 70s, windows down, cicadas, crickets, dairy, fresh-cut hay, and I am hungry for jambalaya and cheap beer.

Speed Cycling

Last week riding home from my office, I latched onto the draft of a large pick-up truck pulling a huge fifth wheel travel trailer or, as they call them now, RV.  It had just gone past the intersection at which I had a stop sign.  It was clear for me to proceed.  The RV was not going 20 mph, so I sprinted to get in its draft.  I rode with my front wheel about six feet off its bumper.  The truck slowly accelerated.  The rode curved slightly, and the RV looked heavily loaded as with each bump or dip it seemed to rock and roll a bit.  Eventually it got up to 35 mph.  I rode in the path of the left, driver’s side wheel in case there were any road killed raccoons or ground hogs.  I assumed that the driver would try to avoid directly running over road kill, since that too might bounce the trailer around.  Slowly the pace climbed to above 45 mph.  I did not look back.  I kept my vision focused on the rear bumper.  I assumed that, given how slowly the driver accelerated, when it came time to slow down, the driver would decelerate slowly; there wouldn’t be any sudden increases or decreases in speed.  I could pedal half a dozen strokes, then coast.  I didn’t know if I could stay in the draft.  I thought that if I stayed close enough, within six feet, I’d have a chance.  The speed limit for that section of road is 50 or 55 mph.  If I got out of the draft I’d quickly slow to 20 mph.  After two miles, he began to slow down for an approaching stop sign.  At the stop, he and I turned left.  I again accelerated with him.  But one-quarter mile down the road, he turned right and I needed to go straight.  Shortly after, another driver in a pick-up truck passed me, and yelled something out the window.  I didn’t comprehend what he said, but it did not seem unfriendly.  I am sure it was an extremely unusual sight for him to see a bicyclist going over 45 mph, something to tell the dog, wife, and kids about.  It is certainly not the sort of thing sung about in country music.  When I got home, I checked my cyclocomputer and it showed a maximum speed of 47 mph.  That is likely the fastest I have gone on my bike in a couple of years.

The first time I went fast was during the first bike race I entered.  The race was a circuit road race.  The circuit was five miles, and we did six laps of it.  I have ridden my bicycle a lot since I was a young kid.  I grew up ten miles from the nearest small town.  Over two miles from our house was Wright, where there was a Catholic church and elementary school, a bar, and a corner store.  Back then they called them corner stores; now they call them convenience stores.  They might have a few grocery items, but mostly they were places to stop to get candy, ice cream, sodas.  They might have sold cigarettes, but more likely you would have to go next door to the bar to get them out of a machine.  No beer, wine, or liquor.  Again, you got that next door.  Probably didn’t even have milk, as as most folks I knew had a milkman who delivered once or twice weekly.  By the time I was eight, I could ride, usually with a sister or two, up to Wright.  Along the way we’d pick up beer bottles to return for deposits at the bar to get money for candy or ice cream novelties.  The bar felt like such a forbidden place: dark even in the middle of the day, cool, smoky, only men in there, unless the owner’s wife was tending, and most of them were retired farmers.  When the owner’s wife was tending, it would not draw a younger or a female crowd.  It is just that she was the only woman I ever saw in the bar.  Beer was served in six or eight ounce glasses.  Probably only Stroh’s and Pabst or Schlitz.  And no light beers, as they had not yet been invented.  A couple of times each year we, my sisters and I, would ride our bikes the ten miles to school.  Nobody locked their bikes.  By the time I was in junior high and high school, I would more regularly ride ten miles to friends’ houses.  When I turned sixteen and got a driver’s license, the bike was more a child’s toy.  I still would pack it in my car, take it to a girlfriend’s house to go for a summer bike ride with a girlfriend.  But it ceased to be transportation; it was recreation.  Then in graduate school in my early twenties, I started riding the bike more for transportation, and some for exercise.  When my children came along, I got the kiddie seat for the rear of the bike to take my kids for bike rides.  From those days in my early twenties onward, I have worn a helmet while cycling.  In my mid-thirties, I was doing a lot of running and races.  I developed plantar fasciitis.  So for my distance workouts, I rode my bike, keeping the running for speed-work over shorter distances.  Eventually as my kids got older, when they were in fourth or fifth grade, and I could afford it, I got an entry level racing bike during a November end of season sale.  And next May, I entered my first race.

