All posts by Edward Staskus

Edward Staskus is a freelance writer from Sudbury, Ontario. He lives in Lakewood, Ohio. His crime thrillers "Cross Walk" and "Bomb City" can be found on Amazon.
Ebb Tide

Chubby’s Corral

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By Ed Staskus

   Clyde Ferguson stumbled into the Queen Elizabeth Hospital mortuary room like he was seeing it for the first time, even though he had been the provincial pathologist for 11 years. He waited for the sharp stab in his left hip to go away. He felt unsteady. He steadied himself with one hand on the doorjamb. He was all right after a moment, as far as it went. His left heel wouldn’t flatten down to the floor. That leg had gotten shorter the past five years. He put his arms at his sides and breathed evenly.

   The hospital was practically new. It was still in its infancy. He was getting older by the minute, which bothered him. “Getting old is no problem,” is what Groucho Marx said. “You just have to live long enough.” But sometimes he didn’t feel like he was just getting old. He felt like he was getting old and getting crippled to boot.

   His hip hurt like hell and worse. He knew exactly what the matter was. It had finally gotten to be bone on bone. The day had always been coming. Walking and yoga and strong drink had forestalled the inevitable. But he had walked too much the past several days. When the weather had gotten better, he drove to Brackley Beach, and walked two miles back and forth three days in a row. That was a mistake. It wasn’t the same as his treadmill, which had arm rails he could support himself on. He had three months left before his retirement became official. When it was signed and sealed, he was getting an after-market hip the next day, going back to Tracadie, and staying there. He would break it in and in the evening cut up fillets rather than dead folks.

   He blinked in the fluorescent light, wondering why there were two tables set up for him. When he remembered the arm, he remembered he was going to have to do two post-mortems, one on the arm and one on the young woman who the arm belonged to.

   Her death was being treated as the result of criminal activity. If it was some place bigger than Charlottetown the post-mortem would have been performed by a forensic pathologist. They investigate deaths where there are legal implications, like a suspected murder. But it wasn’t some other place. It was Charlottetown, the smallest capital city of the smallest province in Canada. It would have to do, and he would have to do it.

   When he was suited up, Clyde stood over the dead woman and blinked his fly-belly blue eyes. She was on her back on a stainless-steel cadaver table. It was essentially a a body-sized slanted tray with raised edges to keep fluids from flowing onto the floor. There was running water to wash away the blood that is released during the procedure. The blood went down a drain.

   She hadn’t been shot or stabbed. Her face was a mess, though. It took him a minute to see what it was that had killed her. Her skull was fractured. Parts of the broken skull had pressed into the brain. It swelled and cut off access to blood by squeezing shut the arteries and blood vessels that supply it. As the brain swelled it grew larger than the skull that held it and begin to press outside of it into the nasal cavity, out of the ears, and through the fracture. After a minute it began to die. After five minutes, if she hadn’t called it a day, she would have suffered irreversible brain damage. One way or the other it was the end of her.

   He got down to the rest of his work, making a long incision down the front of the body to remove the internal organs and examine them. A single incision across the back of the head allowed the top of her skull to be removed so the brain could be examined. He saw what he expected to see. He examined everything carefully with the naked eye. If dissection had been necessary to look for any abnormalities, such as blood clots or tumors, he would have done it, but what was the point?

   After the examination he returned the organs and brain to the body. He sewed her back up. When he turned his attention to the arm, he saw clearly enough it had been chopped off with one clean blow. The axe, or whatever it was, must have been new or even newer. In any case, it was as sharp as could be. Her hand was clenched in a fist. He had to break her fingers to loosen it. When he did, he found a loonie in her palm. It was Canada’s one-dollar coin introduced two years earlier to replace paper dollar bills, which had become too expensive to print. Everybody called them loonies after the loon on the reverse side.

   Clyde looked at the spanking new coin smeared with old blood and older dirt. He put it in a plastic bag and labelled it. He recorded everything on a body diagram and verbally on a cassette tape. He put the loonie, diagram, and tape in a pouch and labelled it. When he was done, he washed up and decided to go eat. After that he would call it a day. The work had warmed him up and he wasn’t limping as much as he had earlier. He tested his hip, lifting his leg at the knee and rotating it. It felt reasonably ready to go. He would go to Chubby’s Roadhouse for lunch. They had the best burgers on the island.

   The phone rang. It was Pete Lambert, the Commanding Officer of the RCMP Queens detachment.

   “What have you found out, Clyde.”

   “I’m on my way out for a bite to eat. Meet me at Chubby’s. So long as the force pays, I’ll tell you everything I know.”

   “I’ll meet you there in twenty minutes.” Chubby’s was 15 minutes from the Queen Elizabeth Hospital and 20 minutes from the RCMP station. While he was driving Clyde thanked God it was 1989 and metallic hip replacements were as good as they had ever been. The first hip replacements dated back a hundred years to when ivory implants were used to replace the femoral head. Elephant tusks were cheap at the time and were thought to possess good biomechanical properties. That proved to not be the case. Men and women died right and left from infections and dislocations.

   Fifty years later an American surgeon performed the first metallic hip replacement. He designed a prosthesis with a large head made of something he called Vitallium. The implant was 12 inches in length and attached with bolts to the end of the femoral shaft. It worked like a charm. That same prosthesis is what he would be getting, except it was better and the implant would be inserted within the canal of the femur, where bone growth would lead to more permanent attachment. So long as he could wake up and walk upright first thing in the morning, instead of staggering and grabbing for support, he would be a happy man.

   Chubby’s Roadhouse and Bud’s Diner were next to each other in a pink and blue building on St. Peters Road in Dunstaffnage. They did brisk business. It was a popular pit stop for bikers on poker runs. It was why Pete Lambert had lunch or dinner there once a week, getting to know the riders. He kept his enemies close.

   “We serve burgers and fries and shakes, and fish and chips and clams and all that stuff,” Clarence Foster said. “But I think as far as the burger goes, the best, the one that everybody seems to like is called the Bud Burger.” Clarence was both the Chubby and the Bud.

   Dances were held in the back of the building with local bands. Haywire was a summer favorite. Teenagers with ice cream cones gathered around the pinball machines at the front. Drinkers stayed at the bar, drinking. The bikers ate their Bud Burgers outside during the day and drank inside during the night.

   “We have wedding receptions and things like that,” Clarence said. He told the bikers about them in advance, so that nobody ended up stepping on anybody else’s toes.

   The Spoke Wheel Car Museum was next door. Clarence and his father, Ray, shared an appreciation for old cars. They both liked to smoke but loved cars more. They gave up cigarettes to save money. Instead of going up in smoke their savings went toward buying heaps nobody else wanted and restoring them. They offered to buy Bernie Doiron’s VW Beetle, but he said, “It ain’t no antique.” By 1969, they had 13 cars, including a 1930 Ford Model A Coach that Clarence drove. It was how the roadhouse and diner came into being. 

   “People were coming to the museum and looking for a place to eat,” he said. “Since my dad was a cook in the army, we decided to build a little canteen and it just kept on growing.” 

   Clyde and Pete ate inside at a back table. It wasn’t the warmest day, although it was sunny. They had Bud Burgers and cold pints. There were only a handful pf people having a late lunch.

   “How’s the hip?” Pete asked.

   “Hellzapoppin’,” Clyde said.

   “Is that the official word?”

   “It’s how I feel. I’ve got two months and 29 days from now circled on my calendar.”

   They ate and small talked. “Find anything out?” Pete asked, finishing his burger and hand-cut fries. The food was good because the beef and potatoes came from the island. It would be a trifecta once islanders started up their own breweries.

   “It will be in my report tomorrow, but since you’re interested, I’ll summarize it. She died of a fractured skull. There was tissue not hers on her face and in her hair. I want to say she was hit by a fist that got scuffed up doing it. She had alfalfa on and in her clothes. More than a brush of silage, enough to make me think she was on a dairy farm long enough to roll around in it. She wasn’t killed on that field, although her arm was probably cut off there. The last cut there was in late August, so she was put in the ground sometime between then and no later than the end of October.”

   Thousands of acres of potatoes on the island the last fall were left in the ground. Heavy rain and cold temperatures put a damper on the harvest. There was too much rain and cold, freezing and thawing day after day, and it led to a deep frost.

   “Her arm was probably cut off by an axe, sharp as hell, clean as a whistle. Whoever did it, like the fist, is a strong man or woman. Why it was cut off, since she was already dead when it happened, is for you to find out. She had a loonie clenched in her missing hand. It was a 1988 issue. No prints other than hers on it.”

   “Are her prints in the report?”

   “Yes, what we could get, which wasn’t much of anything, but they will do.”

   It was shop talk. Pete knew everything and a batch of photographs would be part of the report.     

   “She wasn’t molested or abused. I don’t think she had eaten for several days. There wasn’t anything remarkable about her teeth, none missing, one filling. She was in her early twenties, five foot five, 118 pounds, green eyes, light brown hair, no moles, birthmarks, or tattoos. She was healthy as a horse.”

   “Anything else?”

   “One more thing. I think she might have poked somebody in the eye. There was retinal fluid and blood under the fingernails of the first two fingers on the cut-off arm. Her nails were 7 mm long and almond shaped, perfect for poking. It wasn’t her blood, either.”

   Blunt trauma to the eye can cause the retina to tear. It can lead to retinal detachment. It can require urgent surgery. The alternative is blindness.

   “If that happened, where would the eye have been treated?” Pete asked.

   “At a hospital or a large eye clinic.”

   “What happens if it’s not treated?”

   “Kiss goodbye to that eye.”

   “I see,” the police officer said, paying the bill when the waitress stopped at their table. What thin crowd there had been had cleared out. It was the middle of the afternoon. When the two men went out to their cars, they were the only two cars in the front lot. Pete was driving an unmarked police car, although it was clearly an official car. Clyde was driving a Buick Electra station wagon. He could lay a corpse out in the back if he had to. They shook hands and went their separate ways.

   Five hours later a biker riding a red motorcycle approached the roadhouse, swerving to avoid a fox. There was always more roadkill in the spring and fall. Skunks and raccoons were the most common, although foxes weren’t always as quick and slippery as their reputation. He pulled up, parked, and went inside. He left the key in the ignition. His Kawasaki Ninja had an inline four cylinder, 16 valve, liquid cooled engine with a top speed above 240 KPH. He had already made that speed and more. He knew nobody was going to mess with his bike because everybody at Chubby’s knew whose motorcycle it was. At the bar he ordered a Bud Burger and a cold pint.

   “How’s the eye?” the bartender asked. “It looks good. At least, no more pirate’s patch.”

   “Yeah, but I waited too long to get it fixed,” the biker said. “The doc says I’ll probably be more blind than not in that eye from here on. It doesn’t matter, I can still see enough out of the other one to take care of my business.”

   He ate fast and downed his beer. When he left, he paid cash with a new one-hundred-dollar bill.

   “Where do you keep finding these?” the bartender asked.

   “Pennies from heaven, my man, pennies from the main man” the biker said, leaving him a tip of a half dozen shiny loonies.

   Getting on his glam motorcycle in the dusk he thought, I’ve got to be more careful about that.

Excerpted from “Ebb Tide.”

Ed Staskus posts stories on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Cleveland Ohio Daybook http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

“Ebb Tide” by Ed Staskus

“A thriller in the Maritimes, out of the past, a double cross, and a fight to the finish.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Books

Available at Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CV9MRG55

Summer, 1989. A small town on Prince Edward Island. Mob money on the move gone missing. Two hired guns from Montreal. A constable working the back roads stands in the way.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Adirondacks

Fire in the Belly

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By Ed Staskus

“It is a hard to argue with the belly, since it has no ears.” Marcus Cato the Elder

For the past fifty-or-so years restaurants have been rated on the star system by magazines and newspapers. One star means the spot is good, two stars means very good, three is excellent, and four is extraordinary. No stars means you’re on the spot. It’s either tasteless or you’ll be gagging behind the eight ball if you go.

There are some restaurants, standing inside the door, waiting for a table, you get a gut reaction, and it’s best to slowly back out of the place. It doesn’t matter if your name is on the reservation list. Tell the hostess it was a mistake.

“No one likes one–star reviews,” said Peter Wells, restaurant critic for The New York Times. “The restaurants don’t like them, and the readers don’t like them. It’s very tricky to explain why this place is good enough to deserve a review but not quite good enough to get up to the next level.”

Liquids and Solids at the Handlebar is a neck of the woods gastropub slightly off the beaten path, across from Lamb Lumber, in Lake Placid, New York. It doesn’t have the one or two-star problem. With Liquids and Solids it’s love or loathing, feast or famine, no stars or four stars.

“The joint skips the rustic pretentious vibes and serves unforgettable upscale drink and plates in a comfy atmosphere,” Nara Shin wrote recently in ‘Cool Running’.

They don’t take reservations. They describe themselves as “cooking and drink making how we want.” Originality is independence. It doesn’t matter that you have to set aside some of the tried-and-true. Most first-rate stuff is the fruit of originality, anyway.

Frank and Vera Glass, who live in Lakewood, Ohio, walked into the eatery on the corner of Station Street and Route 73 on a Thursday night in late June. It was hopping crowded lively, lots of talking, little of it for the sake of anybody else’s table. Besides, there was food and drink on the tables to pay attention to.

Summer was a week in and it was summertime in the north, a breeze in the windows. Mr. and Mrs. Glass were on a road trip and had stopped in Lake Placid to have dinner at Liquids and Solids.

“We’ve eaten here nine or ten times,” said Frank Glass. “We like it.”

“I never noticed this, it looks like they take their old menus, tear them in half, and put the meats and cheeses on what was the blank backside,” said Vera Glass, seated at a round table in the middle of the restaurant.

“Waste not, want not,” said Frank.

The menus are printed on a 2007-era Kyocera. “It prints the daily menus at a not so top speed, jams pretty fast, sensitive to overheating, traded a guy named Bill a meal for her,” said Tim Loomis, chef and co-owner.

“Best printer we’ve ever had.”

The meats, from the Kreature Butcher Shop next door, included Fennel Kolbasz, Andouille, and Corned Tongue. The cheeses included Dutch Knuckle “fruity and nutty” from the Sugar House Creamery in nearby Upper Jay and a feta “goat’s milk aged 8 months” from Asgaard Dairy in nearby Ausable.

