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Accidental Reality

Rearview Mirror

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By Ed Staskus

It wasn’t until the movers took the legs off the dining room table and hauled it and the six chairs out that I realized the two town paintings in their glossy walnut frames were still on the wall. I stood in a pool of damp late October sunlight at the other end of the room. I hadn’t noticed Lucy had painted the wall a light green color until the room was empty.

A Stacey’s Moving and Storage truck was on the street. The trailer and cab were longer than the width of my house. One of the Montreuil’s and three other men were methodically tramping up and down a ramp into and out of the back of the truck. Sugar maple and white cedar leaves stuck to the soles of their boots.

Autumn was stripping the trees so that the neighborhood, concealed all summer, was becoming clear.

I turned away from the window and faced the paintings. I had seen them every day for years, but hadn’t looked at them for a long time.

The painting on the left was of the fishing docks on the Niagara River. Two men spin nets while a third slumps on the ground, his back against a two-story shingled building. He sits with his legs splayed out while a dog squats beside him. Fort Niagara is on top of the cliff face across the river, below a leaden gray and white streaked sky.

The other painting was of Art’s Coffee Shop on Main Street, or what is now called Queen Street. The pregnant woman wearing a red hat, leaning back as she walks, and carrying what would be twins is Betty White. Nineteen years later Lucy White and I got married.

The large purple dog trailing a small boy on a tricycle in the center of the painting is an Airedale, as are the other four dogs in the painting, including the one peeing on a lamppost. You probably couldn’t paint that from real life anymore. Niagara-on-the-Lake has by-laws about it.

One night my new neighbor reminded me it was against the law for a dog to bark more than twenty minutes after 8 PM.

“Your dog’s been barking for twenty two minutes,” she said over the phone.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was out and I haven’t had a chance to walk him, yet.”

She hung up.

“What the hell?” I thought, the dog’s lead in my hand.

I have a Jack Russell terrier. He misses me when I go out in the evening. The dog burns himself up whenever he spots a rat in Paradise Grove Park behind the Festival Theater. He always used to get what he was after, but he’s grown older and slower, and sometimes the rats get away.

The fisheries closed when Lake Ontario became polluted and there was too much DDT in the water. Algae blooms got so thick waves couldn’t break. It’s better now. There are even walleye to be had, although they don’t reproduce anymore. They have to be restocked year after year.

Lake sturgeon used to be the King of Fish. Then they were hunted down. They were even burned as fuel to power steamboats. No one’s allowed to try for lake sturgeon anymore, even if someone could miraculously find one.

Art’s Coffee Shop is gone, too, and it’s now called Cork’s Wine Bar and Eatery. They serve Hawaiian Meatballs and Beef Panini’s for lunch. A John MacDonald is what needs to be in your wallet for a bowl of soup and a cup of coffee.

My father got the paintings in trade from Bruce Rigg, the town doctor, the same year he got our dining room set. After he died and I inherited the house they stayed where they were on the wall where they’d always hung. We only ever took them down the year we tore off the wallpaper and whenever we repainted the room.

Bruce Rigg was our family doctor. My father was a mason and worked on Dr. Rigg’s office building on Davy Street whenever repairs were needed. It had been the high school gymnasium until after World War Two, when there weren’t any more children in town. Bruce Rigg and his brother Jackson bought the building and converted it into a medical office. They were the town doctors for the next forty-some years.

In 1957 another high school had to be built since there were suddenly so many soon-to-be teenagers in town. That one closed four years ago. I remember its mascot was a Trojan with a Jay Leno chin and a blue plumed helmet. When the Parliament Oak elementary school closes next year there won’t be any schools left in Niagara-on-the-Lake.

At the front of the Art’s Coffee Shop painting two boys wrestle like spitfires, a boy in a green shirt rides a tricycle, a girl in a red jumpsuit pushes a wheel and paddle on a stick, and a woman with a yellow stroller carrying a round-faced toddler stops to talk to Betty White.

Whenever there were sleet storms my sister and I would tie our shoes around our necks and skate down Main Street to school.

The trustees and the town debated for months about Parliament Oak. Everyone said the school was essential for the Old Town’s vitality. The Lord Mayor argued no one appreciated the growth anticipated for the town. One of the parents cried she was flabbergasted by the decision. But, there are barely any children left in Niagara-on-the-Lake.

No one’s setting their houses on fire at night.

By the time the movers took the dining room table out all the rooms were vacant. I had emptied the bookcases, packed my clothes, and taken everything off the walls, except the paintings, the day before. It was when everything else was gone that the paintings stood out, like a sudden, sharp image in a dream.

The summer before my sister was born my father drove the more than two hundred kilometers to Owen Sound and came back with our dining room set and a china cabinet. He drove a Chevy pick-up he had hired from Tommy May’s Livery Stable. The truck had a wood slat deck, so none of the furniture got scratched, although the Jack Russell’s we always had in the house left their mark.

My father lived in Niagara-on-the-Lake, went to school, and worked here his whole life, but he was born in Lancashire. He and my uncles and aunts were all born there. Whenever she was seven months along my grandmother went back to Britain to her mother to have the baby.

She took a train from Buffalo to New York City and sailed on the White Star ocean liner Cedric. She went back and forth five times in third class. She never got seasick and was on the Cedric when it collided with another ship in Morcombe Bay and sank it. The last time she sailed to Lancashire she died in childbirth and my grandfather had to take the boat to bring the baby back.

I was one of the first children delivered at the new Niagara-on-the-Lake Hospital on Wellington Street when it opened in 1953, replacing the old cottage hospital. Dr. Rigg was the attending doctor, although my father said he hardly did anything. My mother said she did all the hard work.

That’s all changed. No one works hard here anymore. The growth industry in Niagara-on-the-Lake is lawn care. Every time I look out my window some guy goes by in a pick-up with a lawn mower in the back. They cut the grass for people who are too lazy to cut their own.

No one is born or dies here, either.

They tore down the general hospital outside St. Catherine’s and built a mammoth, new one. Now all the small local hospitals are closing in its wake. Ours is turning off its lights at year’s end and children won’t be born in Niagara-on-the-Lake anymore.

They say it makes economic sense, but I don’t think it matters. Once you get involved with anything under the rule of no one, like the National Health Service, you’re not going to save even a dime. That’s a given.

When there were still docks in town Dr. Rigg painted the river and the fishermen on weekends. He and his artist colony friends had social parties at Bill Richardson’s, the local coal yard owner. Mary Jones wore a cape and Betty Lane, the bohemian of the group, played a fiddle.