The race had about thirty-five entrants.  Since I was new, the race director advised that I not ride in the midst of the pack, but at the back where it would be safer.  I thought he meant “safer for me,” but in fact he meant “safer for the rest of the riders.”  I didn’t heed his advice.  I had been reading about bicycle racing, and had learned some of the basics.  Two chief basic prinicples are “don’t overlap your front wheel with a rider’s rear wheel,” and “ride a straight line.”  If your front wheel is overlapped and the rider ahead makes a quick lateral movement bumping your front wheel, you will most likely become intimately acquainted with the asphalt, and he will only hear the metal grinding on pavement behind him.  Given that in bicycle racing the uniform is next to nothing, sliding on pavement is going to hurt.  I heard someone say that if you have never raced and crashed on a bicycle and want to know what it is like, strip down to your underwear, get in a friend’s car, have them get up to about 25 mph or so, then jump out the door.  Don’t’ overlap your front wheel, and the corresponding principle which is to keep the rider ahead from sending a rider behind who may not have adhered to principle one down to the pavement: ride a straight line.  I knew both principles, so I rode in the midst of the pack.  The pack started out slowly, maybe 18-21 mph.  A mile down the course we had a right turn, and were now riding with a 15 mph tailwind.  A half-mile down the road, there was a slight downhill, and the race was on.  In short order we were going 37 mph, and I felt like screaming with giddy excitement.  That was such a rush, so much fun.  Another mile ahead, and we were heading into a right turn, going about 30 mph.  Lean, lean, make it through the corner, everyone upright, hold your line.  Second lap, I start to get spit out the back.  Heading down the hill into the corner, I am gapped off but trying to get back on.  I enter the corner too fast, realize I am not going to make it through the corner without skidding out and sliding nearly naked on the pavement.  So I straighten the bike up and brake hard.  I know I am going to go off the far side of the road.  It is early May.  There is no ditch.  The fields are freshly tilled and planted.  It is a smooth run off, like the paths along mountain highways for tractor-trailer rigs whose brakes fail them, with sand or very loose gravel to slow them to a halt.  I ride into the field, come to a complete stop, get off the bike, carry it back to the road, and get going again, well off the back of the pack with no chance to catch back on.

A year or two after that I was up near Benzonia, Michigan.  There are some steep short hills around there.  I found one southwest of Benzonia that I could hit 50 mph on.  There was another road that was steeper, Traverse Avenue or Walker Street, heading east off the main street.  I probably could have gone over 50 on that, except that there was stop sign at the bottom, at the point where you’d hit top speed.  I suppose I could have had someone at the stop sign to let me know half way down if traffic was clear and I could bomb through the stop sign.  On the long downhill heading south to Hoxeyville, with a tailwind I could get over 45 mph on that hill, with a bit of work.  There were some good hills around the Manistee River, around High Bridge and Red Bridge where I could get over 40 mph.  On Caberfae Road, heading toward Harietta, there is a good downhill that I could get close to 50 mph.  Most of those were long enough, just not steep enough.