Liquids and Solids is the brainchild, labor of love, and walk of life of Tim Loomis and Keegan Konkoski, the bartender, native Adirondack restaurateurs. “He got the action, he got the motion,” Dire Straights sang when the two were tykes. “Dedication, devotion, do the walk of life.” Getting the hang of going is in the going.

The restaurant seats maybe sixty, seventy diners and the bar seats maybe a dozen. There are no flat-screens, no pump up the volume, and nobody performs any tricks at your table.

“How’s it going, guys?” asked the server walking up to Frank and Vera’s table. “I remember you, you ate outside last fall.”

“We did,” said Frank, “It’s Mel, right?”

“Close, it’s Raquel. Do you want to start with a beverage?”

“A draft.”

“Do you like IPA’s? The Gone Away is fantastic.”

“I’ll take that.”

Vera asked about the Maple and Spice.

“It’s a bourbon, a little spicy, high-end peppers,” said Raquel. “Keegan got the idea for it from a detox, like a cleanse, not that it’s going to cleanse you, but the combination came from that in mind. The apple and lemon juices level it out. The nice thing is it comes in two sizes, a small and a 19 ounce.”

“I’ll take the small one,” said Vera. “That way I can try something else later.”

“What do you like about bourbon?” asked Frank.

“Kentucky punch, it’s refreshing,” said Vera.

Food writers are anyone and everyone who writes about food and restaurants. Some of them prowl noodle shops, like Ruth Reichi does, handing out two and three stars. Others, like Jonathan Gold, win Pulitzer Prizes. There are more than 2 million blogs about food.

Food journalists reviewers critics are expected to be honest, understand both specific dishes and cuisine, as well as be able to look beyond the food to capture the whole of a restaurant, from sandwich shops to swanky supper clubs.

“We have a funny relationship with critics,” said NYC chef Wylie Dufresne. “Regardless of how well we prepare the food, if people don’t know that we’re out there, if someone isn’t talking about us, you guys aren’t coming.”

Sometimes, though, asking a critic to name their cream of the crop restaurant is like asking a butcher to name their favorite cow. It is problematic at best. Our dependence on food is vital, a matter of existence, but our tie-ins to food are intimate, existential.

“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well,” said Virginia Wolff

Nobody needs a critic to find out where good food is. Just go there and try it for yourself. But, since the aughts, with the rise of Zagat, Yelp, and TripAdvisor, everyone’s a critic. Good criticism melds good judgment with a nub of good, old-fashioned crankiness. If you don’t like it, fair enough. But, there’s a difference between judgmental sideswipes and a write-up or write-down, whatever the case may be.

“The arrogant pretentiousness of the mixologist was unbelievable. Part-owner, if she smiled just once, she might even be pretty,” a Virginia diner wrote about Liquids and Solids.

“The short ribs were tough, fatty, and without flavor, the worse short ribs I’ve ever had. I’m 100% sure the chefs bring in and cook whatever animal they killed with their car that morning,” a downstate New York diner wrote about Liquids and Solids.

“Motivated by my dead taste buds and general anger, I am writing as a warning to others about possibly the WORST restaurant I have ever set foot in. My octopus had the consistency of a rubber boot,” a Canadian diner wrote, after rushing back to safety over the border.

It begs the question, however, why the diner was cognizant of the taste of a rubber boot in the first place.

If things don’t work out for DJ Trump in the court of public opinion, maybe he can take his talents to the food court, putting them to work yowling on Yelp.

Unlike reviews of books, music, and movies, reviews of restaurants serve a pragmatic purpose. They alert us to things like cleanliness and food poisoning. Food poisoning is one thing, pointing to a clear danger, but social media poison is another thing, like dirty dishwater.

Imagination, ingenuity, and invention aren’t for everyone, especially not in the food court. Creativity only works when you make mistakes along the way. Who wants to eat a swing and a miss? On the other hand, who doesn’t want to eat a home run?

“They warn you when you first walk in the menu is not for the weak of stomach. I had blood sausage, pureed sweet potato, and some other stuff on a croissant. It was delicious!” wrote a diner from New Jersey.

“The menu changes daily so it’s inevitable they’ll churn out some misses along with their hits. I got beef tartare with cured egg yolk, pickled onions, patty pans, scallions, bacon vin, jalapenos, and potato chips There was a lot going on. Risk-taking, but really yummy,” wrote a diner from New York City.

“The tempura asparagus buns were playful and dangerously addictive, the gnocchi and spaghetti squash layered with a ton of intricate flavors. Excellent service, attentive,” wrote a diner from Massachusetts.

The sound of someone tooting your horn is the sweetest of all sounds. The sound of someone’s two cents’ worth, however, when they’re panning you, can be hard to take.

There are many ways of taking criticism. In the heat of the moment many people get mad and defensive. Some don’t lose their balance, listening to what the critic is saying, taking it like a champ. Others simply admit their mistake and hope for the best. Sometimes you just have to shrug it off. The best restaurateurs take a slice of humble pie, swallow their pride, and try harder, or not, since they are already trying their hardest.

Ordering dinner at Liquids and Solids is simple. It’s all on one side of the paper menu and everything is in black and white. The Ramen plate, for example, is particularized as being made of fried chicken feet, scallions, mustard greens, miso broth, and minute egg.

The sides are called Smalls and the entrees are called Larger.

“Are you ready to go to the next step?” asked Raquel. Waiting tables means being the kind of person who doesn’t get lost on subways.

“Is the Caesar salad still a Caesar salad?” asked Frank.

“It’s a little bit of a play on it, and there are potatoes,” said Raquel. “The old Caesar isn’t on the menu anymore.“

“To keep it alive, it needs to have somebody in there inventing,” Peter Wells has said about chefs and their kitchens.

“OK, we’ll grab that, with two fried eggs on top,” said Frank. It’s a buck an egg extra at Liquids and Solids.

“How about the poutine, we can share that, too” said Vera.

“They’re a little different tonight,” said Raquel.

Poutine is a Quebecois dish, French fries and cheese curds topped with light brown meat gravy, usually served in greasy spoon casse-croutes and roadside chip wagons. French-Canadians say poutine won’t cheat on you, won’t betray you, won’t fight you.

“Poutine gravy is traditionally beef, but this one’s a veggie base, broccoli. It’s a little bit of a lighter poutine.”

“It doesn’t sound like the Meatatarian, but let’s try it,” said Frank.

“How are the smoked grits and shrimp?” asked Vera.

“Southern style, everybody’s lovin’ it tonight.”

“The fried pig head?” asked Frank.

“What they’re doing is they’re cooking the pig head down and pulling all the meat off of it, then balling it, breading it, deep-frying it, and it comes with polenta, cheddar, apples, maple vinaigrette.”

“As long as we don’t see the head,” said Vera.

When restaurants lose the make-it-or-break-it intensity that made them famous in the first place, no matter how crazy much they charge for their plates after that, they become just famous and meaningless. Liquids and Solids is more along the lines of super-excellent than famous.

People go to good restaurants to eat good food and have a good time. Eating bad food in some hash house would put anyone in a bad mood. Everybody’s got to eat. You might as well have an A-1 crack at it.

The good times that roll off the food line at Liquids and Solids kitchen are the doing of Tim Loomis. “Tim rocks,” said the waitstaff on their Facebook page. “Thanks for tossin’ that food on the plate and makin’ it taste and look all sexy like.”

The good times that spill out of the craft beer and specialty cocktail bar at Liquids and Solids are the doing of Keegan Konkoski. Last year for the second year in a row she was named mixologist of the year in Best of the Adirondacks 2015.

She mixes it up even when she’s not mixing drinks. “First day of fall, see ya tomorrow,” said Keegan on the first day of fall. “Off biking. This day should be a holiday!”

“How are you guys digging the poutine?” asked Raquel.

“You can taste the potatoes more, like the broccoli moistens it,” said Vera. “Are there any herbs in there? Am I tasting thyme?”

“I’m not 100% sure. I’ll have to ask.”

Broccoli is one of the world’s healthiest foods. Many children, however, vow that when they grow up they are going to uninvent it. “I haven’t liked it since I was a little kid and my mother made me eat it,” said George H. W. Bush soon after being elected. “I’m President of the United States now and I’m not going to eat any more broccoli.”

Liquids and Solids doesn’t necessarily try to reinvent the wheel, just realign the wheels, starting with plain old broccoli.

“They said no herbs, just different kinds of broccoli,” said Raquel.

“Who dreams this food up?” asked Frank.

“Tim.”

“Why change the tried and true?”

“Who knows what goes on in his head? Try to figure that out, you’ll be here all day.”

“What’s that oily peppery taste?”

“That’s actually simple. They did a rue, flour and butter, cooked it down with onions, and salt and peppered it.”

“It wasn’t thick, it wasn’t all ruey,” said Vera.

“They cooked it down enough that the cool tastes come out,” said Raquel.

“Why can’t Tim do a Caesar salad that you can count on and just fork up?” asked Frank.

“I think he put it on the menu in the first place for people who struggled to find something on our menu. It’s everybody’s go-to. People like to order what they know.”

All food is comfort food for somebody. Caesar salad, no matter where you are, is a standby. You can always rely on it. Except when you can’t.

“Why does Tim do anything? There’s always a reason. Until a month ago he was doing kale and mustard greens because there was an abundance of it on the farm.”

Halfway through dinner a fresh cocktail, a #1, and another pint of beer came to the table.

“Cheers” said Raquel.

“This is different than the Gone Away, but still grapefruity,” said Frank.

“It’s not an IPA, but it’s got a little funk to it” said Raquel. “It’s brewed with wild yeast cultures, in Allagash, Maine.”

“That sounds Turkish.”

“It doesn’t sound American.”

“Did Turks go to Maine, found Allagash, and make beer there?”

“Your guess is as good as mine.”

Liquids and Solids closes at 10 PM. By then the dining room was almost empty. Half a dozen people sat at the bar, two of them with plates of poutine.

“Don’t leave that bite on the plate,“ Vera said, glancing at Frank’s plate.

“Let them eat pig’s head!” said Frank.

In the bowels of some restaurants, whenever a food critic is spied walking in, the kitchen goes into overdrive. Everything else takes a back seat. Whatever the critic orders might be prepared and plated two three four times to make the order absolutely unconditionally no ifs ands or buts great.

At Liquids and Solids everything is prepared and plated once, because everyone’s a critic.

“How was everything?” asked Keegan Konkoski as Frank and Vera Glass passed the bar on their way out.

“Good, thanks,” said Frank.

“I had the #1,” said Vera.

The #1 is a whiskey, whistle pig, st. germaine, suze bitters, cherrys, cran-molasses mix, and falernum.

“You had the #1?”

“Yes, I did.”

“I’m impressed.”

Vera Glass walked out of Liquids and Solids at the Handlebar with a happy full belly and big smile pasted on her face. There’s nothing like tasty sincere food, a sincerely serious drink, and a sincere tip of the hat to make one’s day.

Ed Staskus posts stories on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Cleveland Ohio Daybook http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

Atlantic Canada

Cooking Up the Landmark

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By Ed Staskus

There are thousands of moving parts to restaurants, from sourcing good food for the larder to wage and safety regulations to clearing the tables. Keeping the doors open is an exercise in controlling chaos. That’s why Calvin Trillin, the New York City food writer, has said he never eats in a restaurant more than one hundred feet off the ground.

It can be a way of life, a labor of love, and Dante’s Inferno all rolled up in one, especially if you are the owner and chef at the same time.

Restaurants are fine dining with a reserved atmosphere and noisy gastropubs and clam chowder shacks on the beach. All restaurants, from fast food to fine dining, need stoves and ovens and grills to prepare food. And no matter what kind of a restaurant it is, unless it’s a street takeaway or a food truck, it needs chairs, tables, and booths.

“There was a neighbor of mine up the road in Crapaud, a farmer, who had built tables for a little church fair,” said Eugene Sauve, the owner and chef of the Landmark Café in Victoria, a seacoast town on the Northumberland Strait side of Prince Edward Island. “I asked him if he would consider building tables and a whole bunch of chairs for me. A week later he said, I’ll do it for two thousand.”

A dozen some tables and forty chairs were made. It was 1988. “I didn’t have a formal plan, but it was all visually in my mind,” said Eugene. “I knew I wanted a big round one. The tables and chairs in the front and back dining rooms are still the originals. The big round table is still in the front.”

The Landmark Café, in the centuries old building that had once been Craig’s Grocery Store, opened on the day long-time Victoria resident Hope Laird drove her three-wheeled bicycle through the grand opening ceremonial ribbon. Almost everyone in town was there.

“When we were kids, we used to call Craig’s Store the Landmark,” she said. “Say meet you at the Landmark and all the kids would meet you there.”

“So, that’s what we called it,” said Eugene Sauve.

Restaurateurs open eateries because they are conversant with the business, are self-motivated, and are usually people with people skills. They are foodies who want to match a menu with what they love to do. Sometimes they are people who just like getting their hands wet and dirty, like to be on their feet all day, and like to work long, long hours.

Opening your own sit-down means pulling up your pants, pilgrim. It takes gumption and hard work the spread-out hours you are on your feet. It takes nerve, too. 50% of all restaurants go south inside of three years. After a decade more than 70% have closed their doors.

Why do friends let friends open restaurants?

“I remember having nightmares opening this place,” said Eugene. “All my friends were saying, you’re crazy, you’re wasting your money.”

What Eugene Sauve’s friends didn’t know was that he had worked in restaurants since he was 16-years-old, and had an outsize appetite, to boot. A business centering on an all-you-can-eat business plan made all the sense in the world. “Growing up I played a lot of hockey and I was always hungry,” he said.

“My father was very formal. He was a banker. He would come home from work, go upstairs, get out of his suit, come downstairs, sit down, and only then was supper served. So, I volunteered to help in the kitchen. I had three sisters, but they weren’t interested. My mom was an amazing great cook. One night, dinner would be Japanese, another Italian, another French.”

He helped her and helped himself.  “Every time my mom turned her back in the kitchen I was eating.”