They lived here all their lives.

Almost no one in Niagara-on-the-Lake now has been here long. They’re all from somewhere else. The sub-divisions are full of them. At first I noticed their high-end cars, like Audis and Mercedes. I thought it was the tourists. Everyone in town used to drive Chevy’s and Pontiacs.

But, they weren’t tourists. They were living here. And they’re all retired, getting a pension from somebody or other, most of the time the government. That’s why there are no children anymore and the schools are all closing.

Last year the veteran’s house on the corner, a story-and-a-half, like mine, was sold. They built a little porch around it, which was nice, but it was something anyone could have done on a weekend. Seven or eight years ago the house would have sold for a hundred grand.

They sold it for four hundred and thirty thousand dollars.

Nobody who actually lives here, and was in their right mind, would pay that kind of money for that house.

The out-of-towner who bought it was a single woman. She had a self-satisfied spinsterish look on her face when I met her. She was a retired schoolteacher from Toronto who had sold her house, that she bought for fifty thousand 35 years ago, for nine hundred thousand, and come to Niagara-on-the Lake.

She drove a metallic blue Audi A4 and had plenty of money left over.

A few years from now she’ll probably look like a seer.

“Oh, yes, I only paid $430,000.00 for my house. The man next door might sell you his for God knows what.”

When you live here, with one bathroom, in a small, funny house you can’t swing a cat in, and someone offers you a half million for it, you take it. Very few people are left in Niagara-on-the-Lake. They’ve all sold out and moved to St. Catherine’s, where they can get a real house for half the price.

Niagara-on-the-Lake has become, like Oakville, one of the beautiful places to live. It’s nostalgic, the houses have been tarted up, and it’s close to Toronto. Everybody used to know everybody. But, now nobody knows anybody. It’s a wealthy ghetto, although no one calls it a ghetto. They call it the good life.

People used to work here, but all the manufacturing jobs have left. General Motors is still in St. Catherine’s, but even GM is just a shadow of what it used to be.

The federal provincial government backstopped all the pensions when it went under. It’s a gravy train if you’re on the train.

The woman from St. Catherine’s who cleaned my house once a month is retired from General Motors. She was there for twenty-five years. She’s figured out carpal tunnel. She doesn’t have it, but she got a check for $30,000.00 for having it, and she gets a monthly check, to boot, for the rest of her life.

Her first, second, and third husbands all worked for GM. The one she’s getting rid of now worked for GM, too, and they double-dip everything from the drug store to eyeglasses.

We had our own government here, in the town, once, but then it was amalgamated, and the town lost control. The barbarians in the township took over. Everybody asked what was going on, but that was it. It was all down hill from there.

A town planner from Scarborough was sent to Niagara-on-the-Lake. He was a big man with cornflower blue eyes in a black suit. He stood on the corner of Mississauga and Queen Streets twenty years ago and said, “When you look left, that’s going to be residential. When you look right, that’s going to be commercial.“

That would have been news to lot of people in town.

Scarberia is what we called Scarborough. Niagara-on-the-Lake has the oldest, largest collection of Georgian architecture in Canada and the man from Toronto was taking over. No one with any sense believed it. But, what he had in mind is what it is today.

When the bureaucrats take over there will be problems. It’s hard making sense of anything. Everything gets very commercial. There used to be fine big trees on Queen Street, their branches almost touching over the street. They’ve slowly been cutting them all down so they can grow annuals in the sidewalk flowerbeds. They think the tourists like it.

It’s a terrible idea.

There were once a block-or-two of shops, but now the whole street is commercial, although not so you can buy baby food, drop your shoes off to be repaired, or get a haircut.

There were always a few bed and breakfasts in town. Widows and orphans ran them. They couldn’t afford the taxes on their houses, so they let a room, or two. Now it’s an industry. They’re all out-of-towners running the bed and breakfasts, retired teachers and bureaucrats from Toronto with time and money on their hands.

They walk around the town, strolling here and there with a dog on a leash because it makes it seem like they’re doing something, which is the same thing they were doing when they were working.

They watch television during the day and drink at night, and after a few years give up and someone else takes their place.

The next step was to turn houses into guest cottages. They aren’t widows and orphans and they don’t live there. They rent the house and live somewhere else. There are people in the house and no one’s got a clue who they are. I mow my lawn and every few weeks I notice I’ve got new neighbors.

The Chinese own the hotels. They had to get their money out of Hong Kong in the 1990s before the Communists got their hands on it, and so they brought some of it here. They own the Queen’s Landing, the Oban Inn, the Prince of Wales, and all the other big places.

When the Queen’s Royal Hotel was still open, before the bust, the Prince of Wales was a run-down dump. It was a weasely small thing on the corner. Now the town is booming and it’s got more than a hundred rooms at $300.00 a night.

You can’t smoke in any of the rooms, either, no matter what you pay. You can’t smoke anywhere indoors. Anyone can smoke in his own house, but you can’t smoke in your own car if there is a child in the car. Or, even if a child is going to be in the car.

My wife asked me to stop smoking seven-or-eight years. I promised her I would, and I did. I didn’t mind the gruesome pictures on the packages, but the price got to be too much. The hell with it; I wasn’t a big-time smoker, anyway. She never smoked, but she got cancer, somehow, and died two years ago.

She died in the same hospital on Wellington Street she was born in.

The stores that sell cigarettes don’t let you see them anymore. They’re behind a curtain, the way they used to hide alcohol. The liquor stores would give you a pencil and a piece of paper. You wrote down the number of what you wanted, brandy or whiskey, handed it to them, and the clerk went into the back room to get it for you.

Cigarettes used to be good and booze was bad. Now cigarettes are bad and booze is good. There are more than eighty wineries in Niagara. Drugs used to be bad, too, but lately greenhouses have gone up on the escarpment growing pot. They’re going to make it profitable and then they’re going to tax it.

Niagara-on-the-Lake isn’t really a town anymore. It’s a group of people who show up here once in a while. It looks pretty because there’s so much money floating around, but it’s more a show town than anything else.

The Shaw theaters could be anywhere. They just happen to be in Niagara-on-the-Lake. Most of the theater people live here part-time, and even those who have houses aren’t here for half the year. They go somewhere else to work. Old Town is a very quiet village in the winter. The actors and musicians and everybody used to rent in the town, but they can’t afford to anymore. It’s one of their big problems, finding accommodations for all the show people.

