Dixie Ducklings

Yesterday (Saturday) evening, my husband and I were driving on the Dixie Highway toward Clarkston when traffic suddenly slowed. When we got closer, we saw cars crooked in the lanes and thought there'd been an accident. When we got closer still, we saw the cause was actually a mother duck and six ducklings. She had taken it into her feathery head to bring the kids across the road. Cars had stopped in both the east-bound lanes. But the mother duck was determined to keep on going, and she headed for the west-bound lanes, where cars continued to whizz by, unconcerned.

She and the babies stood in the turning lane for a moment, then she started across. The next car in the west-bound lane saw them and hit the brakes just in time to avoid hitting her. Cars behind the driver screeched to a stop. The mother duck waddled determinedly toward the curb, with the trusting ducklings right behind her.

A car bore down on them, and then managed to stop, but the SUV behind was following too closely. At the last second, the driver swerved. The SUV jumped the curb and stopped on the grassy border, gouging out ruts and narrowly avoiding a crash into the wall of a motel cabin.

The mother duck clambered up the curb and the ducklings scrambled up after her. all of them unharmed.

Dad's Memorial Service

Last week we held a memorial for my father Waldis Piziks.  It took some planning.

My sister Bethany offered to hold it at her house up in Cadillac.  She has a shaded outdoor horse pavilion which would be a perfect way to hold it outside, where Dad liked to do such things.  It was both shaded and sheltered from potential rain.

A couple days beforehand, I made a batch of piragi, the ham-filled rolls that are the number one favorite food in Latvia and which must be present for every special occasion.  These I packed into a cooler, and Darwin and I drove up to Cadillac.  Along the way, we stopped in Saginaw.  First we picked up Dad's ashes from the funeral home.  I signed a form, and the funeral director handed me a heavy white box, which we put into the back seat.  It felt . . . very strange.

We also stopped at Ted's Meat Market.  For decades, Ted's was the go-to place for the large Latvian expatriate community in Saginaw, since they carried Baltic favorites like rye bread, summer sausage, sprats, and herring.  It used to be a huge place, and busy all the time, but these days, it's sadly shrunk to less than half its original size as the native Latvian population has dwindled.  I bought bread and fish and sausage to have on hand at the memorial, and it occurred to me that this was probably the last time I'll ever stop in at Ted's.

In Cadillac, we checked into our hotel and, after some back-and-forth texting, headed out to meet the others for supper at a restaurant.  My brother Paul and sister Bethany were there.  So was my mother Penny and my aunt Sue.  Kala and Aran were there, too.  (Max couldn't get out of work to come, and Sasha has a hard time with travel of any kind.)  The restaurant was the food arm of a golf club, and while the dining room was grand and airy, the service was terrible.  It took an enormously long time for anyone to take orders, and even longer to get the food to us.  Bethany and Paul even went out for a little stroll on the long balcony that overlooked the golf course.  And the food itself was definitely sub-par.  Since we weren't in a big hurry, we chose to make jokes about the situation.

All in all, we didn't get back to the hotel until nearly ten.  I went to bed soon after.

In the morning, we headed over to Bethany's house.  She has a large house and a horse barn on several acres in the country, exactly the kind of place Dad loved.  Mom and Sue were making potato salad in the kitchen.  Paul and Bethany and I went outside to set up chairs and tables and Dad memorabilia in the arena.  It turned out to be tense work.  Small things that went wrong had a way of turning explosive, and we knew it wasn't the small things themselves; it was that we didn't have the emotional energy left to handle them.  I largely coped by disconnecting.  Whenever Bethany or Paul got annoyed or upset about something, I mostly nodded and said, "Okay."  With one exception:

Darwin had been dispatched to pick up the food Bethany had ordered from a local BBQ restaurant, along with the flowers.  He called a few minutes later to tell us the restaurant had messed up badly.  They didn't have the order prepared, and although Bethany had confirmed--twice--that they would make vegetarian baked beans (no bacon or brisket in them), they told Darwin that, oops, they hadn't made any.  The only beans they had were those with meat in them.