In the early 1970s Euene Sauve’s father, Eugene, Sr., was transferred from Quebec to British Columbia. He was the first French-Canadian to become vice-president of a major bank in western Canada. Eugene’s sisters, as they grew up, went into banking, too, following the lead of their father.

“I was the only one who got away,” said Eugene.

Before his father was a banker, he was a football player in high school and later joined the Canadian Navy.

“After his military service he became a loan officer in a bank. Sometimes loans would only be ten or twenty dollars and he would literally hound guys for fifty cents. It was right after the war and every penny counted. Since he had also once been a boxer, he was an ideal debt collector.”

After leaving home in the mid 70s Eugene was on the road and staying in a small coastal town in Portugal. It was where he found out for himself what good food was, the kind of food he describes to this day as something that “snaps and cracks.” It was the kind of food three decades after opening the Landmark Café he continues to procure and make and serve.

“When I was in Portugal the fishermen would come in, take a little nap, get dressed up, and walk around the plaza, drinking coffee and booze. Their women would go to work, sardines on the barbeque, dipped in olive oil, sprinkled with salt and pepper, with a big crusty roll. Those are my images of good food, good simple food.”

There’s a difference between good table manners and good food. No one needs a silver spoon to eat the best food.

By the 1980s, although his wanderlust had not, and has not to this day abated, he found himself living, working, and newly married in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island. “Julia was from New York, performing in a modern dance company. That’s how we met.” He was soon working in the performing arts and the father of the first of two children.

But his children didn’t grow up in PEI’s capital city. Charlottetown is the province’s largest city. They grew up in Victoria. It is one of the province’s smallest communities. “Erskine Smith, the director of the theater in Victoria, phoned me in April one day, out of the blue,” said Eugene. “He said, I’d like to have you at the Victoria Playhouse, would you come out to talk?”

The seaside town that is Victoria, once known simply as Lot 29, was founded in 1819. Besides landing fish, its livelihood was shipping potatoes and eggs to Europe and the West Indies. Today there are some year-round residents, but not many more than a hundred. Summer is what animates the former seaport of family-run fine and folk-art galleries, artisan chocolate and coffee shops, and the Victoria Playhouse. The Landmark Café is kitty-corner to the theater.

The town in April is quiet wet cold.  “I had a half-hour, I walked around, and I instantly felt something here, something about this place. I got the job, and a month in someone at the theater says to me, there’s a house on the corner. I think the guy wants to sell it.” By the end of the summer Eugene Sauve and his nascent family were living in Victoria.

Two years later he approached Annie Craig about renting her grocery store to him for a new seasonal café to serve the theater’s playgoers.

“She had the post office, a bit of pension, although she wasn’t making a living at the store. But she said no,” said Eugene.

Two months later he approached her again. “This time I asked her if I could buy it. She said no, again.”

Annie Craig spent winters knitting sitting in a rocking chair in the back corner of the store. “Under our carpet you can see where she wore the floor out, rubbing her feet as she rocked,” said Rachel, Eugene’s daughter. “She wore through the tile and into the wood.”

The Craig’s Grocery Store building was almost two hundred years old. It had been gambled away in a card game and had once been sold with the bill of sale hand written on the back of a pack of cigarettes. Before it was a grocery it had a history of cobbling, butchering, and bootlegging.

Annie Craig called back the next spring. “You know what, I will sell to you,” she said.

“How much?” asked Eugene Sauve.

“Twenty thousand. I’m going to be firm on that,” she said.

“You got a deal,” he said.

“20 grand,” he thought after hanging up the phone. “Where am I going to get $20 grand?”

Entrepreneurs need capital to get going, but banks don’t like lending to start-up businesses. “They have no historical income,” said Tom Swenson, chief executive of an American bank. “If you are proposing a start-up business, you are de facto proposing something that doesn’t meet typical bank underwriting standards.”

If it’s a food-related business, they like it even less, because restaurants have high rates of default, no matter how much people like eating the food or how well known the chef might be. A healthy dose of skepticism is the default setting of most banks, or at least it should be. Many start-ups look to their families for cash. Eugene Sauve looked to his father, who was family, and a banker, too.

“My father lent me the $20 grand, since I was determined to open it for exactly that amount of money,” he said. “But I had to bring him in as a partner. It cost me 50 for 20 the six years he was my partner, which was pretty darn good for him, which explains why he was a banker.”

He stuck to his budget by buying end-of-the-roll carpeting on the cheap, cadging no cost paint that had been returned because it was the wrong color, and doing a lot of the heavy lifting himself. “A buddy of mine was an electrician. I worked with him. It was hard work, but It all fell together.”

His first stove was an old 4-burner Enterprise. The galvanized range hood came from a bakery going bankrupt. He was the dishwasher, sous chef, and chef. The kitchen had no air conditioning. “It used to be so hot in here it was unbelievable.”

The Landmark Café in Victoria opened in the summer of 1989.  In the movies they say things like, “If you build it, they will come.” In real life not everything is scripted. “The first day was really scary,” said Eugene. “I wasn’t sure if anybody was going to walk in.”

But if you build something good somebody is going to pay good money for it.

“The best Caesar salad I have ever experienced. The flavors were amazing. And the seafood pasta was melt in your mouth delicious,” said a man finishing his seafood pasta.

“I had been searching for a great seafood chowder,” said a woman in a print skirt. “After four other places this was the very best I’ve had on the island so far, just delicious.”

“I usually go with the flavorful Acadian meat pie, but yesterday I tried the special, a fish burger,” said a frequent diner. “It was delicious.”

When you’re serving people delicious food they don’t complain.

Not much beats delicious. Sunshine and fresh air are delicious. Kissing is delicious, tastier than sex. You don’t have to think about rotisserie chicken to know that it’s delicious. Authentic fresh yummy ingredients like island beef, island fish, and island produce are what make the Landmark Café a landmark when Eugene Sauve prepares and brings them to the table.

A decade-and-a-half after opening, in the mid-aughts, the family, son Oliver and daughter Rachel having joined the labor force, expanded the Landmark Café. “We lifted the whole building, since we had a problem with storage and there was no basement, which we needed to grow as a business,“ said Eugene.

“We added 40 seats and that changed everything, since we were turning people away. The air conditioning in the kitchen got done, too. I’m the chef here, anyway, and I need to stay cool. That way we serve more food and everybody’s happy.”

For all the changes and renovations, the original chairs and tables built by Crapaud farmer George Nicholson thirty years ago are still what many diners sit on and eat at in the Landmark Café. In the course of time, however, things happen, chairs and tables sometimes taking the brunt of it.

Opening the restaurant one morning after a stormy night Eugene Sauve found a note addressed to him.

Dear Eugene,

Please accept my sincere apology for the disorderly behavior I displayed last evening. Enclosed is a cheque that I hope is sufficient for the purchase of a new table. It’s been awhile since I’ve let myself loose like that and I’m only sorry it was at your expense.

Signed, Pam

The next day he wrote back.

Pam, the table is going to be fixed with a little glue. There’s no problem. You are always welcome here.

Love, Eugene

Who doesn’t want to stop and eat and drink and kick back somewhere where the chairs are time tested and sturdy and the table is always set for you?

Ed Staskus posts stories on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Cleveland Ohio Daybook http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

Paperback Yoga

Two’s a Crowd

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By Ed Staskus

“It’s like having, you know, your phone has a charger, right? It’s like having a charger for your body and mind. That’s what meditation is.”  Jerry Seinfeld

Meditation is not a huge undertaking. Anybody can do it anywhere they are, anytime they want, sitting somewhere familiar or even on the fly. It’s often thought that meditation is thinking about nothing. It’s not, since thinking is one thing and nothing is another thing.

If you’re trying to think about nothing, you are still thinking, giving your best shot to making something out of nothing. But, trying to think of nada is like trying to nail Jell-O to a wall. Only nothing comes from nothing. The black hole of meditation isn’t the dark side of the void.

The practice is about being somebody somewhere in a state of being less and less distracted, especially by thoughts. That’s why there are walking and sitting meditations, in the park or on a park bench. It’s not about the moving body. It’s about the non-moving mind. It’s about slowing down the brain on the train.

“If you’re impatient while waiting for the bus, tell yourself you’re doing bus waiting meditation,”” said Gretchen Rubin, author of ‘The Happiness Project.’

It’s about knowing everything without thinking about anything, at the same time that it’s about paying close attention to one thing, the one thing you’re doing on the bulls-eye spot you’re doing it.

It’s about being alone.

But, who wants to be alone? Many people hate being alone. It makes them feel insecure anxious depressed. They get into relationships and marriages and stay related and married because they’re afraid of being alone. We seek family, work, and obligations to stave off loneliness. Social isolation poses health risks and is associated with an increased risk of death.

Most people avoid being alone as much as possible because who wants to hear the voices in their own head all day long, their own internal monologue. You can’t get away from yourself. It would drive anyone crazy.

Even the Bible says it’s not good for man to be alone, although Jean-Paul Sartre, the existentialist writer, once said hell was other people. Whenever you’re left alone you have fewer problems. It’s harder to find someone else to blame, though.

Meditation is an old practice, prehistoric, mentioned in some Hindu texts more than three thousand years ago, and practiced by pagans, Christians, and Muslims. The Romans said, “Do what you are doing.” Japan’s Zen is meditative, Sufis practiced meditative breathing controls, and a meditative tradition is implicit in the Jewish Tanakh.

The bones of it all come from the Buddhists. “Many techniques commonly practiced today originate from ancient Buddhist meditation texts,” explained Susan Chow, a science writer and editor. For most of its long history it was a religious approach. Even when it wasn’t it played a top spot in many religious and spiritual practices.

Believers went to churches temples mosques for many years centuries millennium to affirm and reaffirm their beliefs. They prayed and meditated because it was the person-to-person way to talk to God. It was the direct line to heaven. If you wanted to go to heaven you went to church first.

But, who goes to church anymore? Religion was once called the opiate of the masses. However, denominations and church attendance have slowly and steadily declined the past thirty years, so that today, according to The Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, only about 52 million worshipers go to a weekly service.

Yoga is the new opiate of the masses. It has grown by leaps and bounds the past thirty years, so that today, according to Yoga Journal, about 37 million Americans practice it. Getting on their rubber mats about twice a week, at a studio or at home, means that more people practice yoga than go to church every week.

Spiritual practice has gone rubber soul secular.

Nobody wants to climb the Holy Staircase of the Scala Santa in Rome on sore knees anymore. Everybody wants to get down on healthy knees for cat cow pose. Nobody wants to chant a mantra to a complicated-sounding deity. Everybody wants to go ecstatic kirtan dancing at Wanderlust. Nobody wants to meditate like old-school Buddhists, for whom meditation was a cog in the machinery of enlightenment, along with virtue and wisdom.

Virtue and wisdom don’t get it done anymore, dude, not in the machine age.

What does get it done is mindfulness meditation.

“Meditation is not religion, not spirituality, it’s a technology of upgrading the mind that can enrich one’s life,” wrote Jay Michaelson in ‘Evolving Dharma: Meditation, Buddhism, and the Next Generation of Enlightenment’.

Mr. Michaelson cut to the chase, limning his perspective on meditation and its offspring, modern mindfulness meditation. “There are a lot of same-old, same-old Buddhist books out there. I wanted to write the book I wanted to write, for my circle of serious practitioner friends, all of whom are either Gen-X or Millennial, and none of whom have any patience for those clichés.”

“All men’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone,” wrote Blaise Pascal, the French mathematician and philosopher, coining a cliché.

But, three hundred years after Blaise Pascal, nobody needs to sit in a musty quiet same-old room meditating all by themselves. Besides, it’s not a quiet world anymore, not when the nagging question of the age for the Gen-X and Millennial body politic is, “Where’s my iPhone?” We have turned our backs on silence, even though it’s only silence that can express the inexpressible.

The idea used to be to get in touch with the silence within you. Now the idea is to get in touch with your social media account to see what it’s saying about you. The sounds of silence were once golden. Although the world is never quiet, it used to be much quieter. Chattering is the new knowledge.

Silence is scary.

Fortunately, there is little need to meditate alone anymore. Wherever you are we can all go to mindfulness meditation seminars, classes, and studios. MNDFL in New York City offers 30-minute sit-down sessions for $15 and 45-minute classes for $25. For those aware that MNDFL fills up fast, endless meditation is available at $200 a month.

The Awakening Series at Cleveland’s Mindful Moments is $200, while the Deepening Series is $280.00. Austin’s Meditation Bar offers an unlimited monthly pass, with a 3-month commitment, for $99 a month. At the Kadampa Meditation Center in San Francisco, “perfectly suited for busy modern people,” drop-in classes are $15 and there is a bargain coupon offer of 4 for $50.

“Having a dedicated space where you can go to meditate really brings the practice to life for people,” said Rinzler Lodro, one of MNDFL’s founders. Otherwise, at home, he added, “They’re always going to be distracted by the stain on the carpet.” Carpet stains can be a bane to the tidy and distraction is the archenemy of meditation.

Before meditation was mindfulness meditation it was meditation. It was a way of shaping the mind so that it could be cognizant of content without identifying with content. It was an exercise in generating energy, sometimes called life force, and developing patience, generosity, and compassion. It could also simply be about sustaining a single-pointed concentration as an end in itself.

“The simplest definition of meditation is learning to do one thing at a time,” wrote Tony Schwartz in The New York Times.

The complexity of mindfulness meditation, on the other hand, is that it wants to do everything at once: it lowers stress, enlarges your brain, elevates your school grades, makes music sound better, lowers your health care bill, reduces depression risk, supports weight-loss goals, comes in handy during cold season, and finally, among much, much more, basically makes you a totally terrific person, according to Amanda Chan, editor of ‘Healthy Living’.

What doesn’t it do?

Brain, Behavoir and Immunity Journal Proves Meditation Reduces Risk of Alzheimer’s and Premature Death!

Wake Forest Baptist Medical Centre Reveals Meditation Better than Morphine for Pain!

University of Wisconsin-Madison Demonstrates Meditation Effective in Relieving Inflammatory Bowel Disease!

Whew, it’s time to take a breath!