Trains used to bring summer visitors from Buffalo and Toronto up the tracks on King Street. They stayed for a few weeks or a month and the trains went back loaded with fruit. Now the summer people come for a few days, walk up and down Queen Street shopping, go to dinner, see a play, and tramp to the wineries.

“It’s such a cute little quaint town and everyone is so nice.”

Then they drive away down the parkway back to the USA or up Mississauga Street to the QEW, racing past one sub-division after the other.

“Are you taking those pictures?” Emil Montreuil asked, coming up behind me.

“You bet,” I said, taking them off the wall. “I can’t leave them here.”

“Do you want me to bubble wrap them?”

“No, I’ll just take them this way.”

I climbed up into the moving truck with Emil and laid the paintings side-by-side face up on the wide recessed dash. I lowered the passenger side window for my Jack Russell. The dog leaned on the armrest barking at our retired schoolteacher neighbor as she crossed the street. She looked away as she went up her walk.

The low watery sky, the tops of the thinning trees, and dark house rooftops reflected off the glass of the two paintings as we slowly rolled from one stop sign to the next stop sign on Mary Street. We turned away from the town on Mississauga Street. When it became Niagara Stone Road Emil picked up speed past the big wineries.

As we passed the Niagara District Airport he reached into his jacket pocket.

“Smoke?” he asked, gesturing with a pack of Export A’s.

In the painting of the fishermen spinning nets the man with his hands jammed into his pockets and sitting on the ground, leaning on a wall, his legs splayed out and his dog beside him, is smoking a pipe.

“What the hell, sure,” I said.

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.”

Adirondacks

Home on the Farm Cafe

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By Ed Staskus

“It starts with the cows,” said Marla Gilman, her hand tracing an arc across shelves of cheese. “They make good, good milk.”

At the top of a big slate board behind her was written in chalk: “All dairy comes from our farm and creamery.” The creamery is North Country and the farm is Clover Mead. The counter where Marla was standing was the Clover Mead Café and Farm Store.

When asked where the cows were she pointed to a dirt path across the street.

“Just up there” she said, “where there’s a bunch of poop and some electric fences.”

The farm-to-table eatery in Keeseville, NY, which had been shuttered after its owners retired, re-opened in May 2014. Ashlee Kleinhammer and Steven Googin, co-owners of the farm and creamery since 2013, worked with Ms. Gilman to bring the café back to life, expanding and refreshing it.

“They decided to amp it up,” Marla said. “We busted our butts to get this place in shape.” She became the cook and manager.

“Great flavors,” said Jean-Audouin Duval of Keeseville, by way of 40 years living in New York City. “After eating there I take home some insane cheeses and yogurt to die for. I’m in heaven!”

The 25-year-old Marla Gilman, a New Jersey native and University of Vermont graduate of the Department of Agriculture, whose kitchen work includes NYC’s Blue Hill at Stone Barns and Lake Placid’s Liquids and Solids, moved to Keeseville in the spring.

“All my friends and boyfriend were here,” she said. “I wanted to live here.”

Her boyfriend, Dylan Badger, who opened the Ausable Brewing Company with his brother Dan in September, described their malted grain wares as “unfiltered beers from unfiltered brewers.”

“They re-built a barn that was falling to the ground and turned it into their brew space and tasting room,” said Marla.

The café, farm, creamery, and brewery are all on Mace Chasm Road, as is Mace Chasm Farm, whose chickens, pigs, and cows are rotationally grazed on 60 acres of pasture. Just down the street is Fledging Crow Vegetables, a Certified Naturally Grown farm.

The nascent resurgence of farming up and down Mace Chasm Road is reminiscent of Vermont’s ecologically minded “Back to the Land” movement of the 1970s. Just across Lake Champlain from Keeseville, Vermont today ranks first on the Locavore Index for its commitment to local food, which is part of the state’s economic growth strategy.

“There’s a food scene happening here,” Marla said. “It’s not big, but it’s definitely starting. I don’t think Mace Chasm Farm has ever seen as much action before. They even did a taco night this summer.”

Dylan Badger of Ausable Brewing agreed. “On this road alone there are four farms. We want people to enjoy what we have to offer, just this whole incredible scene here.”

Ms. Gilman is emblematic of Millennials taking up farm work. “I felt this thing going on here, super cool young farmers and motivated entrepreneurs starting something, and I totally wanted to be a part of it.”

Farm internships have skyrocketed in the last five years, according to the National Agriculture Information Service.

“If you talk to any really good farmer they’ll tell you that they’ve had a doubling and tripling of the applicant pool over the last few years,” said Severine von Tscharner Fleming, an upstate New York farmer activist who founded the National Young Farmers Coalition.

Even though farming can be notoriously dogged work, working one to the bone, and midsized farms, which account for most people who try to make a living off the land, have been increasingly marginalized by agribusinesses, many young people are taking up the mantle of farming, often specializing in the local, organic market.

“New England is now home to young kids becoming farmers – not the old back-to-the-landers type with political or religious missions, but focusing entirely on food,” said Helena Worthen, a retired professor from Berkeley, California.

After eating at the Clover Mead Cafe she praised the food, especially the “Cheeseville” cheese, but explained that outdoor seating meant the picnic table. “If there’s room,” she added.

Clover Mead features all things locally grown on the area’s farmlands. “It’s elevated comfort food,” said Stephanie Fishes of nearby Au Sable Forks. “It’s totally worth a menu detour.”

The café’s coolers brim with cheeses, yogurts, and milk, and the menu features Marla’s homemade breads, breakfast, and lunch foods. The egg sandwiches are a favorite, as are the Camembert Panini’s. The Camembert is theirs and the apples come from a neighboring orchard.

“Our chicken salad sandwich is definitely number one for lunch,” she said. “I roast whole, organic chickens, pick all the meat off, chop it up, and all the goodness in the pan goes back in. The moisture comes from that and then I add a bunch of spices.”

It isn’t plain Jane chicken mixed with mayonnaise. It’s chicken salad spreading its wings.

“I’m surrounded by really awesome farms, so the point is to create really good food,” Marla explained.

Off the beaten path, even in the off the beaten path town of Keeseville, re-opening the café was a risk. “It was scary at first,” said Marla. “It’s so unassuming here. But, this is a really cool place.”

People will go far and wide for good food. “We haven’t met our goal business-wise just yet,” said Ashlee Kleinhammer. “But, we’re close.”

Ms. Gilman has been buoyed by the community’s support.

“Keeseville has been great,” she said.

“They could have been, what are those young idiots doing? But, I think they’re happy to see it coming back. It used to be a booming, fun town back in the day. And then it plummeted. I think they’re happy to see something happening again with the town they grew up in.”