Also in the late 1990s, two or three times I did a cycling tour with friends in early autumn in southeast Ohio, in the Ohio Appalachians.  They were two-day rides, about 110 miles each day, with about 5000 feet of climbing (and descending) each day.  Many of the descents were steep, many allowing speeds of over 45 mph.  My fastest was 52 mph.  That was on a winding road.  I descended it riding from gutter to gutter, from guard rail to guard rail.  I remember a short section with gravel on the road.  I remember blind corners where I was praying that no one was coming up the hill.  I quickly got a reputation for being a very fast descender.  “Eric the Eagle” one guy called me.  With a small pack of five or seven riders, you could go faster downhill by “tumbling” in a rotating paceline.  The rider to the front pulled over to the side to drift to the back of the group.  As soon as the next rider was clear of the rider who had just pulled to the side, he pulled to the side too.  The group continued to rotate, with no one being out front in the wind for more than a few seconds, drafting and bombing down the hill.  I got with one such group which included a tandem.  Given gravity, a bike with two riders weighed more than two bikes with a rider each, and it had less rolling and wind resistance.  The tandem could lead down the hill, with it almost impossible for anyone to pass.  On one downhill section, there was a rough looking, Appalachian old man in an older beat up Buick behind us.  After we descended that hill and got to the flat land, going perhaps 24 mph, he passed us.  As he passed us, he rolled down his window.  We wondered if we were going to get yelled at for being on his road.  Instead, with a partially toothless grin we got “y’all wir gawn bout fordy five dawn thet heel.”  I guess we made his day, almost as good as having a friend give you a pint jar of his newly distilled moonshine.  Not to stereotype or anything.

My fastest ride was in the early 2000s in northern Kentucky, west of Covington, between the Cincinnati Northern Kentucky Airport and the Ohio River to the west.  There are some steep hills around there.  I was on a ride on unfamiliar roads.  But from looking at the map, with none of the roads going straight I knew it was hilly.  After peaking one hill, a dump truck just passed me as we began to go downhill.  I got onto its draft, riding about six to eight feet off its tailgate.  I assumed that if it could go fast, the corners could not be too sharp.  The speed climbed.  I hoped the truck would not kick up rocks, that there would be no potholes, and that there would be no road kill.  That is asking for a lot in northern Kentucky roads.  I got all I asked for.  The road had very gentle curves, such that the dump truck driver could pretty much go the speed limit and more.  By the time the road leveled off near the Ohio River valley and I could check my cyclocomputer, the maximum speed registered was 57 mph.  What a thrill!  On a twenty pound bike with tires about 23 mm (less than an inch) wide.

Mid-Summer Therapies

It was a hot Independence Day weekend Saturday.  I went for a bike ride, leaving the house about 10 am.  It was about 75 degrees, but it felt a lot hotter, maybe because of the humidity.  I went west three miles, then north fifteen miles to M-21, east five miles to DeWitt Road, just a mile west of St. Johns, south through DeWitt and back to our house, 40 miles total.  It was an aromatherapy ride.  Heading north toward M-21, I went by several mint fields on the west side of the road.  St. Johns calls itself the Mint Capital of the World, with a Mint Festival in mid-August.  While it might have been 75 degrees when I started, it seemed to warm quickly into the mid 80s.  With the heat and humidity and the wind from the west, the mint seemed to be giving off scent more strongly.  That was nice.  Deep green fields of mint.  Healthful smells.  Heading south from M-21 back toward DeWitt, I rode past a couple of dairy operations on the west side of the road.  So with the heat, humidity, and west wind, the scent was strong.  Dairy operations give off a sweet manure smell, less offensive than the beef operations.  I suppose it has to do with the feed.  And dairy cattle need a lot of water.  A Holstein averages about eight gallons a day.  The record Holstein, set in Wisconsin in 2009, averaged 23 gallons a day.  It had to be drinking over 30 gallons a day.  Maybe the farmer had it on a huge IV drip to get that much fluid into her system.

I suppose it was also a visual therapy ride.  The mint fields were a rich green.  The wheat is turning to golden, in preparation for harvest within a month.  I did the ride at a moderately hard pace.  When I got done about noon, it felt close to 90 degrees.  I was hot.  We had the sprinklers going, and I got in the sprinklers to cool my body off more quickly.  Pasty white chest, moderate reddish color from the sun tan on my arms and legs.  Light tan of the dried clay fields around the house.  It is quite a shock to the body to have that sixty degree water, especially on my back or chest.  It is fine on my legs, but takes my breath away when it sprays on my chest.  Rainbows in each droplet as the sun shines through them.  Sunday morning I went on another sort of aromatherapy ride.  I rode my single speed with the panniers, to collect cans.  Over a 20 mile ride, I passed about 20 dead raccoons, skunks, opossums.  The previous day’s heat cooked the greasy and slimy road kill to a wretched smell.  The heat bloats the carcasses until they burst, spewing or oozing stomach and intestinal contents, urging flies and vultures to come to dinner.  Not much visual therapy there.  Grey-green slime just does not strike me as visually appealing.

