Gene’s Drive-Thru Carry-Out

Growing up we spent every weekend and many weekdays at my grandparents’ house in Clyde.  The big white farmhouse stood with a sort of authority, the same authority that rang through the air when Grandma called us for dinner.  And across the drive from the farmhouse stood Gene’s Drive-Thru Carry-Out.

In between Clyde and Green Creek Township, people drove out of their way to go to Gene’s.  Some say he had the coldest beer around, others came to sit at the counter on tattered stools and scratch lottery tickets and talk about the Cleveland Indians.  Some came because Gene and his kids remembered their orders and had them waiting as soon as they pulled in.

After hours of playing in the yard and being turned away from the cookie jar at Grandma’s house, us kids would run barefoot across the scorching asphalt and open the metal door to the back of “the store.”  Stepping in and cooling our feet on the smooth concrete floor, we sneaked through cardboard boxes and overstock Pepsi and Miller Lite cartons to the doorway that led to Grandpa.  He always stood behind the counter with either my mother, my Aunt Karen or Aunt MaryLynn or Uncle Mike.

As soon as we appeared, all of the customers would ask which of Gene’s kids we belonged to, and what we were up to.  We answered them, reaching into the cooler for a cold pop and then walking out from behind the counter to the wall of candy on the side wall.  We took what we wanted, sometimes daring to go to the freezer for a frozen Snickers bar, and we left.

It’s a wonder we aren’t all kleptomaniacs.  It is NOT a wonder that I was pretty chunky throughout my childhood.

I did a lot of growing up in that store.  I learned to play the clarinet with my cousin Heather.  I got locked in the cooler with a dead pig and my cousin Meghan.  ”Momma Cat” had a batch of kittens in a garbage bag back by the bathroom and then left them for dead.  I scanned lottery tickets to my heart’s content.

I was heartbroken when Grandpa sold the store.  He retired and began working at Wilson’s Clothing part time instead.  They sold the store to a local couple, and during a chain of drive-thru robberies, Denise was shot:

“Less than 30 minutes after Hovis reported The Gables robbery to police, the body of 42-year-old Denise Clink was found at Gene’s Drive-Thru, just outside the city limits of Clyde, a small town in Sandusky County best known as the home of a Whirlpool factory. Robinson, police concluded, had shot Clink during a robbery of the drive-through that she and her husband owned.”  -Brad Dicken, The Chronicle-Telegram

It was terrifying.  Grandpa’s store became a place where a murder happened.  It was a friend who was killed…and worse, it could have been our grandpa.

Gene’s Drive-Thru is still standing, although vacant.  It’s mostly just memories now, memories that I hope someday we can revive.  I don’t know how to run a business, but it’s always an option.  It took Grandpa a lot of years to build up that clientele, and he was as loyal to them as they were to him.

I do miss that carry-out though.

 

They Call Me “Country”

My CEO has nicknamed me “Country”.  It could have been the big belt buckle I wore one time (thanks, Jenny), or my not-so-quiet love of big trucks and men who do manly things.  It could have been my request to wear overalls on Fridays, too…

And I kept thinking, “What does it really mean to be country?”

I grew up in Fremont–not quite on a farm, not quite in the city.  I ate mud as a kid, had pet toads, played with bugs, shot guns, tried beer for the first time at a relatively young age, and have an odd love for 4-wheelers.  But is that what makes you country?  Maybe it’s because I climb a lot of trees.  If you ask me (which you all inadvertently did when you started reading my blog), being country means a few things.  Let’s just skip right past the deer-shootin’, beer-drinkin’ stereotypes and get into what it really means to be country.

It means being capable.  The real country is a rough place, and if you don’t know what to do to survive, if you’re incapable of thinking on your feet and doing whatever it takes to make it to the next day, you’re going to die.

It means developing compassion, but not to a fault.  Decisions must be made in the country.  Think of it this way–do you swerve to avoid a squirrel but end up putting your truck in a ditch and causing damage?  Or do you hit the squirrel and get on with your life (and maybe scoop it up for some squirrel stew)?

It means making decisions and not lingering on things that you cannot change.  ”Woops, hit a squirrel, now where’s my chainsaw?  Granny’s waitin’ for me to cut down her tree.”

It means not being too sensitive.  It was just a squirrel–geez.

It means appreciating the simple things in life, like having enough food to keep the family fed or a beautiful sunset.

It means knowing that you are but a small spec in the scheme of things.

It’s independence and knowing you can rely on your family and your neighbors.

It means trying it by yourself, and being able to ask for help if you need it.