When asked what her plans were for the North Country winter she explained the café would be closed for a month in January.

“I’m going to San Francisco and eat a bunch of food. That’s what I like to do when I’m not working, try new things, and develop my palette.”

She pointed to the bottom of the slate board, which said: “We proudly source organically, locally, from scratch, and always with love.”

“We’ll figure out our plan from there,” she said. “Five years from now this is going to be a totally happening place.”

Photograph by Vanessa Staskus.

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

Topsy Turvy

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By Ed Staskus

The biggest yoga event of 2013 in Cleveland, Ohio, went off at the tail end of the summer without a hitch. It was as though the gods were smiling down on it. The Friday evening was dry, without a thunderstorm in sight, the hot day tempering as the sun sank into Lake Erie so that when the festivities began the temperature had settled into the mid-70s. The humidity was kept at bay by the breeze off the lake.

“The yoga, the assists, the people, the music, the weather, the views. Cleveland rocks!” said Deanna Broaddus of Beachwood.

Several thousand people unrolled their mats on the Collection Auto Group Plaza of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum on the city’s re-developed North Coast Harbor. The mass class took place in front of the I. M. Pei-deigned dual-triangular-shaped glass tent that is the main entry facade to the museum and which extends onto the 65,000-square-foot plaza.

It is modeled after Pei’s Louvre Pyramid in Paris.

‘Believe in Cleveland’ was sponsored by Inner Bliss, Cleveland’s largest yoga studio with locations in Rocky River and Westlake, the athletic apparel company Lululemon, and the Rock Hall.

“We are so thrilled to have you here,” said Greg Harris of Brecksville, CEO of the Rock Hall. “This is the first time, but it won’t be the last,” he added, to a roar from the crowd.

The keynote address was by Ohio Congressman Tim Ryan, who spoke on mindfulness, the subject of his recent book, ‘A Mindful Nation’.

Tammy Lyons of Bay Village, owner of Inner Bliss, led the yoga exercise class. “Lift up your neighbor, breath in, a little higher, go up,” she urged the throng.

After the 90-minute practice, set to music by Prince, Led Zeppelin, U2, Billy Idol, and the Rolling Stones, among others, there was dancing and food, including the novelty of a vegan food truck.

But, on a night filled with inspiring speeches, asana, music, laughter, dancing, and fun, food was not uppermost in most people’s minds.

“The yoga, the location, the weather, it was perfect in Cleveland,” said Heather Moore of Cleveland Heights.

It was easily not only the largest outdoor yoga event in Cleveland; it was the largest yoga event in Cleveland of any kind, attesting to the practice’s growing popularity in a changing city.

“We came. We saw. We believed,” said Jeffrey Jones of Willoughby. “This event gave me hope for the city I love.”

But, it was an event edgy with surprising alliances, some more surprising than others. It was a night when politicians, of all things, shone brighter and truer than professed yoga boosters like Lululemon and professed counter culture icons like rock-and-roll bands.

Congressional job approval stands at less than 20% according to most polls, including Fox News and the Gallup Poll. The 80% disapproval rating is the worst Gallup has measured in more than 30 years of tracking congressional approval. And this is more than a century after Mark Twain said, “Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress. But, I repeat myself.”

It has long been observed that politics have little or no relation to morals. It is rarely a good idea to give a politician the keys to the city. Better to change the locks.

Henry Kissinger, the National Security Advisor and Secretary of State in the administrations of Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, once noted that 90 percent of politicians give the other 10 percent a bad name.

Congressman Ryan is one of the 10 percent. He might be the only percent of politicians who believe meditation can result in well being on a nationwide basis, and who practice it themselves.

A five-term incumbent from a rust belt northeastern Ohio district, the congressman is a 6-foot-4-inch former football star, an unlikely candidate for the meditative world. He is a career politician whose re-elections are fueled by the jobs he brings to his district, from the Lordstown Chevy plant to the expansion of the Air Force Reserve Base, and the tens of millions of federal dollars in earmarks he routinely delivers. The Additive Manufacturing Center in downtown Youngstown, which he was instrumental in making happen, is poised to become the linchpin in a Pittsburgh-Youngstown-Cleveland technology belt.

But, as much as he caters to the meat-and-potato concerns of his district’s residents, as well as dealing with national issues like immigration, gun control, and balancing the budget, Congressman Ryan is breaking ground in Washington by proposing that America can be transformed by practicing simple forms of meditation to develop what he calls “mindfulness”.

In his book ‘A Mindful Nation: How a Simple Practice Can Help Us Reduce Stress, Improve Performance, and Recapture the American Spirit’, Congressman Ryan asserts that meditation, or mindfulness, is a simple tonic for the national angst.

“Mindfulness will be a response to the wars, struggling to make ends meet, the general anxiety out there. This can be transformational. It should be mainstream. We need this.”

‘A Mindful Nation’ was the result of a retreat he attended after the 2008 elections, conducted by Jon Kabat-Zinn, founder of the Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, and a leading mindfulness advocate.

“When you taste this stuff, it has profound effects,” said Mr. Kabat-Zinn. “That’s why it has lasted 2,600-plus years. It’s not just some silly quaint thing they used to do in Asia because they had nothing better to do. It’s a way to stay healthy.”

While writing his book Congressman Ryan met with Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist who studies the effects of meditation on the brain.

“Tim was interested in the potential of this, the impact this research might have to shape policy, bringing these kinds of methods into education, health care, leadership,” said Mr. Davidson, the director of the University of Wisconsin’s Lab for Affective Neuroscience.

“There’s a huge amount of suffering that can be prevented with healthy habits of the mind, decreased substance abuse, suicide, bullying, drunk driving, anxiety, and depression. The benefits are considerable and wide-ranging.”

Starting with scientists conducting Transcendental Meditation research since the late 1960s, numerous studies have shown that meditation helps reduce chronic pain and depression, protects against heart disease by reducing the marker C-reactive protein, and lowers acute stress response by actually changing the structure of the brain.

“It did to my mind what going to the gym did to my body – it made it both stronger and more flexible,” says Dr. Hedy Kober, a neuroscientist who studies the effects of mindfulness meditation at her lab at Yale University.

Since the publication of his book Congressman Ryan has started a once-a-week quiet time caucus for members of Congress as well as spoken on the subject at seminars and public events coast-to coast. He said he has been surprised by how many members of Congress have asked him about the practice and how to better deal with stress.

“A lot of people don’t understand mindfulness,” he said.