Then there was some aural therapy.  Friday night we went to a show, “Keep on The Sunny Side,” a two hour long musical play about A.P. Carter, Sara Carter and Maybelle Carter.  It was highly entertaining and the quality of the music was very good.  The woman playing Maybelle perhaps played guitar better than Maybelle did, and probably sang better too.  Maybelle picked out melodies and harmonies on the guitar.  Maybelle played a Gibson L-4 (I think), an archtop acoustic guitar (the L-4 became electric, and now the L-7 is their acoustic archtop, close to $6,000); the actress who played Maybelle played a guitar very similar in appearance to the Gibson L-7.  Sara played autoharp.  A.P. played folk guitar.  For the show, they got vintage instruments, very nice.  The show included two dozen of their songs: Keep on the Sunny Side, Are You Lonesome Tonight?, Worried Man Blues, Are you Tired of Me, My Darling?, Bury Me Under the Weeping Willow, Church in the Wildwood, I Never Will Marry, Lonesome Valley, My Clinch Mountain Home, among them.  Some of their performances nearly brought tears to my eyes.  Most of those songs, if not all of them, I have heard played first by other actors.  I heard “I Never Will Marry” about six years ago for the first time by the Peasall Sisters.  In the play, after A.P. and Sara have separated, and A.P. is still passionately in love with Sara while Sara wants to move on in her life, posed at opposite sides of the stage they sing “I Never Will Marry.”  That was painful to watch.  Maybe more painful was to watch A.P. sing “Are you Tired of Me My Darling?” to Sara just after she discussed leaving him.  That one I think I first heard from Emmylou Harris or Nanci Griffith.  I think I first heard “Worried Man Blues” from Woody Guthrie or Johnny Cash.  The play was sweet, funny, sad.  A.P. and Sara were married young.  A.P. travelled a lot trying to get record deals and book shows. Sara stayed home and raised the kids.  She got tired of him being gone so much, and ended up divorcing him.  A.P. and Maybelle (Sara’s cousin who had married A.P.’s brother) and other Carter family members continued to perform and make records.  Sara performed with them only on rare occasion.  A.P. sure wrote some beautiful songs.  One of Maybelle’s daughters (June) married Johnny Cash.  The show did my heart well.  The actor who played A.P. and the actress who played Sara are getting married this month.  I wonder how it felt to play characters who had a rocky relationship that ended in separation, just as you, the players, are about to set out on your own marriage.  Would it make you aware of the kinds of conflicts and challenges that are likely to arise?  Would it prepare you to learn how to address challenges to your marriage?  Would you more likely have a rewarding and surviving marriage?