And it means knowing how to sit back and watch the world go by for a bit.

If that’s what my CEO meant, I’ll take it.  But I have a feeling he thinks I chew tobacco and shoot guns on the weekends.  I’ll shoot guns, but I’ll take my tobacco in the form of a cigarette.  :-)

Love,
“Country”

 

 

The Mud Puddle

At the request of my dear friend and former student, Jerry, I am writing again about my childhood.

My cousins and I spent every weekend on my grandparents’ farm, where we searched for Jessie Simmons’ tongue, and our sweet Grandma Cleobelle rarely let us in the house if it was nice out.  So we spent a lot of time inventing games, climbing trees, and getting into trouble.

This is my grandparents' barn. In front of this was the mud puddle.

In front of the barn, there was a perpetual mud puddle.  After it rained, it could be as deep as halfway up to our shins.  During the drought of 1988, it turned into flake clay mud that blew away in the dry wind.  But for the majority of my childhood, it was a mud puddle.

We rejoiced in riding our bikes through it, spraying water up on our backs and the cousins who were unlucky enough to ride behind us.  We filled water guns and Solo cups for water fights, and built mud pies out of the thick mud below the rocks.  And if we were lucky enough to find something that floated, we had make-believe sea adventures.  Even though Grandma wouldn’t let us into the house after such antics, we still played in the mud puddle, ate dinner with our muddy hands, and smear mud on our arms and faces like war paint.

What is it about a puddle, or mud, or dirt that draws children in?  Perhaps it’s an innate instinct to locate water and exist near it.  Perhaps it is just because we can.

 

Babies, Civil Wars, and Red Rainbows

On Friday, I got to go home.  Going home feels like a privilege anymore.  I like that…and I wish it could happen more often.  In going home, I got to play with baby Jax and see my cousin Heather.  There is nothing like having a baby fall asleep in your arms.  Nothing.  Then my mom took Mike and I to Applebee’s and then came home in time for Dad to get off work and celebrate his birthday.

On Saturday, it was dreary, so I lifted in the basement with Mike instead of going for a run.  I’m feeling it today.  I can hardly walk.  I also found a list of old potential baby names from 2004 in an old journal.  I take comfort in knowing that I tried to incorporate my then-current boyfriend’s name into the names of my boys.  Yeah, that was nice of me.  Ha ha!

Rutherford B. Hayes House

Then I went old school.  My cousin Meghan, Mike, and I went to Spiegel Grove to tour Rutherford B. Hayes’ home and to watch a Civl War reenactment.  I hadn’t been in the Hayes house since an elementary school field trip, and it was crazy to look at the place he lived again.  I remembered certain things, and others were really great surprises.  No photography allowed…so I can’t show you any of it.  But it is GLORIOUS.  I found a picture of the outside of the house from the south side.  The front porch is to the right, the second chimney from the left is Hayes’ bedroom.  It really is a beautiful home.

You really don’t take advantage of some of the things in your very own hometown.  I think I might have to take that tour again.  We didn’t go to the museum, but that just gives us something to do another time.

Then we watched the Civil War reenactment put on twice a year at Spiegel Grove.  This one was commemorating Hayes’ birthday (October 4th, 1822).  I don’t really understand war reenactments.  So I’m interested to see if any of you have anything to say about it other than the cannons are cool.

Saturday night, I drank a bottle of wine and rented two chick flicks with Mike.  I then proceeded to wrestle him.  I won.  It’s my story.

Sunday, we helped Mom and Dad close the pool, watched football, and fell asleep a lot.  We drove home the back way and in the midst of the dreary skies, God gave us a beautiful sunset that hit every direction of the sky, shooting a red rainbow up into the heavens.

 

IT’S CALLED POP

I know I know, we’ll all defend our name for fizzy drinks until we die.  But where I come from, it’s called pop.  Because that’s what it does.  It pops.  And it looks like 80-100% of the folks in my home county (Sandusky County, Ohio) agree with me.  Now, call me crazy, but there’s an awful lot of blue on this map.  but I am also aware that it appears in many sparsely populated areas.

But on this Friday, I will proudly order a pop from any restaurant, and I will drink a pop any time of day.  And if you ask me for a soda or a Coke, I’m just gonna say, “You mean a pop?”

Happy Friday!

 

Over Ohio and Through Indiana to Roseanne’s House We Go!

!!!!!!!!  It’s official.  I am going to Roseanne’s house.  It’s true!  Okay okay, not her real house (which is in Hawaii now), and not even a house she ever actually lived in.  And truth be told, according to my good buddy, Bruce, they never actually filmed inside this house, either…  But I will be visiting THE HOUSE (or at least the outside of it) that is featured in all of the episodes of Roseanne!