“But, when you talk about slowing down and being in the present moment they get enthusiastic, across partisan lines. It’s about participating in your own health care, in education, in politics, and becoming more resilient, and there’s no reason why people should rule this out because it doesn’t fit into their political philosophy.”

Even before the publication of his book Congressman Ryan secured almost a million dollars in federal funding for programs to teach mindfulness at elementary schools in his district.

“We are basically teaching them how to calm down the part of the brain that is preventing them from learning how to pay attention. It’s a beautiful thing to walk in to classrooms and hear stories about how it’s transforming them.”

Congressman Ryan may have been the warm-up band at ‘Believe in Cleveland’, but he deserved to be the headliner.

It is rare when the unexpected sincerity of a politician trumps the supposed sincerity of yoga boosters like Lululemon. Politicians are bred to seem sincere, even when they usually don’t mean it. Congressman Ryan was a breath of fresh air. Lululemon, on the other hand, is as fresh as its next advertising campaign, or in whatever direction the hot air balloon is blowing.

Lululemon is a high-end yoga-inspired multi-billion dollar apparel retailer. It pronounces itself as a company “where dreams come to fruition.” One of the slogans most prominent in its manifesto is: “Friends are more important than money.”

However, most of Lululemon’s apparel is manufactured in third-world countries at the behest of the company’s founder, Chip Wilson, who believes, according to a speech he made at a conference of the Business Alliance of Local Living Economies in Vancouver, British Columbia, that third-world children should be encouraged to work in factories because it provides their families with much-needed wages.

Lululemon’s former CEO, Christine Day, recently ousted after overseeing the introduction of its ill-fated see-through yoga pants, explained the company’s philosophy of purposefully keeping inventories low in order to drive demand for its one hundred dollar separates by saying: “Our guests know that there’s a limited supply, and it creates these fanatical shoppers.”

When Lululemon opened a new store in Kingston, Ontario, in the middle of winter in 2011, it advertised free clothes at its grand opening. Full-page ads blared: “Grin and Bare It! Let us dress you from head to toe. The first 30 people wearing only their undies will receive a free Lululemon top and bottom.” Since another of the company’s slogans is, “Do one thing a day that scares you,” and since stripping in public is scary for most people, on the big day the sidewalks of Kingston were overflowing with Girls Gone Wild, although some couldn’t stop shivering while patiently waiting for their free Bhakti capris.

Corporate public relations representative Sara Gardiner described the come-as-you-are campaign as a “great way of grassroots marketing and creating conversations.”

“Our product is unique because it’s infused with passion,” said the manager of Lululemon when it opened in the up-scale Eton Square Mall in a suburb of Cleveland. “Each step of the process is committed to greatness, fun, integrity, and quality. The culture of Lululemon is one that inspires me. When I put on a pair of groove pants I feel like I’m a part of that inspiration.”

A New York Times investigation revealed that Lululemon’s Vitasea line of seaweed fabric – whose seaweed it claimed released “marine amino acids, minerals, and vitamins into the skin” – contained no seaweed at all.

The Wall Street Journal has reported that the company’s employees are trained to routinely eavesdrop on customers.

In the past five years Lululemon has tripled its annual revenue, expanding from 70 stores to more than 200, giving substance to the notion that if you can fake sincerity, you have surely got it made.

Two years ago Lululemon introduced new shopping bags sporting the shadowy question: “Who is John Galt?”

John Galt, a pivotal character in Ayn Rand’s novel ‘Atlas Shrugged’, believes in and defends the right of the individual to employ his mind and life solely for his own benefit.

Few people become engaged with yoga as a result of reading Ayn Rand’s potboilers, and for good reason. An unabashed advocate of individualism and unbridled capitalism, she rejects faith in favor of rational selfishness.

In notes for her novel she describes John Galt as without “inner conflict because he is perfect.” In other words, he is the Superman of our modern times. In the book he is compared to Prometheus, who in Greek mythology created man from clay.

The philosophy of Ayn Rand holds that there is no greater moral good than achieving happiness. It is an idealistic message burdened by the simplistic flaw that it confuses what are necessary conditions for happiness with sufficient conditions.

Ayn Rand blithely pronounces, in the words of John Galt, that if we all pursue whatever is in our own self-interest then the world will be a better place. Most of today’s libertarians justify their political views by citing Ayn Randism, or Objectivism, as it is better known.

Ayn Rand is considered the matriarch of the Tea Party, even though she herself enjoyed the benefits of Medicaid and Social Security.

Chip Wilson, Lululemon’s founder and guiding light, was influenced by ‘Atlas Shrugged’ when he read it at age eighteen. “Only later, looking back, did he realize the impact the book’s ideology had on his quest to elevate the world from mediocrity to greatness,” according to the company.

“Our bags are visual reminders for ourselves to live a life we love and conquer the epidemic of mediocrity.”

It begs the question of whether the children working in Lululemon’s overseas factories are on the fast track to conquering mediocrity, or if they need to get on the fast track to reading more of Ayn Rand to understand how they have been misled. Maybe they should reconsider sewing see-through pants twelve hours a day and instead, as Lululemon urges, break free of “the constraints and limitations on ourselves, which impede us from living our best lives.”

But, it may not be as easy to do in Bangladesh as it is in North America, given that practically all of the profit margins on clothes made for pennies on the dollar flow into the coffers of Lululemon and its shareholders, and not into the savings accounts of its workers.

In the spring of 2013 workers at the Sabrina Garment Manufacturing factory in Cambodia, where Lululemon clothes are made, went on strike, complaining about “slave wages”.

Lululemon replied by saying: “We share your concern about the situation, and are in close contact with our factory partners.”

They might as well have said nothing.

Carol Horton, a yoga teacher and author of ‘Race and the Making of American Liberalism’, writes: “I strongly suspect that the overwhelming majority of Lululemon customers and ambassadors haven’t thought into the politics of the company they’re supporting.”

But, social and economic concerns aside, the issue of pursuing our own self-interest no matter what not only leads to innumerable dead ends, it is contrary to the teachings of yoga, a core component of which is building community. “The feeling we get from being part of a community, or kula, is an important part of why many of us embrace yoga,” says Kelle Walsh, the editor of Yoga Journal.

“The notion of self-interest, in fact, runs completely against that,” argues Simon Houpt, senior media writer for the Canadian newspaper the Globe and Mail, writing about Lululemon’s love affair with Ayn Rand.