I got on the phone with them and tore into them.  They had screwed up food for a funeral, of all things.  "You'll get that order together right now while my husband waits, and the beans will be free," I said.  "Get to work on that now, please."

"I can't authorize that," the woman on the phone said.  "The only person who can do that is Jason."

"Then get Jason on the line."

"He's not in today."

Now Bethany got on the phone, and she ripped them up worse than I had.  She was upset in the extreme, and again it wasn't really the beans--it was everything else.  The restaurant--Primo's by name--finally and reluctantly agreed to take the beans off the bill.  But when Darwin arrived with the food, we discovered they had just given us a pile of shredded, dry meat and containers of barbecue sauce.  The meat hadn't even been simmered in the sauce.  We could have gotten better from the supermarket.  Don't ever to go to Primo's in Cadillac.  They're incompetent, and their food is awful.

The flowers we got, however, were wonderful.  Bright and colorful and fresh.

We set up a memorial table for Dad--flowers, photos, his hat, other mementos.  I found a rosewood box with a tree carved on it to contain his ashes, and the three of us sealed his ashes inside.  (Later, as Dad requested, we'll scatter them on Lake Huron.)  We set it in the middle.

Other people arrived.  In all, we had a group of fifteen or twenty people.

I had written a service.  The three of us talked about who should run the memorial.  Dad wasn't part of a church, so we had no minister.  I was leery of the three of us doing it.  There's a reason close family members rarely take this role at a funeral--it's an emotional and difficult time.  But Bethany and Paul and I all speak in public for a living, and they were sure we could handle it.  I had written the service, so I ended up being the director.

At the last moment, I noticed some e-messages from out-of-state relatives asking about a Zoom link.  In all the rush, we'd forgotten we'd promised a Zoom viewing for them.  Fortunately, we're good with Zoom, and we quickly set up a meeting and got everyone online who needed to be.

We started the service, and as I predicted, it was difficult to get through.  I read the eulogy I'd written--something I never imagined myself doing for my own father--and had to stop several times, and in unexpected places.  Bethany and Paul also spoke, and we called on other people to share memories.  Several people did, including those who had Zoomed in.

Afterward, we headed into Bethany's back yard to eat and talk.  We spent considerable time doing both.  :)  And then came the monumental cleaning up!  It was getting dark before everything was finally finished.  I put Dad's ashes back into my car and Darwin and I went back to the hotel, where I all but collapsed.

In the morning, Bethany, Paul, Darwin, Mom, and I met for breakfast at a restaurant where I think we were the very first customers our teenaged waiter ever had.  He was clumsy but determined, and we liked him for it.

And then we drove home.  I put Dad's ashes on a table in the living room, awaiting the day we scatter them.  They're an odd presence there.  It both does and doesn't feel like they're what's left of him.

I'm glad Darwin was there throughout.  His presence made so many things easier to deal with.

Burying Shawn

Right at the beginning of the pandemic, Darwin's brother Shawn passed away in Arizona.  Darwin and Shawn weren't super close, but Darwin was still upset, and, worse, the pandemic prevented us from traveling down there.  On top of it all, Shawn's family down there ended up pushing most of the arrangements onto Darwin.  From a distance, he arranged to have Shawn cremated and his ashes sent up to Michigan.  Darwin wanted to have Shawn's ashes buried up in Onaway, Michigan, where his family has a burial plot, but the pandemic prevented that.  And so the ashes waited in our house in Commerce, and then the house in Albion, and then the condo in Waterford.

Now, though, the pandemic has calmed down, thanks to the vaccine, and I told Darwin that this would be an ideal time to bury Shawn.  We both had time now, and things are going to become extremely busy for us very soon.  He agreed.  We decided to head up to Onaway on Friday, inter the ashes, spend the night, and come home on Saturday.

I called the village and explained the situation to the clerk.  There was some back-and-forth while she checked records and such, but in the end she said everything was arranged and could we meet at the cemetery on Friday at one o'clock?  We could.

Meanwhile, the cremains were still in their original cardboard mailer.  Darwin very much liked the rosewood box with a tree carved on it that I'd found for my dad's ashes, so I ordered another one just like it for Shawn.  When it arrived, we transferred Shawn's ashes and sealed the box.