When we got home Friday night after the show, our neighbor was shooting off big fireworks.  They had stopped by earlier in the week to give me a flyer and invitation to join them around 8 pm for a party in their back yard, with fireworks show after dark.  I thought they’d be over with by the time we got home from the play.  But no, they went on for twenty minutes after we got home.  And I thought they’d be not too flashy, ones that would go as high as your house, or were ground fireworks of flash and light.  But no, they were commercial quality.  I was stunned how impressive the show was.  A really good fireworks show gives me the analogy of a THC-induced laugh.  I can’t control the joy of the visual candy, the light and color against a dark night sky.  I would not be surprised if he had spent over $2000 on fireworks.  Lansing downtown was to have fireworks July 4.  We went to their Independence Day parade around the state capitol at mid-day.  What a dud of a parade!  No marching bands, no floats.  There were a bunch of tow trucks, a bunch of customized cars (late 1980s two-door Oldsmobiles, for example, with large diameter low-profile tires, cars jacked-up, glittery paint jobs, loud stereos, doors that are hinged to open vertically rather than horizontally), an adopt-a-pet group, some pony league football teams, a few dance groups (belly dancers—gave a whole new meaning to being a belly dancer, several ballet groups, Mexican folk dancers, cloggers), and I almost forgot the local flat track roller derby team, the Mitten Mavens.  The Mavens’ website says “no experience required,” and it showed.  But I suppose as mavens, some of them have some sort of trusted expertise that they hope to pass on to others, expertise on flinging elbows, dodging opponents’ elbows, jamming, pivoting, blocking, not to mention roller skating.  Overall, it was laughable for a parade.  It seemed like anyone who wanted to could walk or ride the parade route and wave at people sitting at the curbs.  Maybe that was the point.  Maybe the organizers were post-modernists trained in the craft of poking fun at us the audience.  I told Beth she should have decorated her bike and joined the parade. The Memorial Day parade in Coleman, MI (pop. 1229) was better than the Independence Day Parade in downtown Lansing.  Given that, we decided not to go to the downtown fireworks show.  We were going to attend, but after the parade, we were not confident that Lansing could put on a good fireworks show.  There was also one in St. Johns, about fifteen miles from us past the mint fields, but we stayed home.

A week before Independence Day, I rode 88 miles.  It was the first I had ridden in two weeks.  During the group ride, the leader and I broke away from the group for four miles leading to a sprint.  We were working right at our limit, very very hard, 24-32 mph.  Coming to the sprint, he led me, but the sprinters from the bunch just caught me about 30 yards from the line, and I took third.  Shortly after that, about 35 miles into my 88 mile ride, my calves started cramping.  I worked on cramp-therapy management: pedal easy, don’t put in hard efforts, stay in the draft, drink a lot, have an energy gel.  On and off for the rest of the group ride my legs were cramping.  Then on the ride back home, about twenty miles, it seemed like every muscle in my legs were cramping.  If there are such muscles as toe-flexors, they were cramping.  If I tried to push very hard on the pedals, my calves and quadriceps cramped.  If I pulled up on the pedals, my hip flexors and tibialis anterior cramped.  At one point, I almost had to stop pedaling.  I’d never had it that bad.  The very hard and long effort after not riding two weeks, and insufficient energy intake (drinking only water, not an energy drink) is what did it.  Stopping at a drinking fountain, I drank a bottle full of water and had an energy bar, and was fine the rest of the way home (except that I got two flats over the last seven miles to home).  That night I thought my sleep would be miserable, and my legs would cramp in the night.  But when I got home I pursued further cramp therapy.  I drank a recovery drink, and fixed two grilled tuna sandwiches.  The recovery drink and the protein in the tuna was perfect. In the future, I am taking Cytomax (like Gatorade, but a different brand).  I hadn’t been taking it since I haven’t been training to race, and figured water was good enough.  Plus energy drink spills on my bike making a sticky mess, and the bike needs to be washed after the ride.  I’ll wash my bike and hope to avoid such severe leg cramps.  I did about 250 miles this past week.  Fat-burning therapy.

Finally, my garden is growing well.  The zinnias are starting to flower.  I have picked three green peppers.  Tomatoes are coming, but I am not sure they will be good.  I expect to get beans in about a week.  I transplanted a cantaloupe from in the garden to just outside, and also a tomato plant that was growing wild.  Maybe they will take and produce something.  I had to spray again for the small beetles that are eating the leaves of the bean plants.  What kind of therapy is growing a garden?  It seems to me a kind of therapy, to take a bunch of seeds, till a garden area with a shovel and spade fork, smooth it with a rake, mark rows, plant seeds, weed and water the garden, tend it, watch it grow, harvest it and enjoy the harvest.  Maybe it is geo-therapy.  Becoming healthful and attuned toward the earth, from which I came and to which I will return.