The path of yoga is admittedly a path towards one’s own fulfillment, but it is not the path of narcissism. It is a commonplace that we have to be selfish to get ahead in this world. But, the idea that selfishness is an overarching virtue to be pursued at all cost, as Ayn Rand and Lululemon espouse, is both shortsighted and solipsistic.

Every man for himself and God against all is not one of the eight limbs of yoga.

“Self-cherishing is the cause of all misery and dissatisfaction,” according to the Tibetan Buddhist Panchen Lama, “while holding other sentient beings dearer than oneself is the foundation of all realization and knowledge.”

It may seem churlish to not see the good in sexy, form fitting yoga pants, but yoga is ultimately a practice whose focus is meant to be internal, rather than focused on how shapely one’s butt can be in a pair of Wunder Under tights. Nor is it a practice meant to further the fortunes of companies doing anything and everything they can to claw their way up the NASDAQ ladder. Although yoga is America’s favorite eastern philosophy, because it is so accepting of SUV’s, one of its central tenets is non-grasping, or non-greed.

None of its tenets bears any resemblance to Lululemonism. To suppose otherwise is to pretend to understand what Led Zeppelin meant by the lyrics of ‘Stairway to Heaven’.

As antithetical as the presumptions of Lululemon are to yoga, the mantra of sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll is equally peripheral to the yoga project. Rock-and-roll’s carousal of multi-millionaire stars has long since turned the music on its head. Given the luxurious lifestyles of many of the Rock Hall’s inductees, from the Gloved One to Elton John, my generation’s Liberace, it cannot be any wonder that Miley Cyrus, famous for faux-masturbating with a foam finger, is banging the gong at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart with her smash hit ‘Bangerz’.

With five chart-toppers by the tender age of twenty, Miley is on a roll and the Rock Hall is probably already planning the induction of and shiny mausoleum for Cyrus the Great in the 2030s when she becomes eligible.

Although rock-and-roll is not, admittedly, my favorite genre of music, I do enjoy listening to the likes of Sonic Youth, Social Distortion, and even Bikini Kill, who recorded on the label ‘Kill Rock Stars’, as much as the next man. It is to their credit, however, that they aren’t and hopefully never will be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Shame, so-called by Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols.

“It’s a place where old rockers go to die.”

In 1994 Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead did not attend his induction because he was opposed to the idea of a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum. The rest of the band disagreed, dragging a cardboard cutout of Garcia onstage. Grace Slick of the Jefferson Airplane skipped the ceremony in 1996, saying: “All rock-and-rollers over the age of 50 look stupid and should retire.”

When the Sex Pistols were named as inductees in 2006, alongside Blondie and Lynyrd Skynyrd, they refused to attend, sending a note instead: “Rock and roll and the hall of fame are a piss stain. We’re not coming. We’re not your monkey, and so what? Fame at $25,000 if we paid for a table, selling us a load of old famous. We’re not coming. You’re not paying attention.”

What they meant was that rock and roll has long since become as corporate as it can possibly become. The genre is immensely popular worldwide and has morphed into a multi-billion dollar business with little connection to what used to be known as the counter-culture, or to anything that means anything except the sound and fury of a tune with a backbeat. Since punk rock stripped back the curtain in the late 1970s, big-time rock-and-roll bands have routinely sold out to sell everything from Royal Caribbean Cruises (Iggy Pop) to Jaguar S-class sedans (Sting).

The Rock Hall’s signature exhibition in 2013 was the ‘Rolling Stones: 50 Years of Satisfaction’. The aptly named Stones have spent fifty years snorting kilos of cocaine and making tons of money. In the years 2000 through 2010 the bad boys of rock grossed almost $900 million dollars at their live shows alone. In the form of twenty-dollar bills it amounts to 36,000 pounds, or literally eighteen tons of twenty-dollar bills.

From its explosive springboard in the 1950s rock-and-roll became a cultural revolution. Bookended by Woodstock and Live Aid it responded to the issues of its day like war, race, sexuality, power, and world hunger. But, 25 years after Live Aid it has become predictable and irrelevant. Rock-and-roll may once have been on its way to changing the world, but then came Matchbox 20 and Vertical Horizon.

There is a reason Fall Out Boy’s ‘Save Rock and Roll’ was the most successful rock album of 2013, and it’s not even really rock-and-roll.

The nadir may have been 2008 when the pop icon Madonna was inducted into the Rock Hall, which Gene Simmons of KISS said was an insult to her because she should have been in the Dance Hall of Fame, instead. The Material Girl is to rock-and-roll as Ben Affleck is to the Baseball Hall of Fame because he goes to so many Red Sox games at Fenway Park.

For a performer whose career has been built on a platform of bawdiness, it is surprising that since 1996 Madonna has practiced and stayed in shape with Ashtanga Yoga workouts. “Yoga is a metaphor for life,” she says. “It is a workout for your mind, your body, and your soul.”

It is surprising, but maybe she simply has never heard of Pattabhi Jois’s emphasis on bramacharya, or the wise use of sexual energy, in the practice of Ashtanga Yoga. But, then again, that is not the kind of idea that sells records and concert tickets costing hundreds of dollars for ringside seats.

As yoga has become more mainstream stars have taken to writing and singing yoga tunes. Madonna had a hit with ‘Shanti/Ashtangi’ in which she crooned, “Beyond comparison, working like the jungle physician/To pacify loss of consciousness from the poison of existence.” The album ‘Ray of Light’ on which the song appeared sold 16 million copies. Abandoning her white top hat, black panties and bra, and black knee-high go-go boots in favor of a shapeless ankle-length sackcloth, the Queen of Pop performed with a troupe of traditionally-clad Indian women.

Although the Boston Globe described the album as “deeply spiritual dance music,” not everyone agreed that ‘Shanti/Ashtangi’ was Madonna’s best work, no matter the weird intensity of its lyrics. Nor does everyone agree that any and all performers are the best vehicles for sacred songs.

“Some people think they can find some melodies and put some mantras to them, and now they’re chanting,” Krishna Das said in an interview with Shannon Sexton, a former editor of Yoga International. “But they may not understand that this is spiritual practice. This is not entertainment. These chants have power. They have the ability to change us.”

The venue for ‘Believe in Cleveland’ was centrally located in downtown Cleveland, accessible to all the city’s many suburbs and exburbs along its myriad of highways. Like pilgrims flowing downstream the area’s yogis descended to the mouth of the Cuyahoga River as though it were the Ganges. The show was a hit.