We made the three-hour drive in good time and arrived in Onaway.  It's a tiny town fairly close to Mackinac City that seems to depend on tourists for its living.  The graveyard is also tiny, and Darwin easily located the family plot.  It helped that someone had already dug a hole and left a traffic cone to mark the spot.  We were about half an hour early, and Darwin examined other family graves and shared stories about the people.

Eventually, the clerk arrived with a Department of Public Works worker in tow.  Darwin handed over the burial paperwork that had arrived with the ashes from Arizona, and she accompanied us to the site, where Darwin placed the box into the grave.  He wasn't up to saying anything, so we had a moment of silence.  Darwin couldn't bear to watch the actual burial, so he and I took a walk while the worker handled that part.  And so it was done.

Darwin wanted a marker on the spot, and the clerk had told us that the best (only) place to get one was the funeral home in Onaway.  So we headed over there.  The funeral home was right across the street from village hall, in fact.  We entered the place, and eventually a woman in a black shirt and slacks came up from the basement stairs to ask how she could help us.  When we explained we wanted a gravestone, she said that the funeral director was the only one who could help with that, and he wasn't available just then.  Perhaps we could make an appointment for next week?  We said we lived three hours away and were only in town until tomorrow morning--Saturday.  Could we make an appointment for then?  She laughed this off.  "Saturday?  No, never."

"Is this something we could ultimately handle over the phone?" I persisted.

She thought about that, then laboriously went down the stairs to the basement again.  When she came back up, she said that we could indeed do it over the phone.  She gave us some pamphlets and catalogs for headstones, and we left.

"That was weird," Darwin said.  "The director couldn't meet with us on a Saturday?  Do people not die on Saturdays in Onaway?"

"You know why he couldn't meet with us now and why she kept going into the basement to talk to him, right?" I said.  "The embalming room is in the basement.  He was . . . occupied with another client.  The funeral is probably tomorrow, which is why he couldn't meet."

"Ah," said Darwin with a nod, and we drove off.

There was no place to stay in Onaway itself, and I had found us an Airbnb in the unfortunately-named town of Indian River, about twenty minutes away.  We'd driven through Indian River on our way to Mackinaw, in fact, and had even eaten at a restaurant there a couple times, but had never spent significant time there.

The Airbnb turned out to be a studio apartment that had once been the host's attached garage, and it was very nice and exactly what we needed.  We explored the town a little and got ice cream at a charming ice cream and candy store on the main street.  We also stumbled across Burt Lake entirely by accident.

Burt Lake has been a resort area since at least 1910.  It's an enormous lake that connects to another lake, that connects to yet another lake, which finally connects to Lake Michigan.  Burt Lake is large and clear, with a delightful public beach just a few blocks from downtown Indian River.  Darwin and I got there as the sun was setting in a spectacular blaze of red and pink and orange.  A quay juts out into the lake, and we walked down it, enjoying it very much.

Cottages and vacation homes of all sizes ring Burt Lake, and you can see by the architecture that most of them went up in the 1910s and 20s, though they've been meticulously maintained and updated.  Back in those days, it was the thing to board a steamer and chug around the network of lakes, as many publicly-displayed photos of women in long skirts and tiny hats and men in high collars and tweed jackets attest.  It was also common to tie a string of rowboats behind the steamers for the more daring among the vacationers.  As a result of all the boating and of the river that divides the land into a series of tiny islands near the lake, there's a series of little canals and eddies and streams (both natural and artificial) around the area that are crying to be explored on a kayak or canoe.  Darwin and I were completely charmed and we both agreed that our next trip to northern Michigan would be to Indian River so we could swim and boat and explore to our heart's content.

We conked out hard at the Airbnb, and in the morning we had a delicious breakfast at a very nice café, where we people-watched an elderly Amish couple, a group of good-old-boys, and a breathtakingly handsome young man who looked like Clark Kent in a ball cap.  He arrived alone, ate alone, and left alone.  We wondered what his story was.

And then it was home.  For all that it was for a sad reason, the trip was a fine one.