However, not everyone is all-in with the one-size-fits-all outsize role of mindfulness meditation. “Mindfulness practice has its benefits,” noted Catherine Ingram, author of ‘Passionate Presence’. “But, there came a point when mentally noting my breath, thoughts, and sensations became wearisome, a sense of always having homework and of constantly chopping reality into little bits.”

Even Jack Kornfield, the American author and Buddhist teacher, believed there were limits to what meditation could accomplish. “While I benefitted enormously from training in the Thai and Burmese monasteries where I practiced,” he wrote, “there were major areas of difficulty in my life that even deep meditation didn’t touch.”

One major area in which meditation has undergone a sizable transformation is in the world of business. Not only is meditation, like yoga, like spirituality, like all things ingenuous, being transformed into a commodity, businesses are co-opting meditation for their own purposes.

Fortune 500’s as diverse as Nike, Prentice Hall Publishing, and Proctor & Gamble have gotten behind the meditation-at-work wave. “You cannot out-work a problem, you have to out-meditation it,” said P & G’s CEO A. G. Lafley, who has his own mindfulness practice.

Apple and Google offer meditation space and courses on a regular basis. Google’s ‘Search Inside Yourself’ program is designed to teach employees how to breathe mindfully and listen closely to their coworkers. Steve Jobs often meditated, was married in a Zen ceremony, and the technology titan he created affords employees 30 minutes a day to meditate.

It is no fad in Silicon Valley, since many techies believe it is the kind of thing that rewires your brain, all to the good of the bottom line. “The woo-woo mystical stuff, that’s really retrograde,” said Kenneth Folk, a meditation teacher in San Francisco. “It’s about training the brain.”

In the Digital Age in the New World it’s the kind of thing that can make or break your career. Many companies are concerned with employee motivation, or what they call emotional intelligence. “Every company knows that if their people have emotional intelligence, they’re going to make a shitload of money,” said Google’s Mindfulness Coach and ‘Jolly Good Fellow’ Chade-Meng Tan, sounding like a squid on a skateboard.

At Google there are bi-monthly ‘Mindful Lunches’ where everyone eats in total silence, the only sound the sounds of munching crunching digesting, and the tolling of prayer bells. They have built a labyrinth, too, for walking meditations, although it’s not clear what getting lost has to do with being found. Nevertheless, it isn’t “hippie bullshit,” said Bill Duane, who designs meditation classes for the industry giant.

Meditation used to be one man or woman in one place somewhere on Main Street doing one thing, doing their own thing. There was no bullshit to it. Now it’s walking in circles to get the Wall Street share price of your employer’s stock going in the right direction. There are many kinds of bullshit to it.

Meditation for a long time was an individual enterprise, the seventh element of the Buddhist Noble Eightfold Path. It was about being attentive to everything as-it-is. It wasn’t about being attentive to your co-workers making sure they were on the same path to profits as everyone else.

It wasn’t goal-oriented mindfulness meditation and data-driven wisdom conferences at resorts with executives from Cisco and Ford among the headliners.

“Are we there yet?” asked the man at the Journey to Enlightenment class.

Individualism is the idea that an individual’s life belongs to him or her. The Declaration of Independence is largely about individualism. Collectivism is the idea that an individual’s life belongs to the pack company society of which he or she is a part. The Constitution is largely about collectivism.

According to collectivism the group is real and the individual is an abstraction, clear as dishwater. When meditation is reduced to its lowest common denominator, a dollar sign for a breath of life, individuals are reduced to consumers and notional values on an Excel spreadsheet. According to individualism men and women are an end in themselves. They are not a means to an end for Apple, Google, and Proctor & Gamble, although, God knows, everybody needs soap.

Nobody needs to meditate about that, not even the P & G soap makers.

Mindfulness meditation, as conceived by spiritual entrepreneurs, sharp-eyed businessmen, and post modernists, is a collectivist endeavour, full of hearty healthy happiness on the menu. Meditation as conceived by the old-school sit-down tradition is a breath and point-of-focus practice to get you to a new state of consciousness, out of time, back to the future.

Maybe you got there and maybe you didn’t. In any event, back-in-the-day the results weren’t going to show up on your pay stub. They were going to show up in something that money can’t buy. They were going to show up in a brain and body sitting quietly by itself, the showing up as much the big bang of consciousness as consciousness itself.

When men and women fall in love they rarely want a third wheel along for the ride. Nobody takes collectivism that far, neither back-in-the-day nor today. The dynamic of love is two minds two bodies two individuals melding into what makes the ride worthwhile.

Three’s a crowd.

Meditation can be practiced anywhere, by yourself or in a crowd. All you have to do is be quiet and go inward. No one can do it to you or for you. You have to do it yourself, all by yourself. In the end, when the effort is intentional and the end is unintentional, everyone meditates alone, just like everyone is born alone and everyone dies alone.

Meditation is as solitary as your own reflected light in a mirror. It’s minding your own business.

“Travel light, live light, be the light,” said Yogi Bhajan. When it comes to meditation, and its modern soul mate, mindfulness meditation, two’s a distraction from the solitary practice. It’s me and my shadow.

Other than that, two’s a crowd.

Ed Staskus posts stories on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Cleveland Ohio Daybook http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

Paperback Yoga

Never Trust a Yoga Teacher Under 30

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By Ed Staskus

Back in the 1960s Jack Weinberg, one of the founders of the Free Speech Movement, said, “Never trust anyone over 30.” What he meant was that a great gap existed between those over 30 and under 30. The gap was credibility, to use the term of the day.

The expression was both celebrated and ridiculed. Today the Baby Boomers of yesteryear, for many of whom the catchphrase was a rallying cry, have become the way over 30s and are not trusted by anyone, at least not anyone who suspects that My Generation is the most partisan and self-serving generation of modern times.

Yoga practice is built on trust. Whether it’s the study of yoga ethics, or the concepts of introversion and concentration, or the 800-pound gorilla in the corner, which is yoga exercise, trusting in one’s teachers is important.

Having faith in their teachers motivates students to examine themselves and encourages them to grow.

If you can’t trust a yoga teacher, who can you trust?

“It’s the integrity and awareness that the teacher brings to class that is most important,” said Joe Palese, a Georgia-based teacher trainer who conducts workshops both nationally and internationally.

The problem is, there are boatloads of yoga teachers whose qualifications amount to 200 hours of training. In fact, 85% of Yoga Alliance’s more than 40, 000 registered teachers are registered at the 200-hour level. It’s when the front of the room gets sketchy.

Joe Palese has seen some of these teachers in action.

“The instructors were cool people and they’d play good music,” he said. “But, students didn’t know they were being taught poorly.”

Yoga can be traced back about 5, 000 years, although some researchers believe it may be 10, 000 years old. The first hatha yoga schools date back about 90 years. A 200-hour Yoga Alliance certified teacher expends an effort equivalent to one hour of study for every 25 years of yoga’s existence, based on the 5, 000 year mark, or about two hours of study for every year of modern hatha yoga’s existence.

That’s like stubbing your little toe on the base of Mt. Everest instead of climbing it.

Is there anyone who would hire a plumber, for example, to install a sink or toilet in his or her home, a plumber who bragged he had 200 hours of training?

Plumbers train at trade schools and community colleges. Their apprenticeships typically span 4 – 5 years. In most states they must have 2 – 5 years of work experience before they can take an exam and obtain a license.

A yoga enthusiast can train for 200 hours, earn their Yoga Alliance Registered Yoga Teacher (RYT) title, and open their own studio the next day. They can even offer their own “Teacher Training” program not long after the paint has dried, or after 500 hours of experience, whichever comes first, according to Yoga Alliance Standards. Although YA registration is not a certification, it is a listing of those “who meet our minimum requirements for teaching experience,” explains the organization.

There’s something to be said for setting the bar a little higher, or at least approaching something like elementary school.

The men and women who teach first graders must have a bachelor’s degree from a teacher education program and are typically required to complete a supervised student teaching internship. Then, in order to actually teach their first six-year-old, they need to get a state license.

First grade coursework involves learning to read simple rhymes, beginning to count by 2s and 5s, and science experiments such as how pushing and pulling affects a wooden block. Sometimes a child will throw another child out of a chair to illustrate how forces at work can propel something at rest.

It does not involve complex dispositions of the body on a mat, concentration of energy in one place, or lessons on how to achieve a unified state of mind.

Yet, it seems, anyone can teach yoga, from simple down dog to enlightenment, after training for the equivalent of five full-time weeks. They do not need a license of any kind. No state regulates yoga. The one state that did, Colorado, in May 2015 relaxed its regulations to practically nothing after a storm of yogic protests.

“I get pretty fired up about this,” said Annie Freedom of the Samadhi Center for Yoga and Meditation in Denver. “How can you have people who know nothing about yoga regulating yoga schools?” Which begs the question of why teacher training facilities like the Samadhi Center continue to churn out new 200-hour teachers who know next to nothing about yoga.

“Sadly, ‘Do a headstand if you want to,’ is the norm for beginning yoga teachers now,” said James Brown of the American Yoga School.

In fact, no one even needs a Yoga Alliance anything to teach headstand and inner peace. Anyone can open up shop anywhere, on their own say so, whether they know anything about yoga or not. Many in the yoga business argue that because they are teaching love and compassion they should be exempt from state regulation.

It is basically a free-for-all in the free market, buyer beware.

Self-appointed yogis like Bikram Choudhury claim whatever they want, such as that hot yoga flushes toxins from the body (false), cures cancer (false), and keeps you going all night long in the sack (doubtful after 90 minutes of Bikram “Torture Chamber” Yoga).

“Cootchi, cootchi,” said Bikram Choudhury. “You can have seven orgasms when you are ninety.”

No matter the funny dada-like sense of it, it is coldly calculated, some yoga masters laughing all the way to the bank.

“The class was so bad I can’t even explain it to you,“ wrote Lauren Hanna in ‘Licensing Yoga: Who the F*ck Let You Become a Yoga Teacher?’

“It made no sense. The teacher should be arrested it was that bad.”

She may have meant having to listen to a newly minted 200-hour graduate explain how “hips hold deep-seeded feelings of guilt and resentment” or some other mumbo-jumbo, meanwhile offering up the new age mantra of “channel your inner child” as they try to encourage a fifty-year-old a few months shy of beginner class to do crow or handstand.

There is a reason why William Broad of The New York Times has written articles and a book about how yoga can wreck bodies, from torn cartilage to causing strokes. “There are no agreed-upon sets of facts and poses, rules and procedures, outcomes and benefits,” he said.

There are some in the yoga world who want it that way. “Things are not uniform by tradition,” said Gyandev McCord, the Director of Ananda Yoga in Nevada City, California.

As for rules and procedures, Gyandev McCord believes yoga should be left alone to self-govern itself, saying those “who don’t understand the landscape of yoga aren’t qualified” to regulate it.

Yoga Alliance opposes government regulation of yoga, including teacher training programs, saying it “would simply serve no benefit to the public or yoga community.” They believe regulation of any kind is unnecessary because yoga is “a safe activity, licensure would inevitably reduce consumer choice, government authorities are not qualified, and it may compel teachers to stop offering instruction.”

Although it is certainly laudable of Yoga Alliance to be mindful of the yoga community, it may be equally lamentable that fledgling 200-hour teachers are only able to grasp a little of the big landscape of yoga.

Training of any kind is optional.

“It’s not illegal to teach without training as a teacher,” explained Gyandev McCord. Maybe not, but maybe it should be, given that minimally-educated teachers instructing the uninformed in flow-based yoga to the soundtrack of their rocking iPods may be doing more harm than good.

“It’s an embarrassing charade that looks kind of like something called yoga that one saw in a book once or twice,“ said James Brown of the American Yoga School.

“Teaching any of the yoga poses requires an understanding that comes from deep study and long-term practice.”

But, instead of promoting “deep study” Yoga Alliance has gone the way of Trip Advisor, saying on their website: “Past trainees provide social ratings and comments about their training experience, which may be shown on our public directory.”

That’s a Little League home run. Hooray for babes in toyland and social media!

Given the way things are, and the way things seem to be going, it may be best to simply not trust any teacher under 30 and instead opt for older seasoned teachers who have gained their experience from even older well-seasoned teachers.

Although it is true that experience is gained by making mistakes, and real knowledge comes from direct experience, which under 30 teachers are doing, it is also true that experience is a brutal teacher. When it comes to rolling out one’s mat it might be better to do so in front of someone who’s already learned all about drawing without an eraser, someone who’s spent more than a few weeks of training getting prepared organized off on the right foot for a lifetime.

Better to do wheel pose in the hands of someone who’s not re-inventing the wheel.

A version of this story appeared in International Yoga Journal.

Ed Staskus posts on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

Accidental Reality

Ball and Chain

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By Ed Staskus

   It was wetter than not the front end of summer and too muddy to ride the single tracks in the Rocky River Reservation. It had rained or thunder stormed nine days the first fourteen days of July. One day two inches of rain fell. Instead, I rode my Specialized on the all-purpose trail and left my Schwinn hanging in the garage. The Schwinn was outfitted for dirt, with front shocks and a low stem. The Specialized was outfitted with road tires, knobby on the outside and smooth rolling on the flat side and had a higher stem. It made for better riding on asphalt.

   It made for even faster riding down Hogs Back Lane, which is the entryway off Riverside Dr. into the valley. Hogs Back is laid out on a steep shale hill. It’s about a half-mile to the bottom. When the shale slumps and slides, the two-lane surface crumbles, and it becomes essential to keep your eyes fixed on the road.

   Hunched over the handlebars I could hit 40 MPH going downhill, no problem, unless I feathered the brakes, which I did, lessening the chances of flying over the handlebars at 40 MPH. That would have been a problem, if not the end of me.

   I rode alone most of the time and especially that summer because my brother Rick was getting married. He said he didn’t have time to get on his bike anymore. “I’ve got a lot going on,” he explained. He had been married once before, but it only lasted 57 days. He was determined to make his next marriage work out for the better.

   “I don’t want him racing that crazy hill and crashing,” said his fiancée, Amy Brotherton. She was down on Hogs Back. She didn’t want a train wreck walking down the aisle at her side. She and Rick had met a few months earlier on a blind date. One thing led to another on the one-way street they were on.