However, it could have been staged in many different places in Cleveland, including the 22,000 green acres of the Metroparks circling the city. Edgewater State Park on Cleveland’s west shoreline of Lake Erie has hosted large gatherings of yogis practicing 108 sun salutations on summer solstice, as well.

Wade Oval, one of northeast Ohio’s premier public spaces, only minutes from the Rock Hall, might have made a natural choice. Its amenities include a seven-acre park, the hundred-foot wide Kulas Community Stage, and on-site access to water and electricity. Wade Oval is directly opposite the entrance to the Cleveland Museum of Art, as well, which has a large collection of art related to yoga.

One of its best pieces, ‘Yoga Narasimha: Lord Vishnu in his Man-Lion Avatar’, is headlining ‘Yoga: The Art of Transformation’, a major show billed as the world’s first exhibition on yogic art. It will explore yoga over time, as spiritual training as well as physical exercise, and its connections to both well-being and enlightenment. The exhibition, a result of the museum’s traditional strength in Asian art, premiers in June, 2014. It will travel to Washington, D. C. later in the fall for a three-month engagement at the Feer Sackler Gallery at the Smithsonian’s Museum of Asian Art.

At first glance it might seem like a park adjoining a museum co-organizing an historic exhibit of yogic art would have been a better fit for a groundbreaking yoga night out than a pay-per-view depository venerating the likes of Guns N’ Roses, the Stooges, and Black Sabbath.

At second glance, too.

“In retrospect,” the Village Voice recently noted, “it’s hard not to see the Osbournes [of Black Sabbath fame] as the first sign that the modern world was entering its Post-Dignity era.”

It might be said, as it often is, that “It’s all yoga.” There is a fondness for promoting the practice no matter what, in the belief that it is both immediately and ultimately beneficial, even if higgledy-piggledy alliances have to be made with Lululemon and the Rock Hall to bring the practice to the people.

But, that’s like Yogi Berra saying, “I didn’t really say everything I said.”

One of the yamas of yoga is satya, or honesty and truthfulness. Lululemon is consistently disingenuous and rock-and-roll chronically two-faced. Both wear the rubric of peace, love, and understanding over their shoulders, proving Mark Twain right when he said, “Honesty is the best policy, when there is money in it.”

Since many politicians don’t believe what they say, sitting on the fence with both ears to the ground, they are often surprised when they are believed. Hall of Fame rock bands and Lululemon are corporations in pursuit of unfettered wealth.

“Groups are corporations now,” says John Lee Hooker, father of the boogie. “They have pension plans. Musicians have saw the daylight.”

Bono of U2 is on track to, literally, become the world’s first billionaire rock star.

Corporations always seek to be believed, no matter what it is they are selling, that being the platform on which success and failure ultimately rests. No one likes to be lied to.

Who listens to Milli Vanelli anymore?

It was refreshing to hear Congressman Ryan speak candidly about an issue that does not benefit him directly in terms of votes and campaign contributions, but rather touches on larger issues affecting citizens and the republic itself. “It’s not very common for elected officials to talk about the psychological and mental factors that are involved in things going well or badly in public policy,” says Rick Hanson, a neuropsychologist and author of ‘Just One Thing: Developing a Buddha Brain One Simple Practice at a Time’.

“Tim is shining a spotlight on this, and that’s brave.”

It was dismaying to listen to the la-la-la’s of Lululemon and Led Zeppelin, especially when they barely believe and dimly understand what they are talking about. ‘Stairway to Heaven’, one of the most beloved and most played rock songs of all time, was written by Robert Plant, who has admitted the lyrics have no actual meaning. Whatever sounds good to keep turning the turnstiles.

The company we keep, fairly or unfairly, judges us.

When yoga aligns itself with the likes of Tim Ryan, who envisions for the nation mindfulness as a way to “prevent a lot of suffering, prevent a lot of war, and suffering in the healthcare system,” it associates with men of good company.

When yoga locks elbows with the likes of Chip Wilson and Mick Jagger, who can never get no satisfaction no matter how many dollar bills they accumulate by whatever means best suited to serve their self-interest, it associates with men of bad company.

“Associate with men of good quality if you esteem your own reputation; for it is better to be alone than in bad company,” said the man whose face is on the greenback.

Better the greenback than the shell game.

Postscript: In February 2014, ‘Believe in Cleveland’ sponsored its second mass event, this time in the renovated Atrium of the Cleveland Museum of Art. Several hundred people unrolled their mats in the glistening, new space, practicing to folk, roots, and world music, with a little bit of acoustic U2 thrown in.

Ozzy Osbourne was not allowed in the building.

“This is the first yoga practice within these walls, ever,” said Tammy Lyons.

The museum was founded in 1913 and opened its doors in 1916. The yoga class ended with a group OM echoing magically in the high-ceilinged space.

It was a sweet-sounding step up from the Rock Hall.

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.”

Adirondacks

On the Line at Liquids and Solids

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By Ed Staskus

   “It took me awhile to understand the vibe that makes Liquids and Solids so special,” said Marla Gilman, a summer removed from her year working in the kitchen of the edgy gastropub in Lake Placid, New York.

    “I was visiting friends in Keeseville and they kept talking about this great little restaurant,” she said. “You would love this place, my friends kept telling me. Their food is awesome. They kept talking about it, and so, finally, during another visit to town, my boyfriend Dylan took me to eat there. It was awesome.”

   A graduate of the University of Vermont, the 25-year-old Marla began her college career focused on business and ended it focused on food and drink. “I took a farm to table class, just kind of randomly, where we read Michael Pollan,” she said. “That’s where the whole thing started. I realized I needed to re-think the way I was eating.”

   She went from being conscious of food by counting the calories in her mouth to getting in touch with sun soil rain through the taste of what she was putting into her mouth. She learned to enjoy food rather than think about it.

   After graduating from the College of Agriculture at UVM with a degree in Community Entrepreneurship and a minor in Food Systems, she spent the summer backpacking through Italy, Germany, and France. Her last stop was at the Ballymaloe Cookery School in Ireland, where she had enrolled to dovetail with her traveling.

   “I was on that side of the ocean, anyway,” Marla said. 

   The 12-Week Certificate at Ballymaloe, a one hundred acre working organic farm west of Dublin, is an intensive immersion-cooking course. Its track proceeds from fundamental skills to increasingly practical techniques, training its graduates to become ready-to-go cooks able to pursue a culinary career.

   But, certificate or no certificate, it didn’t prepare her for Liquids and Solids.

   “I was the first girl to work the line there, with the guys, with their raw, sarcastic stuff, and I was just this little girl from New Jersey who cared about local food. I couldn’t keep up at first. I didn’t talk for a while, at all. I just kept my mouth shut.”