The Promised Land of All Domestic Goddesses

Alright alright, you’re not excited about this at all, are you?  WELL YOU SHOULD BE!  On October 21, my roommate from college (Kay, aka Snoop-A-Loop) will grab her green hat, and we will go to Indianapolis to pick up Barbs, another friend from college.  No doubt, Barbs will have her cranky thong on, so we’re going to have to get her drunk and throw her into the car the next morning.

From there, we will drive to 619 South Runnymeade Avenue in Evansville, Indiana, and we will take shameless photos in front of the house.  Barbs will probably be snapping most of the pictures, as she doesn’t give a rat’s ass about Roseanne.

Would it be out of line to ask the people who live there if we can come in?  I hope it’s not out of line, because I fully intend on doing it.

I AM SO EXCITED!!!

 

 

Jumping on the Bandwagon

When something big happens, we all want to be involved.  Even if it’s something unfortunate.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing.  It is this desire to be involved that spawns compassion among human beings.  It’s because we can imagine what it would be like if it HAD happened to us.  So we reach out.

I am lucky enough to have never been in danger because of the weather.  I’ve never seen a tornado, been in a hurricane, or felt an earthquake.  I’ve never suffered through a tsunami or ran from an exploding volcano.  I just haven’t.  I like to think that I live in one of the safest areas in the world.  I live in the United States.  Safety #1.  I also live in northern Ohio.  So no hurricanes, no fault lines, no tsunamis, and rarely a tornado.

I am lucky.

But here’s the thing:  I’ve always wanted to see a tornado–just not have to worry about it harming anyone or anything.

And when I lived in North Carolina, I so badly wanted to experience a hurricane.  Not a horrible one–just a hurricane.  I wanted to see the rain and watch the trees bend, listen to the wind howl and hear the windows shake.

And when the earthquake hit yesterday, I wanted to feel it something fierce.  But I didn’t.

I want to experience these types of weather–I just don’t want to deal with any of the negative effects.  I’m stuck somewhere in this thinking that this makes me a bad person.  I want to see these things that ruin people’s lives.  But I don’t want them to ruin people’s lives.  And I certainly don’t want to be in danger either.

I just want to see it, you know?  Bah.

 

Why It Is Almost Impossible to Live In One’s Hometown

I don’t know about your family, but mine has been in the same place for a long long time.  Let me explain.

Fremont and Clyde, where my kin resides.

I grew up in Fremont, Ohio.  Most of my family has been in Fremont and Clyde for at least 70 years.  See that map?  My entire immediate family including grandparents is pretty much in there.  My maternal grandmother grew up in Clyde and searched for Jessie Simmons’ tongue on the very farm I searched for it years later.  She married my grandfather, who was also living in Clyde.  My parents, aunts, and uncles all married people in the same vicinity.  And let’s be honest.  Everything is easier for them in terms of seeing loved ones.  If my grandparents need something, they have 4 kids and their spouses right there, plus some grandkids and cousins.  It’s easy to pick a place to have a family gathering because everyone is right there.

And up until my generation, everyone was still there.  My grandparents have 10 grandchildren.  Seven of them are still living in either Clyde or Fremont.  I am just south of Cleveland.  My cousin Heidi is right around Ashland.  I know we would love to be able to get back more often and see our family, but sometimes it just isn’t possible.

Getting off of work at 5, driving an hour and a half home puts me at 6:30, long enough to eat dinner, say hi, and head on out before the hour and a half drive back, so that I can go to bed at a decent hour.  I’d love to be able to drive 10 minutes down the road to have a cup of coffee with my mother.

There are advantages to this.  If you marry someone from your hometown, chances are you get to be close to both of your families.  That makes celebrating holidays with both much easier.  It makes planning the actual wedding easier.  It creates built-in babysitters that you don’t have to pay and grandparents get to see their grandkids.  I loved spending every weekend at my grandparents’ house.

But it’s hard to do that as a Gen Y kid.  We move away, go to college, graduate, feel guilty for not using our degrees, and live somewhere we can get a job.  During that process, most of us fall in love, either with someone from our hometown, someone in college, someone in grad school.  And eventually you have to choose.  Do you live closer to your parents?  Or your lovers?  You’re coming from different places, after all.  Will someone be upset?  What if you both can’t get a job in the same place?  What happens then?

It’s just all very weird.