   “You be careful, too,” my wife said watching me saddle up in the backyard. “I don’t want you wrecking, either.”

   The summer of 1995 was hot, in the high 80s when it wasn’t in the high 90s, and the air was humid and sluggish. I could have ridden the single tracks, since they had dried up, but I stayed on the all-purpose trails. Towards the end of one week, after getting home from work, I rode twelve miles out, almost all the way to Berea. It was on the way back that I passed a skinny man in a red helmet on a hybrid.

   Inside a few minutes the red helmet was behind me, drafting, but when I slowed down for a car at the crossroads to the entrance of Little Met, he slipped ahead when the car paused to let us go by. The trail goes up a long hill there and I finally caught up at the top.

   He tucked in behind me and we rode fast to where the trail zigzags through some curves, and to where he got sloppy. He tried to pass two young women on roller blades, except on an inside-out curve, and when a biker rode up on the other side, he had to slalom wide on the grass. At the end of the curve a ditch stretches away from the trail to the Valley Parkway, and he backtracked. I waited for him to catch up.

   “That was a good pace,” he said before I peeled away to go back home, while he kept going his own way. Pedaling up Hogs Back is a long hard slog, which is what I did, slog up the long hill. By the time I got close to the crest, I was on the verge of a standstill.

   The next day Rick and I rode downtown. He said he had an appointment for a haircut at Planet 10, on West 9th St., and wanted to ride there. On the way from Lakewood, we spun through Ohio City to Church Street. He pointed out an old church whose rectory had been converted into a recording studio. 

   “That’s where we’re having our reception,” he said. Amy was a sometime actress and singer. She had the looks and the voice. She made a living doing nails, since nailing roles in Cleveland wasn’t a paying proposition.

   They were getting married at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church instead of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, where my wife and I had gotten married. Rick was Lithuanian stock, just like me, but even though Amy was an atheist, her mother wasn’t and wanted her to be married in a church. Amy didn’t like the Lithuanian church in North Collinwood, so it was going to be St. Pete’s in Lakewood.

   We went south on West 25th St., crossed the bridge to Jacobs Field, and rode to the Warehouse District. The bride-to-be was still OK with Rick riding on city streets, but not any farther through the near east side, like I often did, to Cleveland Heights along Cedar Rd. She quashed that, stamping her foot.  

   “I don’t want him getting killed in Fairfax by any porch monkey,” she said.

   Rick pushed his bike into Planet 10’s lobby and I rode away, going my flaneur-like way. After zigzagging around downtown, on my way home, stopping at a narrow strip of grass beside the Hope Memorial Bridge, squeezing a drink from my water bottle, I watched a black woman with shopping bags easing herself down to the ground in front of an RTA sign. She looked up at me and smiled. She had crooked yellow teeth. She was probably going back to Fairfax, maybe thinking of killing Rick if he rode his bike past her house.

   I was standing outside my garage when Rick and Amy pulled up in her baby blue Ford Tempo. His bike was sticking out of the trunk, the trunk bungee corded. “Jerry screwed up Rick’s appointment,” she complained. “He’s so unprofessional.” She was mad. “That’s not how we do business at Artistiques.” It was her friend’s hair and nail salon.

   Planet Ten was owned and operated by a gay man named Jerry who was a junkie. He lived near Gordon Square where he could score smack in the blink of an eye. He was up-and-down on any given day. He was good with clippers and shears, though.

   It was mid-week before I rode back into the park and got on the dirt trails that branch off from the horse stables at Puritas Rd. They were dry where they were level, but they weren’t level over much. I had to ford a stream where a tree had fallen. I jumped some baby stumps, went sideways once, and when I got home got the outdoor hose and sprayed cold water on myself. It was a hot day.

   My wife and I drove to Amy’s bridal shower that weekend, which was at her best friend’s house in Avon Lake. She was a big-faced woman married to an Englishman who was a barge pilot. It was steamy as hell even though it was just barely August. I was sprawled across a leather sofa in the air-conditioned family room when I noticed a small dog on the coffee table. I couldn’t tell if it was a dog dead asleep or a dead dog who had been stuffed. When I reached for whatever the thing was, it snapped at my fingers.

   “You better watch out,” the bridesmaid said. “He’s blind, so he bites at everything.”

   I went for a ride after we got home. Twilight was turning to dusk by the time I got back. Snapper, our Maine Coon cat, came running out of the neighbor’s backyard. Just when I was ready to close the garage door, Rick pulled into the driveway.

   “Can I borrow your lawn mower?” he asked.

   “All right, but don’t break it.”

   My brother was notorious for either busting or never returning borrowed tools. He had Katie, Amy’s three-year-old, with him. I picked her up, held her upside down, and spun her by her heels in tight circles. When we were done, we talked about a nickname for her, finally settling on Skate.

   “It rhymes with Kate,” I said.

   She waved goodbye through the window of the car as Rick pulled out with the lawn mower. If the child hadn’t been with him, I wouldn’t have lent him the mower. That was probably why he brought her along.

   By mid-August cumulus clouds were dotting the sky and the weather was surprisingly cooler than it had been. I rode my Schwinn down Hogs Back and got off the all-purpose trail at Mastik Woods, veering onto the dirt track there. I rode the track for three miles and then double-backed on the horse trail. As I did, I noticed somebody was coming up.

   When he went by, I saw he was wearing a baseball cap instead of a helmet and was on a well-worn Trek. He was riding fast, and even though I followed him as best I could, I couldn’t catch him until he suddenly slowed down. I saw why when he pulled up. Horses were coming around a bend. We waited while the horses cantered past.

   The Trek turned to the right and rode into the trees toward the river and the single tracks on the bank. I followed him, bumping over ruts and logs and through thick underbrush, but soon lost sight of him. He pushed up the hill running along Big Met, then down, and as he came into the clear jumped onto the trail ahead of me. He had gone around and was riding faster than before. We sped through a thicket, then across a baseball field where he widened the gap by jumping a wood guardrail, something I couldn’t do, even if I tried as hard as I could. It would have ended badly. I went around. It went well enough.

   I thought I might catch the Trek on the Detroit Rd. climb out of the valley, except he climbed so fast I lost more ground. I finally caught up to him where he was waiting at a red light on Riverside Dr. We talked while I gulped air.

   “I wasn’t planning on doing much today, but it ended up being a fun ride,” he said. “I saw the Vytis decal on your fender,” he said. There was a red decal of the White Knight on my rear X-Blade fender. 

   “Not many people know what that is,” I said.

   “I know my Lithuanian heroes,” he said, waving goodbye.

   A week before the wedding my brother called and said JoJo was out as their maid of honor. She was Amy’s ex-friend-to-be who arranged the blind date with Rick when Amy had been on the prowl after her latest divorce. She was promised she could be maid of honor if the date led to anything. JoJo was a travel agent. Amy gave her a cash down payment for a Cancun honeymoon. But then the travel agency called and said they were getting anxious about the down payment, since they hadn’t received it, yet.

   When Rick telephoned JoJo, she said she hadn’t gotten any cash, but when Amy heard that she rushed to the phone. There was a long loud argument and JoJo somehow found the money. The honeymoon was back on, but Tammy had to at the last minute find another maid of honor. 

   The next day my brother called.

   “Are you going riding?” he asked.

   “I’m just going out the door,” I said.

   “I’ll be there in ten minutes. I need some fresh air.”

    I was working out the kinks in my lower back when Rick rode up the driveway.

   “Amy’s sick,” he said.

   “What’s wrong with her?”

   “Cramps. I think it’s nerves,” he said.

   “Let’s go,” I said.

   The sky was overcast and gusts from the southwest pushed us around as we rode Riverside Dr. on the rim of the valley. We glided down and rode single tracks. The dirt was late summer dried out and the ruts were bad, but we rode fast enough. My back wheel went in sketchy directions a few times. Rick held back. He didn’t want to face plant.

   “A little out of control there,” he said when we crossed over to a horse path and relaxed.

   “Maybe a little,” I said.

   “I want to make it to the altar in one piece,” he said.

   “Getting married can be risky business,” I said. “Take a look at you and Amy. You were married once, and it lasted for two months. Tammy’s been married twice. She’s got a kid by one of the husbands and a kid by somebody else. You might want to throw yourself down every downhill between now and the wedding day.”

   “I don’t think so,” he said, giving me an aggrieved look. 

   “Then the next best thing is to keep your eyes wide open before the wedding and half-shut afterwards.”

   Coming out of the park on a smooth stretch Rick suddenly slowed down ahead of me when I wasn’t looking. I got tangled up in his rear tire and went over the handlebars. I skinned my knee and put a dent in my helmet, but we were going too slow for much else to happen.

   “Crash test dummies!” a crow watching us from a tree branch squawked.

   I took me longer to put my derailleur chain, which had fallen off, back on than it did to get over my injuries. The chain was trapped against the frame. I had to loosen the rear wheel. I cleaned my greasy hands on some of last year’s fallen leaves.

   The morning of the big day, while my wife went shopping for a gift, I rode down into the valley. I felt good, but a strong crosswind was blowing, and I got tired. The bike felt sloppy, too. Going home I pushed hard because I didn’t want to be late for the show. When I finally got home, I found out I had been riding on a nearly flat back tire.

   Rick’s wedding went off without a hitch, but during the reception, when my wife was congratulating him, he made the shape of a handgun with his hand, with his index finger pressed to his temple.

   The next day I drove to Rick’s house with the gift we had forgotten to bring to the reception. Amy was lounging in the living room in a thick, white bathrobe, poring over Cancun brochures, and Skater Katie was in her pajama’s. While Rick and I talked in the kitchen doorway, Amy’s old dog limped up to me and licked the scrape on my knee.

   By the beginning of October, the park was yellow and maple red. I rode the all-purpose trail every other day. One Sunday morning my wife and I had breakfast at the Borderline Café down the street and went for a walk on the horse trails behind South Mastik. That night, while we were watching a movie on TV, Rick called.

   “I won’t be able to ride anymore,” he said.

   “Amy?” I asked.

   “No,” he said. “It’s my shoulder.”

   I had seen how he couldn’t lift his right arm above his head without trying hard.

   “After any ride,” he said, “any ride at all, bumps or no bumps, my shoulder is in a lot of pain. I’ve been taking Celebrex, but my doctor told me it’s rubbing bone on bone. There’s almost no cartilage left. He said sometime in the next couple of years, depending on how fast the rest of it goes, I’ll need a replacement shoulder.”

   “Oh, man!” I exclaimed.

   The last Saturday of the month was the last day of the year I rode in the valley. It was getting too wet and cold. I was adjusting the strap on my helmet when a gang of neighborhood boys and girls came walking up with rakes, brooms, and a wagon. They asked if they could rake our yard for $5.00. I said sure. They started pushing wet leaves into piles. The biggest of the girls walked up to me.

   “Mister, can I ask you something?” she said.

   “Sure,” I said.

   “That small boy,” she said pointing to a small boy. “He’s having a potty emergency.”

   I rang the doorbell for my wife, and she came outside, saying she would take care of the boy and supervise the raking. “Go before it gets dark,” she said. It was getting dark earlier and earlier.

   Where Hogs Back intersects with the Valley Parkway, I cut across a field and rode onto a single track. The path was littered with twigs and slapdash. A flock of honking Canadian geese went by overhead. I came around a quick bend and the branches of a fallen tree on the side of the track jabbed at my face. I swerved to the left and pulled on the brakes, jumping off the bike when the tree I was going to run into became the tree I ran into. I landed on my feet and the bike was all right when I picked it up.

   On the way home I rode on the road, instead of the all-purpose trail, hugging the shoulder’s white line. A man in a shiny new silver pick-up leaned on his horn behind me, and when he went past, tried to shrug me off the road, giving me his middle finger for good measure. Some people are sons of bitches. There’s no getting around it or doing anything about it. 

   At home I hosed off the Schwinn and hung it up in the garage. I checked the tires. They looked good, although I knew hanging upside down in the garage all winter long all the air would slowly seep out of them.

   I was going to miss riding with Rick, but when you ride with somebody else you have to wait until they’re as ready as you. When you ride by yourself you can go whenever your bike is spit polish lubricated and the tires look good. The White Knight had been a metalhead for crown and country, and even though his decal brought up my rear, going it alone is the real deal. Nobody wants to be alone, but sometimes you just need to be left alone.

   I did yoga at home that winter to give my lower back a break. I went to classes sometimes even though I couldn’t stand the pie in the sky talk. I had an indoor bike and pedaled on it. I would have to pump up my road bike tires again the coming April, before going back into the valley. When I did, I would keep my eyes on the road ahead, not looking back, daffodils blooming and turkey buzzards circling in the warming air, the springtime fine after a long cold winter on Lake Erie.

Ed Staskus posts stories on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Cleveland Daybook http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

Ebb Tide

Treasure Island

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By Ed Staskus

   “Mommy you know how those men dug a hole and buried daddy in it because he wasn’t alive anymore?”

   “Yes, Maggie.”

    “I saw daddy dig a hole behind the barn and bury something in it.”

   “When did you see that?”

   “I saw it when he came back.”

   “Came back from where?”

   “When he left with all the horses that time and then came back.”

   Siobhan dried her hands on her apron. “Show me where that is,” she said. The widow and her daughter walked out of the kitchen, across the yard, and behind the barn. It was early in the morning, the bottom half of the sun still in the ocean.

   “Look mommy, there’s a fox digging near where daddy buried his treasure.”

   A black-coated red fox was digging, stopping, listening, and digging again. He had long, thin legs, a lean lithe frame, pointed nose and bushy tail. They eat everything, rats, mice, voles, lizards, rabbits and hares, birds, fruits, and bugs. The foxes on their shoreline ate fish and crabs.

   “What is he doing?”

   “When he stops to listen, he’s listening for a rat or a mouse digging underground,” Siobhan said.

   The fox cocked his head. “I know you’re down there,” he said to himself. “You can’t get away.” He dug deeper, not trying to be quiet. He knew he could dig faster than whatever rodent was soon going to be breakfast.

   He was the size of a medium-sized dog. It was a tod, a man fox. The vixen was probably in the nesting chamber with their pups. They lived in the dunes, in burrows they dug for the family. There were three four five ways of getting into and out of the den in case predators snuck in trying to eat the pups. The fox husband and wife stored groceries there, pushing it under piles of leaves, spending most of the day in the safe and sound, searching for food at night.

   The fox looked up at Maggie and Siobhan. She knew they could see as well as cats, their vertically slit pupils glinting. If he yipped and turned to go, he would be gone in a flash. They were by far the fastest animals on the island. Many people thought they were cunning. Some people thought they had magical powers. Whatever spells they could cast never helped when a coyote was tracking them.

   When the fox got his Norway rat, he trotted off with it. Siobhan went into the barn and brought back a shovel. Maggie pointed at the spot to dig. Ten minutes later her mother had a dirty leather tobacco pouch in her hands. She knocked the loose dirt off it and walked to the house, Maggie trailing behind. They sat on the porch facing Murphy’s Cove. When she opened the pouch and reached inside, her hand brought out money in bundles held together by elastic bands. She had never seen elastic bands before and never seen that much money, either. When she finished counting it there was $10,500.00 in her lap.

   It was all in fifty-dollar Dominion of Canada bills. Mercury was on the front holding a map of British North America, along with a harbor, ships, and a train in the background. “50 Dollars Payable at Montreal” was printed on the back. Montreal was where her husband had sold his horses.

   “Look mommy,” Maggie said. “Somebody is coming.”

   A two-man horse and buggy were coming down the road, except there were three people in the buggy, a man and a woman and a one-year-old girl.

   “It’s Clara and Hugh come down from Clifton with their new-born,” Siobhan said as the buggy got closer. Her children were on the porch watching. She stuffed the cash money back into the leather pouch and handed it to Billy, her oldest son. “Go to my bedroom and wait for me there. Keep this on your lap until I come for it.”

   “Good day,” Siobhan said as the buggy came to a stop. Clara handed the child to her. Hugh walked around and helped his wife down to the ground. Lucy Maud Montgomery looked up at Siobhan and smiled. Siobhan smiled back. The baby girl cut cheese, and Siobhan gave her back to her mother.

   “Lucy is a lovely name, but she looks like an Annie to me,” Siobhan said.

   “That’s odd, because you’re the second person who has said the same thing,” Clara said.

   “We wanted to stop and pay our condolences,” Hugh said.

   “Thank you,” Siobhan said.

   “William was a good man.”

   “Yes, he was.”

   Hugh fed and watered the horse. The grown-ups sat and talked on the porch. The children played with the child. When the sun started to set Hugh and Clara started to set off for North Rustico where they planned to spend the night with relatives.

   “Come and have dinner with us,” Clara said.

   “I would love that,” Siobhan said and that is what she did, but not before walking upstairs with Sean, her second-oldest son. “I won’t be back tonight,” she said to him and Billy. “Put the children to bed once it gets dark. Don’t light anything and keep this bag in bed with you tight between the two of you until we decide what to do with it tomorrow.” She kissed her sons, and the others downstairs, and once outside walked alongside the buggy towards town. She carried the baby, cooing at the girl as they walked past the graveyard.

   The next morning, she made breakfast for her children and when they were done, she and the girls cleaned up while the boys tended to their chores. Michael was too small to do much, but Billy and Sean were strong boys who knew their way around animals and farmland. Next summer she might add on to the house, adding two bedrooms so when the boys and girls grew up, they could have separate bedrooms. She would improve the fields and fences. She would hire a farmhand, but not increase the size of her herd overmuch. Her husband had wanted to keep a hundred horses, but she didn’t think the land would keep that many healthy. She would devote three hundred acres to the horses and thought fifty-or-so of them would be best. 

   She didn’t believe in continuous grazing. Horses had a bad habit of grazing their favorite grass close to the ground, then returning to eat the regrowth as soon as it came back. As the year went on there wasn’t enough of it left to capture sunlight and regrow. It had to use stored energy to regrow, and if horses kept eating in the same place, the energy stores ran out and the grass died.

   Horses liked orchard grass, smooth brome, and timothy the best. They could eat it all day long down to the bare ground, which was when weeds started to grow in their place. Siobhan had heard of rotational grazing and that was what she was going to do. She would move the horses to one pasture and let the other pastures rest to recover. Each of the pastures would be left empty for at least several weeks at a time. That was how long it took for forage regrowth to begin after grazing.

   She had four paddocks connected to a sacrifice lot. The lot had a shelter, a feeder, and a water source so that the paddocks didn’t need to have their own. The horses could get to the sacrifice lot anytime they wanted. They liked it that way. Siobhan was determined to keep draft horses. Prince Edward Island was a farming island and farmers needed draft horses more than anything else

   When Friday came and before it went, she told the children they would be going to Charlottetown the next day, and staying overnight, so they could buy clothes shoes boots tools small barrels utensils dishes a new table and chairs and as many household necessities as they could carry back before the long winter set in.

   Her team could trot at 15 KPH and get them to Charlottetown in two hours or die trying. The road wasn’t especially rough or hilly, but it wasn’t smooth and flat, either. If the team walked, they could get to the city and live to tell the tale, although it might take them five hours-or-more. She would take the four youngest children with her and leave the two oldest behind. She made Billy and Sean stand on brown paper and traced their bare feet. She rolled the paper up and tied it with a string. She measured their arms and legs and height.

   The five of them going all together would weigh less than 400 pounds. They would be heavier coming back, but the horses could pull ten times and more that weight with no trouble and do it all day if the distance was slow and steady. She hitched the horses to their farm wagon and started before dawn. Maggie and Michael, the two youngest, sat up front with her. Biddy and Kate knelt in the back on the floor of the wagon leaning on the tailgate, looking back from the way they were coming. 

   When coming into Charlottetown she asked the children if they wanted to see Fanningbank. “Yes, please!” They were unanimous that they did. “Our teacher told us it is the Government House,” Biddy said when she saw it. “Why do they call it Fanningbank?”

   “It’s because a hundred years ago Edmund Fanning, who was going to become the governor, set this land on the riverbank aside for the building of a residence for the governor,” Siobhan said. “The land was his and known as Fanning Bank then, and that is what it has stayed.”

   Fanningbank was a large Georgian style house. It was the kind of architecture popular in England in the 18th and early 19th centuries. The Georgian style valued classical balance. John Harvey was the second governor to live there. After the start of the new year of 1837, in the dead of winter, he held the first big dress-up party in the elegant house. 

   “An entertainment, upon a grand and splendid scale, was given by His Excellency Sir John and Lady Harvey at Government House on Thursday evening last. As this was the first occasion upon which the rooms at Government House were thrown open to a large evening party, no pains were spared to give full effect to the enlivening scene. His Excellency and Lady Harvey received their guests in the centre drawing room, and at ten o’clock dancing commenced, which was continued with great spirit and animation until after one o’clock. The rooms were brilliantly lighted, and this, added to the crown of beauty and fashion with which they were thronged, exhibited their handsome proportions and striking appearance to peculiar advantage,” the Royal Gazette reported.

   The dancing mingling gossiping back-slapping took place in the Grand Ballroom, a high-ceilinged large room surrounded by eight columns. When the party was over His Excellency and Lady went upstairs and rooted around under the covers in the Sovereign’s Bedroom.

   In 1864 the delegates to the Charlottetown Conference came to the house in the evening for an official dinner and dance given by Governor George Dundas. They had a grand time excited by their grand ideas, although none of them had any illusions about what it would take to make their ideas come true.

   “Mommy, why do they call them excellencies?” Maggie asked.

   “I will tell you when you are a little bit older,” Siobhan said.

   They continued to the south side of Queen Square, one of Charlottetown’s main commercial streets. It was where Siobhan knew there was tailoring, the selling of dry goods, and the manufacture and sale of rubber boots and furniture. What she didn’t know was that a fire had swept through the section destroying all but one building on the corner of Richmond and Queen. Where wood had stood brick was being laid, but nothing there was ready yet to provide her what she wanted and needed.

   Charlottetown was a small city but with big enough business, and she had no great difficulty finding the clothes and goods she was looking for. One merchant’s loss was another merchant’s gain. The first merchant she visited was the shoemaker Thomas Strangman and Sons. A shoe stitching machine had been invented by an American in 1856. It was known as the McKay Stitching Machine and Thomas Strangman was the first on PEI to have one. Sole cuts specifically tailored to fit the right or left foot were still on the way.

   When she was ready to pay for the shoes and boots for her children and herself, she showed one of the fifty-dollar bills to Thomas Strangman.

   “Is my money good here?”

   He looked at the front and back of the bill.

   “Yes, ma’am, your money is good here.”

   He would take it next door to the dry goods store which was also an exchange bank.

   She bought rice, sugar, and coffee. She bought cotton socks wool socks undershirts under garments shirts denim pants and blankets. She bought rolls of calico, brown shirting, domestic gingham, and bleached cotton. She bought a heavy plaid shawl for $3.00.  She bought a dining room table and eight chairs for $45.00.

   On the way back to Murphy’s Cove on Sunday morning the children sat in the chairs at the table in the back of the farm wagon all the way home, waving to everybody they saw, pointing out a cross-eyed cow, and singing songs. They took turns sitting at the head of the table. They sang parlor songs and minstrel songs. They sang “The Maple Leaf Forever” and “The Red River Valley.”

   “From this valley they say you are going, I shall miss your bright eyes and sweet smile, for alas you take with the sunshine, that has brightened my pathway awhile.”

   Siobhan kept her eyes fixed on the long road ahead of her.

Photograph: Charlottetown, PEI, 1870s.

Excerpted from “Ebb Tide.”

Ed Staskus posts stories on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Cleveland Ohio Daybook http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

“Ebb Tide” by Ed Staskus

“A thriller in the Maritimes, out of the past, a double cross, and a fight to the finish.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Books

Available at Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CV9MRG55

Summer, 1989. A small town on Prince Edward Island. Mob money on the move gone missing. Two hired guns from Montreal. A constable working the back roads stands in the way.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Cape Cod

Beating the Bushes

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By Ed Staskus

   “Nobody would talk to me at the Lighthouse the first winter I lived in Wellfleet,” said Susan Rarick. “All the other tables were yukking it up, laughing away, having a good time. I sat there alone slouched over a beer, night after night, and nobody would talk to me.”

   The Lighthouse was a bar and restaurant in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod. It had been there forty-some years at the far end of the peninsula called the Outer Cape. A scale replica of the Nauset Beach lighthouse jutted up from the roof and the menu didn’t lack for crab cakes, littlenecks, and PBR’s. The only towns farther out on the Cape are Truro and Provincetown, on the far fist end of the Cape, which is 14 miles north of Wellfleet.

   The Pilgrims, when they landed in North America in 1620, landed in Provincetown. It is where they first shook hands with the locals and signed the Mayflower Compact. When Thanksgiving was over and done, they shook a holy fist at the locals and went south for better living quarters.

   “It wasn’t until Barbara Jordan, who was then the social director of the town, started talking to me that everybody else did, too,” said Suzie.  “I had only moved to Wellfleet from Provincetown, but it’s very local here, big time. Any small town is like that. But, once you’re in, you’re in for life.”

   Fewer than three thousand people live in Wellfleet, once known as Oyster Port, although in summer the population swells to nearly twenty thousand. Almost half of the town is part of the Cape Cod National Seashore. The rest of the place is a one-horse middle of town, winding residential neighborhoods, and a large harbor.

   The town clock on the top of the Congregational Church is the only bell clock in the world that still rings on ship’s time. The Wellfleet Drive-In is one of the few still standing in the USA. It’s the only outdoor screen on the same coastline where the movie was shot that shows the movie “Jaws” under the stars. The Beachcomber at Cahoon’s Hollow is the only beach bar high on top a Cape Cod dune overlooking the Atlantic Ocean.

   The Incredible Casuals, featuring a transvestite drummer, were the Sunday afternoon house band for many years. But, like the band, not all of Cape Cod where the Beachcomber stands is still there. “When I was a kid, we had to walk forever from the car, lugging all our stuff, to the beach,” said Suzie. “Not anymore. It’s being washed away. The winter before last we had a storm that caused twenty years’ worth of erosion.” The Beachcomber lost its last row of parking. It collapsed into the Atlantic Ocean.

   “It’s extremely fragile here. That’s one reason it’s so special, besides the people. Where else can you live where many people don’t necessarily lock their doors? It’s like going back in time,” she said. Recent FBI crime statistics show that Cape Cod is below the national average in everything, while the murder risk, at a third, and the robbery risk, at a fourth, are both far below the national average.

   “I feel safe wherever I go, even in the woods, at least right up to hunting season, when you have to start being a little careful,” Suzie said.

   You can go everywhere in a small town like Wellfleet, although small towns aren’t for everybody. Since many of them don’t have places to go that you shouldn’t necessarily go to, they are sometimes thought of as small-minded. But no matter where you go, even the world’s big cities, it is only small minds that cling to small things.

   Small town life is like working at home, where everybody knows you and you know everybody. “I know everybody here in the winter,” Suzie said. “New Englanders are private, not show-offy, which sometimes comes off as cold, but I know all the local stories now.”

   Zsuzsanna Rarick vacationed on Cape Cod in the 1950s as a child, after her parents immigrated to the United States in the aftermath of the Hungarian Uprising of 1956. “My parents didn’t even speak English. They said the Massachusetts climate was similar to Hungary’s, so that was where they settled. They went to Framingham with nothing but the clothes on their back. It was a different time to come to the United States. People were welcoming, very welcoming.”

   She has spent every summer or lived year-round on Cape Cod since she was four years old. “My friends had families with summer homes, but our family camped. I always loved it. There’s a picture of me at the top of the Provincetown Monument, my front teeth missing. I used to cry going home over the bridge, I don’t want to go, I don’t want to go, I cried. I would lick the sea salt off my skin to get the last little taste of the Cape.”

   It is in places like Cape Cod that something is everything to somebody.

   After whaling slowly died off in the 18th century tourism began to be promoted in the 19th century. The Cape became a summer place for well-off city folk coming from Boston by packet boat and stagecoach.  When Route 6 was finished as far as Provincetown in the 1950s, and President Kennedy signed legislation creating the Cape Cod National Seashore, the sandy peninsula became a go-to vacation spot for many families up and down the Northeast.