 

On Why I Will Not Publish My Book

Yes.  I wrote a book.  Yes.  You’ve read portions of it on this blog (ahem Jessie Simmons and the first part of my Writing Samples page.

The book is about 288 pages long (I believe including some of the front matter and thesis literature) and it is all about working at the Whirlpool plant in Clyde, Ohio (which I did for 6 summers and on breaks from college), as well as growing up in Northwest Ohio in Sherwood Anderson’s own Winesburg, Ohio.

But I will not publish this book.  I have good reasons for it, too.

I don’t want to.  It’s mine.  I do not have to share it with the world.  I learned from writing it, and I learned from putting it down.  I got what I wanted out of that book, and I do not feel that it should be out in the world.

I’m farking sick of looking at it.  I stared at parts of the damn thing from my sophomore year college at Ashland to the day I turned it in to the graduate school in North Carolina.  Since then, I haven’t even THOUGHT about writing more of it, adding, subtracting, changing it.  I haven’t opened the damn thing.  Time away from writing is a good thing.  It gives you the distance and clarity of mind to edit it later.

Publishing Process?  No.  Don’t understand it.  Don’t want to.  Don’t care.  Publishers?  Agents?  Bunch of bologna if you ask me.

Book tours.  In order to appropriately publish and promote a book, you must do a book tour.  I am not leaving my job.  I love my job.

Privacy.  Now why on God’s green earth would I want the world knowing that much about me?  I’m not even sure I’ve processed it all myself.  So no.  It’s much more telling and intimate than this blog…which is fairly open in my mind.  But I know most of the folks that read my blog, and I’m okay with them knowing things.

“You can’t go home again.” – Thomas Wolfe  I write nonfiction.  The book is a memoir.  I talk about real people and real situations.  And because I am a purist, I refuse to “fake” anything in my writing.  It is all true, and I will not compromise the truth.  It’s all we have to make sense of the world, and our ability to discern between fiction and nonfiction is important.  And the truth is that if I published, there would be a crazy amount of legal crap, I’d have to get a million people to sign off on it, and I would still offend someone.  Thomas Wolfe is right.  You can’t go home once you publish something about your hometown.  Remember October Road?  And his book was fiction!

I love my hometown and I refuse to not be able to go home again.  Until all the people in my book are gone, or until I can get them to promise that they won’t read it, there will be no publishing.

Happy Friday!

 

My Vice and My Blessing

I hate to hear the phrase, “You can’t do that.”  I’ve hated it since that show on Nickelodeon called, “You Can’t Do That On Television” and I hated it because they did it anyway.  This is not me raging against The Man or anything.  It’s just something that has always affected me in some way or another.

And then LOST came on.  And John Locke hated when someone told him he couldn’t do something.  Multiple episodes featured him chanting, “Don’t tell me what I can’t do!”

Now, I was never so angry that I yelled it, but it became more of a silent battle.  Let me explain.

When I went to college at Ashland, I was still dating a boy from back home.  He believed I could do anything; we just weren’t a good match.  A few months after breaking up (and I’m not necessarily proud of this), I began dating one of his friends (their friendship had fallen apart upon our break-up) and he was a bit of a…I don’t know what to call him.  He was a good guy, but he didn’t necessarily expect much out of me.  When I wanted to quit college around Christmas time and make my living at Whirlpool, he said, “I didn’t think you’d finish college anyway.”

That did it.  I was finishing college, and I was going to prove him wrong.  And like college kind of makes you do for a lot of things, I outgrew him and had to walk away from our relationship.

Something similar happened in grad school in NC.  I was fairly over it after the first year, and thought that I could make a living doing my own thing up in Ohio.  But the boy I’d left behind in Ohio echoed my previous boyfriend.  When I said, “I’m not sure grad school is for me,” he said, “I never expected you to finish anyway.”

And the thing is that when they said these things, they thought of it a victory for themselves.  They thought, “Yay, she’s coming home.”  “Yay, no more long distance.”  “Yay, we can be together now.”

But they didn’t realize that their doubt in me spurred me to stay where I was and to finish what I started…in terms of school anyway.  I’ve yet to officially “finish” a relationship with marriage and so forth.

Mike knows about this vice, and has tried to leverage it to get me to publish the book I wrote in grad school.  “I knew you wouldn’t publish it.  You wouldn’t be able to if you wanted to,” he says.  But I know he doesn’t believe it.  He doesn’t doubt me one bit.  He believes I can do anything.

In other words, it doesn’t work when he tries to use it.  It just makes me hunker down, intent on not publishing my book.

Wanna know why?  I’ll tell you…tomorrow.