   “I always tell people when they say how much they like Wellfleet, only tell your very best friends about us. It still has character and it’s still a real community.” Some of the townsfolk wear t-shirts saying, “So Many Tourists, So Few Sharks.”  Nevertheless, the driving force behind much of Wellfleet’s economy is off-Cape dollars. Seasonal residents, second-home owners, and tourism account for the better part of the town’s annual income.

   “There’s not a lot of year-round work here, so in the summer everybody is working crazy hours. We’re all complaining about it, too. The roads are a parking lot. All your errands you do on your off hours, somehow or other, or not at all. You go for groceries at the Stop-n-Shop in Provincetown at midnight.”

   It’s where to gossip with your neighbors who you never see in season.

   “But we have to make money, although after September it’s our reward time. We get to be with each other. Cape Cod is your private playground then. You can throw a snowball down the street in January, and you won’t hit a thing.”

   Everybody has to come in from the playground sometime, though, and that’s one of the problems of living in Wellfleet, as well as Truro and Provincetown.

   “There are people who live here who can’t find a place to live,” Suzie said. “If you have a house already, you’re OK.  But, if you’re trying to find a house here, like me, you’re bitter, like me.” Spring, summer, and fall Susan Rarick lives in a three-season cottage, a dwelling without sufficient land around it to qualify as an all-season’s condo. In the winter she is compelled to move to a rental in Eastham, farther south on the Outer Cape. There is a dearth of housing because housing prices have soared, while wages have stagnated.

   “Over the past ten years the median cost of a house rose $200,000 while income rose only $10,000,” said Paul Cullity, the pastor of Wellfleet’s Congregational Church and member of the local housing partnership trust. “Not only are people barely earning more than they did ten years ago, but they can actually buy less and less housing each year.”

   By standards common to the state of Massachusetts the town of Wellfleet should have 140 affordable homes. “But, we have less than 20,” said Pastor Cullity. The problem is so acute that there is an annual “Housing with Love Walk” to raise money and awareness for Cape Cod housing agencies.

   “It’s so friggin’ expensive here, and then, 80%, maybe 90% of the houses are empty,” said Suzie. “The baby boomers are buying everything up. It’s just summer homes for them, someplace where they’ll have a good spot for the 4th of July parade. They don’t live here all year. They live someplace else.” In the race between living and living it up, living it up is winning. “You have to be a certain type of person to live here year-round. We’re not the fast track and our track is disappearing because of real estate. In the 80s a half-acre might have cost $40,000. Today it’s closer to $240,000, or more, if you can find one.”

   Real estate land listings in the spring of 2016 in Wellfleet included 1.4 acres on Route 6, Cape Cod’s spinal highway, for $399,000 and 1.2 waterfront acres on Pine Pond Road for $895,000, while 2.3 acres on Perch Pond Way was a steal at $389,000. Almost half of the homes listed for sale in 2015 in Wellfleet were asking over a million dollars. One of the least expensive was a Sears kit house, the kind folks used to buy from the catalog, priced at $329,000.

   “Wellfleet was a cottage community, but then people started buying the cottages and making them over into million-dollar structures that they use three weeks out of the year,” Suzie said. “It’s good for our taxes and it’s actually not bad either that they’re not here most of the time.”

Far away makes the heart grow fonder.

   “The only saving grace we have is the National Seashore, thank God. Otherwise, there would be condos up and down that shoreline. At least we’re not Provincetown. It’s so sad. There’s nothing there anymore. Twenty years ago, it was a year-round community. It was so much fun. Everybody got along and you could get cheap rentals for the summer. Now, forget it. All the Portuguese sold their family homes for big bucks, walked away, and went somewhere else. You can’t find anything to rent. Everything’s been bought up.”

   Always a popular summer resort town, Provincetown has become increasingly popular since the 90s, so much so that no one lives there anymore. “Locals have been relocating,” said Bob O’Malley of Beachfront Realty. “The prices are driving them out of the market.”

   Although most of the new homeowners don’t live in town in the off-season, they are the newcomers who have more money, much more money, than the locals. “A lot of people had to leave town because they couldn’t find housing, any housing,” said Michelle Jarusiewicz, the Community Housing Specialist for Provincetown.

   “There’s no old-timers, there’s hardly any locals left, at all. There are practically no births anymore and the high school closed,” Suzie said. The last senior class at the Provincetown High School, after more than 150 years of senior classes, graduated in 2013. That was the end of that future.

   In the spring of 2015 Kristin Hatch, a volunteer member of the Provincetown Housing Authority, found the shoe on the other foot when she found out she was going to have to vacate her two-bedroom condo. “The landlord sent me an e-mail that he’s going to sell,” she said. “Hopefully something comes up.” In the meantime, she was moving her possessions into storage and staying with a friend.

   “Living here is not for everybody,” Suzie said. “What is kind of funny is that in the summertime the tourists are all sitting up here and thinking it’s like this all the time, but it’s not. I was doing a catering event in Truro, at a big, modern house that they got out of a magazine, and one of the guys I was working with said, ‘Come winter I’ll be sitting right here on this deck looking out at the sunset because there ain’t gonna be anybody else here.’”

   In winter the shore towns of the Outer Cape go from bustling to evacuated. In summer you can’t park anywhere. In winter you can park anywhere you want. The suddenly empty beaches of the Cape Cod National Seashore are anyone’s for the taking, so long as you take along a heavy coat, boots, and a friendly dog to keep you company.

   In winter in Wellfleet there might not be anything better than spending an hour or two in a neighborhood bar. “It’s a small community,” Suzie said. “One winter when it was bad there were three guys who always sat at a big table at the Lighthouse telling jokes. We would sit around, and they would start telling jokes. They each had a repertoire of fifty of them, maybe more, and they told them for hours. We thought it was great. It’s pretty isolated here in the winter.”

   “Did I ever tell you how Harvey and I tried to set up an anarchist community here in the 1960s, but we couldn’t make it work because nobody would obey the rules,” one of the good old boys drawled between pulls on a Pabst Blue Ribbon.

   “But, if you’re in trouble, somebody’s boat sinks in the harbor, the community is there,” Suzie said. “I was going to drive to Florida one time and there was something wrong with my car. The dealer said it was going to be five, maybe six hundred dollars. I took it to my friend, one of the men who used to tell jokes at the Lighthouse, and he looked at it, said it was no big deal, fixed it, and didn’t charge me. That’s what they are, salt of the earth people.”

   But, before joining the salt of the earth, one needs a little bit of the earth for oneself.

   “I love it here, although you give up a lot to live here. You have got to like yourself because there aren’t many distractions. But I need a house, that’s the biggest thing. I have just got to get a house. I’m crazy about it. I’m obsessed with it. I’ve been looking for years.”

   Of all home remedies, a good home is the best. While it may be true that everybody is stuck with themselves at home, it is where everybody usually feels better than anywhere else. Home is where one starts from early in the morning and ends up at the tail end of the day, where there’s always a candle burning in the window.

   “I’ll get it,” Susan Rarick said. “I’m getting closer, getting closer, and I’ll get there soon.”

Ed Staskus posts stories on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Cleveland Daybook http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

Paperback Yoga

Walk of Life

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By Ed Staskus

“War is hell.”  William Tecumseh Sherman

Wars are armed conflicts. We have been marching off to them for the past 14,000 years. Since the rise of the nation-state as we know it tens of thousands of wars have been fought, costing more than 3.5 billion human lives. Other deaths, like those of horses, mules, and camels are incalculable.

The Confederate cavalryman J. O. Shelby had 24 horses shot out from under him in two-and-a-half years during the Civil War. He survived every warhorse he ever rode. General Shelby died of old age in 1897.

Nearly all people all societies all states have gone to war with one another. 95% of all known societies have either fought wars or fought wars constantly. In the past 14,000 years there have been only approximately 300 years of non-raising Cain.

“The condition of man is a condition of everyone against everyone,” said Thomas Hobbes some 400 years ago. When it comes time to taking care of business it’s about banging heads with iron and blood, no matter what century it is. “Force and fraud are in war cardinal virtues.” In other words, no one gives a hoot for the other man, woman, or child. It’s every Man for himself and God against all.

It’s every horse mule camel for himself, too.

All faiths beliefs persuasions have crossed swords, from Jews to Buddhists to Christians. The European Wars of Religion in the 16thand 17th centuries cost more than 15 million souls. Islam has been at it since just about Day 1. In Sri Lanka the Tamil Tigers and hard-line Buddhists have been fighting tooth and nail for several years.

They were and are fighting for their beliefs, their beliefs being a ball and chain. Non-violence can be a disaster when it doesn’t work. The only bigger disaster is violence when it works.

More than 230 million people died in the wars of the 20th century. “It was a beastly century,” said Margaret Drabble. It’s impossible to say how many were injured displaced disappeared. At the end of the day, at the end of the century, who’s to say who was right and who was wrong? Whoever is left is who says.

The verdict is still out on the 21st century.

In the 5,000-year history of yoga, however, there are no recorded battlefield deaths of any man or woman true-blue to the eight limbs of the practice. There are no war stories of getting off the mat and duking it out with someone across the street who doesn’t see it your way. Even though there is a standing pose called Warrior, there are no thrust and parry, no AK-47’s, no nuclear arsenal. There are no bronze memorials of stern men on horseback sword in hand in any yoga studio anywhere.

Wars are fought for many reasons, but those reasons can be boiled down to nationalism, revenge, and material gain, both economic and territorial. The wages of war are swinish dark bottomless. Yoga is practiced for one reason, uniting body spirit mind. The wages of yoga are breath light energy.

Going to war may be the easiest thing to explain and the hardest thing to do. “Battle is an orgy of disorder. There is only attack and attack and attack some more,” said George ‘Old Blood and Guts’ Patton, who commanded the U. S. Third Army during WW2. Yoga may be the hardest thing to explain and the easiest thing to do. “Just do,” said K. Pattabhi Jois, the man who originated Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga.

General Patton often said battle was the “most magnificent” undertaking known to man. It can be one hell of an undertaking. A chest full of medals sparkles when you’re successful. Six feet of loose dirt covers up your failures.

“The real trouble with modern war is that it gives no one a chance to kill the right people,” said Ezra Pound.

Old Blood and Guts died in an automobile accident. The Army private chauffeuring his Cadillac limousine was uninjured. K. Pattabhi Jois died of natural causes. “He was fearless about combining the path of yoga with the path of the participant “ said David Life, the co-founder of Jivamukti Yoga.

Since yoga doesn’t self-identify with any nation-state, doesn’t live by the eye for an eye of the tiger, and isn’t interested in looting all your stuff, it doesn’t issue declarations and ultimatums. It doesn’t blow its stack, launching smart bombs, armed drones, and coming to your world soon, fully autonomous weapons systems.

Practicing yoga is practicing getting your hands on freedom, no matter how elusive it may be. It’s not about getting your hands on the other guy’s cargo, no matter how bright and shiny and phenomenal it is. More cargo more loot more territory means keeping your nose to the grindstone in order to keep it all in your corner of the world. Yoga means sloughing off the wet dream of more glory more prizes more pride in victory.

Freedom isn’t about riding the merry-go-round and grabbing grasping snatching at the brass ring. Hell, what would you do with it anyway?

The Totenkopf military hat features a human skull, mandible, and two crossed long bones. The black-clad Hussar cavalry of Frederick the Great were the first to wear them. The death-head hats scared the hell out of the other guys, making it clear what was at stake.

Even though the Dalai Lama has said, “Awareness of death is the very bedrock of the path,” death-head hats are never worn by anyone at any time anywhere in any yoga class.

If Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II had taken off his skull and crossbones hat in 1902, put his hair up into a bun, and gotten on a yoga mat instead of scowling all the time, he might not have walked off the plank right into WW1. But, he didn’t, and 12 years later it was Time for Trench Warfare. Since WW2 was a direct consequence of the War to End All Wars, maybe that wouldn’t have happened, either.

In 1938, just before the start of WW2, French biologist Jean Rostond said, “Kill one man, and you are a murderer. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill them all, and you are a god.”

What a difference a hat can make, not just in fashion, but in what determines the fate of birds on the wing, too. The last German Emperor abdicated in 1918, grew a beard, and spent the rest of his life chopping wood and hunting birds. He bagged tens of thousands of them in the next twenty years. The neighborhood flocks thought he was an avenging angel.

Only one man has ever returned Uncle Sam’s Medal of Honor.

Charlie Liteky, a combat chaplain, without a weapon, flak jacket, or helmet, dragged 23 wounded soldiers out of a Viet Cong ambush in 1967, evacuating them to safety. He later opposed the war, and other wars, such as the invasions of Iraq. “I think it’s more of a patriotic duty of citizens of this country to stand up and say that this is wrong, that this is immoral,” he said.

But, one man’s immorality is another man’s morality, especially if those men are Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman. The three largest defense companies in the world are USA companies. “You fasten all the triggers, for the others to fire,” sang Bob Dylan in ‘Masters of War’.

The United States controls more than 50% of the global weaponry market. Yoga controls 100% of the global yoga mat market. Only you control whether the world that’s always trying to make you something else gets its way.

Violence is the bread and butter of war. Warfare is a dangerous world filled with rough men, and lately, rough women, too. It is a world where the end justifies the means. Ahimsa, or non-violence, is the bread and butter of yoga The practice does not abjure self-defense, but it doesn’t propagate violence as a means, no matter what the end might be.

Non-violence is the first article of the first limb of yoga. Ahimsa in action is not doing harm. It’s simple enough, but easier said than done. The first step is to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Unless you’re a psychopath, the doing will be non-violent. The next step might be to not march in ideological lockstep with anybody’s army. It doesn’t matter if it’s President Trump or President Putin or President Xi Jinping. Their interests are not necessarily in your best interest.

It’s pointless to complain about the weather. War is a longtime turmoil as old as the weather, as old as our gods. “May God have mercy on my enemies, because I won’t,” said George Patton. Sometimes it seems like there is no resisting the winds of war. It would be like trying to win a hurricane. When the Junior Bush and Elder Cheney administration wanted to invade Iraq over nothing Iraq had done, there was no stopping it.

If it all sounds like a shell game, that’s because it is. The shells of rockets’ red glare, the litter of shells the damage done, and political military industrial hacks shelling out pipe dreams of heroism. When you’re dead as a doornail it doesn’t matter who won the war.

The side of the moon facing away from the earth is the far side, the flip side. It is the side facing out to the cosmos. The bright side is what makes some moonstruck, making them go crazy when there’s a full moon.

John Bell Hood was a General in the Civil War on the Confederate side. He was notoriously brave and aggressive, and a madman. His troops routinely suffered staggering losses staging frontal assaults they were routinely ordered into. During the Seven Days Battle in 1862 every single officer in his brigade was either killed or wounded. In 1863 at Gettysburg Hood’s left arm was severely injured and he lost use of it for the rest of his life. In 1864 at Chickamauga his right leg had to be amputated just below the hip.

For the rest of the Civil War he rode into battle with his left arm tied to his body and his body tied to the body of his horse. “He has body enough left,” one witness remarked, watching Johnny Reb lock horns with the Yankees again.

The macabre spectacle of the one-armed one-legged Hood, trailed by an orderly carrying his replacement cork leg, was not his alone. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers on both sides of the Civil War lost arms and legs. That’s the damage all wars do, civil or not so civil, lopping off limbs, scrambling brains, filling up cemeteries.

Yoga, on the other hand, is not only a practice intent on keeping your arms and legs attached to your body, it is a practice that conjures additional limbs to those willing to take up the mantle of the mat. The discipline in the classic sense is an eight-limb practice. The limbs are restraint, observance, posture, breath control, sense withdrawal, concentration, meditation, and samadhi, which means standing inside of.

The walk of life can be hard enough with two arms and two legs. It’s much harder when missing an arm or a leg, or both. It’s much easier with eight extra limbs.

“When we talk about war we’re talking about peace,” said President George W. Bush. In the world of doublespeak slavery is freedom and war is known as peace. In the world of yoga freedom is freedom and non-war is known as peace. No fooling. Only fools try to fool themselves.

The masters of war would have you believe that taking up the gun will solve all the problems of taking up the gun. “The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over,” said William Tecumseh Sherman. General Sherman is known for the Savannah Campaign of 1864, slashing through Georgia and South Carolina, innovating what is now known as scorched earth warfare. “Yoga is not easy!” said K. Pattabhi Jois. “But, it leads to freedom.” He is known for inspiring and influencing the way yoga is taught and practiced all over the world.

Warrior pose on the yoga mat is about fighting the good fight, not fighting the other guy. It’s about challenge strength fortitude.

Standing on one leg in a yoga class may be cruel and unusual punishment, but at least you’re standing. Not only that, the standing is getting you somewhere. Getting anywhere in the Fog of War is up for grabs, at best, and on a collision course with Hell, at worse.

When it comes to getting on the good side of the Pearly Gates, war doesn’t have a leg to stand on.

A version of this story appeared in International Yoga Journal.

Ed Staskus posts stories on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Cleveland Ohio Daybook http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

Atlantic Canada

Show on the Road

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By Ed Staskus

Erin McQueen isn’t a blonde, doesn’t often wear pearls carry a silk hand fan or suit up in gilded dresses with bows at the breast and puffed sleeves, and rarely looks perplexed. She does, however, speak with an English accent, which comes in handy when you’re a blonde sporting a string of pearls in a posh dress in the Restoration-era play “The Man of Mode.”

Staged by the Fountain School of Performing Arts at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, the comedy by George Etherege is about a notorious man-about-town trying to slip-slide out of his love affairs and win over the young spunky seemingly virtuous heiress Harriet.

The play hit the bright lights way back when at just the right time. William Shakespeare had died 60 years earlier. The screws tightened by the Puritans had been recently loosened and women were finally being allowed to play female roles on stage.

There’s nothing like a gal in a gal’s role, rather than some scruffy cross-dresser.

“The make up and costumes are totally different from any other show we’ve done,” said Erin, then in her final year at the school. “Having the period costumes is really exciting. It’s a total transformation. The play truly is an authentic glimpse inside the intricate dating scene of 1676.”

Although she paced her prowling at a good trot, cast arched looks in the stagecraft of 17thcentury love stories, and had at it with barbed one-liners, like everyone else in a play that is all innuendo and intrigue, unlike everyone else in the play her English accent was neither feigned nor all wrong.

Even though she graduated from high school in Canada, spent four years at Dalhousie University, earning a Bachelor of Arts with Honors in Theatre, lives in Victoria on the south shore of Prince Edward Island, and her father is Canadian, she isn’t, not entirely Canadian, not exactly.

Erin McQueen is British, born and bred in Bristol.

“It’s right on the border with Wales,” said Erin.

Iron Age hill forts and remnants of Roman villas dot the southwestern British landscape. In the 11thcentury the town was known as Brycgstow, easier to pronounce then than it is now. The port was the starting point for many of the voyages of discovery to the New World in the 15thcentury. Today the modern economy of the city is built on aerospace, electronics, and creative media.

Unlike most cities, it has its own money, the Bristol pound, which is pegged to the Pound sterling. “Our town, our money,” is what they say in Bristol. Since money is a matter of belief, it’s best to believe in what you’ve got.

“There are a lot of art festivals,” said Erin.

“They do a scavenger hunt every summer with ceramic animals. They started with gorillas, giving giant ceramic gorillas to artists, who painted them, and businesses sponsored them in their shops and on sidewalks, where you had to find them. They have a theatre festival, too, but that only started when we left.”

She was 16-years-old.

“The first time we came to Canada we went to see Halifax, where my father was born. It also happened to be the 150thanniversary of ‘Anne of Green Gables.’ My sister Caitlin was a massive fan. My parents finally said, ‘OK, we are in Halifax anyway, we’ll just pop over to Prince Edward Island.’”

She was 11-years-old.

“We did the tour, all the Anne of Green Gables things,” said Caitlin McQueen. They stayed in Victoria, a small village of maybe one hundred residents near the Westmoreland River. It is much, much smaller than Bristol, which is the 8thlargest urban area in England, home to nearly a million.

”I remember saying to Erin, I know I’ve never been here before, but I feel like I am coming home. I feel like I am supposed to be here. It is a dream come true.”

“I don’t really know what happened after that,” said Erin, “but the next year and for a couple of years after, we came back, and we always ended up in Victoria.”

While on a return trip, Andy and Tania McQueen, Erin and Caitlin’s parents, bought a lot overlooking the village harbor. In 2012 the family immigrated to Canada. They commissioned a house to be built, to be completed for occupancy the following spring. That winter was the winter they almost went back to the UK, back to England, back to Bristol.

“We spent a year living in Hampton, just up the road, in a rented house that had no central heating,” said Erin. ”I’m honestly surprised we didn’t move home that winter, because it was horrible.”

The winter months on PEI can be cold, temperatures averaging below zero in January and February. There are many storms, veering from freezing cold rain to freezing cold blizzards. The February 2013 North American blizzard started in the Northern Plains of the United States. By the third day of its arrival in the Maritimes there was heavy snowfall, wind gusts were hitting 100 MPH, more than a thousand flights had been cancelled across eastern Canada, and all Marine Atlantic ferries were suspended.

There was nowhere to go, anyway.  There are few things as democratic as a snowstorm. It’s the same everyone everywhere.

“I feel like many people on this island have done that, lived without central heating, but British people aren’t cut out for Canadian winters in unheated houses. I had a comforter on my bed and many, many blankets. I often wore two pairs of pajamas.”

The McQueen family stuck it out.

“The main reason we didn’t move back to England was probably pride,” said Erin. “Obviously, you can’t move back after five months because your whole family back home would be saying, ‘Oh, so that didn’t go well?’”

The McQueen family cats stuck it out, too.

“They are rescue cats, Callie and Zebedee, and we got their vaccination papers together, and applied for pet passports. My uncle said, ‘Why don’t you just get new cats?’”

“You did not just say that!” said Tania McQueen. “They’re part of the family.”

“Let me tell you, though, cats do not like emigrating,” said Erin. “It traumatized them a little. The only other animals on the plane the eight-hour flight were two dogs, a little thing that barked all the time, and a big, quiet German shepherd. We’re still making up for it six years later.”

The cats slept in front of the fireplace in the living room in the rented house from morning to every next morning from the beginning to the end of winter. Unlike the upstairs rooms, there were no doors downstairs shutting the living room off from the kitchen and two back rooms. They made doors out of blankets to conserve the heat in the living room. The cat litter box was in one of the small rooms, behind a blanket door.

“They would wait quite a long time, and then dart behind the blanket, and as soon as they were done, run back in to the fireplace.”

The school buses stayed the course. Erin enrolled at Bluefield High School to complete her last two years. The family had waited leaving England until she finished her first set of high school exams there.

“It’s a big thing,” she said. “Everyone in the country takes the same exams. You study for them for two years. It’s what you’re working up to that whole time.”

Bluefield High School is in the small town of Hampshire. A $2 million dollar addition in 2000 enlarged and modernized the school, which as well as secondary education trains in carpentry, welding, and applied technology. All of its classrooms feature SmartBoards and there are two computer labs. The sports teams from badminton to hockey are all called the Bluefield Bobcats.

The school is thirteen miles and 90 minutes from Victoria.

“The bus went everywhere, so by the time I got there I didn’t really know where I was, because we had gone all over the island. My first day we did orienteering, even though the school is just surrounded by forest and potato fields. It wasn’t like you ever came across any houses. It was very different from Bristol.”

Her plan had been to study fashion design and costume, but her plans changed. “They didn’t have any sewing or couture classes. They did have drama, so I thought, I guess drama is where my theatrical tendencies are going to have to go.”

After graduation she enrolled at Dalhousie University, majoring in anthropology, keeping acting in the back of her mind. “I took acting as an elective and later auditioned for the program. If I get in, I’ll think about it, I thought. I didn’t think I actually would. And then I did.”

In order to find the unexpected it’s best to expect it. You can’t plan for it, but it’s what often changes your life. ”All creative people want to do the unexpected,” said Hedy Lamarr, the glamorous Hollywood starlet and designer of a patented frequency-hopping radio guidance system for torpedoes. Even though she once said, “Any girl can be glamorous, all you have to do is stand still and look stupid,” her smart invention was the precursor to GPS, secure WiFi, and Bluetooth technology.

“My sister is the anthropologist, no acting, although she’s fascinated by actors,” said Erin. “She thinks she might do a research project about them one day. Actors never know what the future holds. They’re rarely employed for a long time, always on the way to their next role. It’s living on the edge. It’s the idea that you could love doing something so much that you choose that over stability or financial security.

“That’s what I want to do.”

It’s taking the show on the road. “I’m just going to start auditioning in Halifax. There are so many small weird theatre spaces. I’m thinking of potentially writing a fringe play.” She has no plans of pursuing the discipline of anthropology.

Her four years studying the arts and sciences of theater at Dalhousie University were matched by four summers working in theater in her newly adopted hometown.

“My parents saw there was a job at the Victoria Playhouse. I needed to work in the village. It was the perfect job, since although I do now drive, I couldn’t drive at the time. I could meet people in the industry, too.”

The Victoria Playhouse, in the middle of town, in what used to be the Victoria Hall, seats about 150, and has been producing and presenting live theater and performance events for thirty-seven seasons. In 2007 it was designated a ‘Historic Place’ on the Canadian Register of Historic Places. History gets made every summer seven days a week on its stage.

She worked the refreshment stand her first two summers.

“I don’t do that so much anymore,” she said last summer. “You could say I’ve moved up.”

She worked part-time in the box office, then went full-time, and worked front of the house. Odd jobs became must-do jobs. “I helped one of the actors run their lines, and then I did that a couple more times.” When the stage manager was conscripted to do lighting cues, she went backstage. “I gave the actors their places, which was exciting. I’ll do whatever it takes to make sure the show goes on.”

Sometimes the lighting cues are on the sturm und drang side of the curtain, occasioning careful calculation. Higher than normal water temperatures in the Gulf of St. Lawrence can and do morph into massive thunderstorms, roiling the island. It is batten down the hatches and check the flashlights.

“In villages like this, in bad thunderstorms, power goes out,” said Erin. “The doors are going to open in twenty minutes, the power keeps flickering off and on, and the management has to make a call about whether you think you can make it through the show.”

She became one of the emcees at the front of the stage, pointing out the exits, encouraging donations to the theater, and introducing the play. After the show was over was her favorite time. “It might sound corny, but at the end of the show, when we get to open the curtain and the applause, and afterwards the actors are happy, a kind of high, even with small crowds, that they brought a story to life and created some magic for the audience.”

After her employment contract at the Victoria Playhouse expired at the end of October, she moved back to Halifax, where she went to university, and where there is a red-blooded theatre scene. It is zesty and diverse, ranging from Zuppa Theatre, whose performances defy categorization, to the Neptune Theatre, whose performances outpace categorization.

“Some of the actors who worked at the Playhouse live in Halifax, so that’s quite cool,” she said. “They came to my shows at Dalhousie and I went to their shows.

“Acting, that’s my plan.”

If in the event a professional acting career doesn’t pan out, she is determined to keep her foot on the boards, front back or in the wings. ”If I wasn’t an actor, I’d be a secret agent,” said Thornton Wilder. Erin’s secret is all parts of the theater business interest her, from acting to directing to writing to the nuts and bolts.

“If I’m not acting, I will definitely be doing something in theatre. It’s plow ahead.”

It’s keeping your hand on the gospel plow.

“A part of me is intrigued by stage management,” she said. “Stage managers are another level of human being. They’re like super people with super powers. They’re the people you go to if you have any issues, personal, professional, or logistical. One of my stage managers at Dalhousie had a locker full of extra clothes and every kind of medicine you could imagine. They are prepared for anything.”

A career in the arts often means being a jack-of-all-trades.

“I am very into doing whatever I can,” said Erin.

If you want to accomplish anything something everything, you have to be willing to do whatever it takes, maybe not blood, but certainly sweat, and probably a locker loaded for bear, to make it work, to make it happen.

Ed Staskus posts stories on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Cleveland Ohio Daybook http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”