   It was at Ballymaloe that Marla cultivated her personal palette for food. “I learned to taste by eating. I simply ate a lot of locally grown fresh food. I learned the difference between something tasting alive and something tasting dead.”

   However, since she knew little to nothing about wine, learning to drink took more patience. “People would talk about wine and I didn’t get what they were tasting. I couldn’t understand how wine could taste like apricots.”

   One of her friends at the school came to the rescue. The friend parsed a book about wine, cataloging essential flavors, and filled the small holes of eggs crates with those flavors. “Anna blindfolded me and I had to smell each one and be able to say what it was,” she said. “It was one of the nicest things anyone has ever done for me. It pulled it out for me. I learned what I was smelling for.” 

   After returning home she wrangled work at Blue Hill at Stone Barns. 

   Blue Hill in New York’s Greenwich Village, melding fresh local sources with inspired preparation, has been described as a go-to dining destination since it opened in 2000. Their restaurant at Stone Barns, opened four years later in the Hudson Valley, has no menus. Instead, diners are proffered a Grazing, Rooting, and Pecking bill of fare, featuring the farm’s best from field and market.

   “I was obsessed with Stone Farms for years and years, so in the end I staged there. I mean, I worked for free,” Marla said. “A stage is usually a week long, but I wouldn’t leave. I ended up working there for more than three months.”

   In the meantime, her boyfriend-in-waiting moved to the rolling farmlands of Keeseville, on the New York side of Lake Champlain, going to work for Fledging Crow Vegetables, an organic farm based on the Community Supported Agriculture model.

   “Dylan and I had been friends for 6 years and were just starting to see each other,” she said. “I thought I’d like to move there, but not right there, where my boy was. I didn’t want to do that.” Instead, she made plans to move not too far away, to the Keene Valley, known as the home of the High Peaks in the Adirondacks.

   “At first everything was just a thought in my head, and then, literally, within a week-and–a-half I had a place to live and a job.” The job was at Liquids and Solids.

   “I shot Tim Loomis, the head chef and co-owner, an e-mail, and I just said that I’m friends with Dylan at Fledging Crow, and I ate at your restaurant, which I thought was amazing. Just curious, any work opportunities?”

   A week later she got a return call. “Your resume looks awesome,” Tim said. ”We’ll be looking for someone soon and we’d love to have you.”

   “Whoa, you don’t even know me!” she said to Tim, who she had yet to meet. “But, Tim is close with Fledging Crow. He buys so locally. If he could, everything would come from local farms. So, when they dropped the good word about me, Tim being trustworthy about his friends, when they said this girl is cool, he was pretty much OK with it.”

   It was Marla’s first real job in a commercial kitchen. In a kitchen slightly bigger than a family van, serving hundreds of exactly orchestrated plates a night, she worked alongside the head chef, a sous chef, and a dishwasher.

   “I was the pantry person, although we rotated the work. I would do sous chef some nights and wash dishes other nights, and the sous chef would do the pantry some nights. Tim was always Tim every night. He was the main man.”

   At Blue Hill everything needed to be accounted for, from where ingredients were stored to the preparation and presentation of dishes.  “I had to show them every cut I made, and if I wasn’t sure about something, they expected me to ask. At Liquids and Solids, the flavors are all high-end, it tastes so eloquent, and I was always asking, is this all right, is that cut OK?”

   “Yeah, it’s fine, you don’t have to ask me,” Tim grumbled.

   She wasn’t sure how to take the no-questions rule, although she understood he wanted food done as well as she could do it. Nor did she understand the organization of the kitchen. “The kitchen was so disorganized,” she said. The management of the pantry and walk-in made sense to those in the know, but didn’t make any sense to her, at first.

   “It’s such amazing food, but we would forget to order chocolate chips for weeks and have to run to Lisa G’s, the restaurant across the street, to get some. The spices on the shelves were all shoved together. If there’s something on a shelf below where I originally put it I freak out. For me, a thing has to have a spot.”

   At Liquids and Solids salt and pepper could be in any one of six places. “Tim always knew those six places,” she said. Everybody else read Tim’s mind.

   When she asked where something was, she heard, “Stop asking me where things are.” She was expected to know, like the rest of the kitchen staff, who were more interested in what everything was for, that purpose being the end result. It was the plating of the food, and the appreciation of it in the dining room, that was the proof of the pudding of the kitchen’s organization skills. Electricity is organized thunder and lightning.

   “Tim doesn’t call himself the head chef,” Marla said. “He will laugh at you if you call him that.” As Alton Brown of the Food Network has pointed out, a cook who calls himself a chef one day will probably make the worst food you have ever eaten.

   “Tim’s food is so well put together you would think he has every little detail worked out. He does, in a way, but it’s a super laid-back kitchen. He puts a lot of trust in his staff.” She recounted days when Tim, on his day off, would nonetheless turn up in the kitchen and ask that she create a new offering.

   “I’ll do something with it tomorrow,” he said.

   “I was essentially the lowest person in the kitchen,” she said, “and for him to tell me to create something and have enough trust in me that I will apply it to a special that will be on the menu, that was really cool for me.” We are often made trustworthy when someone puts their trust in us. It is the glue of life, like eggs, flour, and breadcrumbs.

   The kitchen at Liquids and Solids was not especially ready for her, partly by accident, partly by design. She worked on a small table on top of a lowboy fridge behind a wall. “They didn’t bring tickets to me, either,” she said. “They would yell out the order and I had to scribble it down, in the right order, for the right tickets. It was totally new to me and super stressful.”

   Working in close quarters with the tight-knit Liquids and Solids crew unnerved her, as well. “They would listen to country stations, and the songs were all about sex, and they would make every inappropriate joke in the book,” she said. “I had no idea how to handle it. It took me a long time to realize it wasn’t real, it was just jokes, and appreciate that rank humor of theirs.“

   In some kitchens saying ‘Sancho’ to a co-worker means someone is at their house being carnal with their husband or wife. The proper response is, “I’m not worried about Sancho.”

   “There were never any hard feelings. It was just me having to adjust to that environment.” In the meantime, Marla was learning to work quickly and safely, be organized when preparing food, and stay responsible for holding up her end. “It was really hard for me at first,” she said. “I had pretty much never done line work before.”

   Line cooks need to be strong, both physically and mentally. Anthony Bourdain, a long-time cook, has likened the work to being in the trenches of a war. They are the foot soldiers in any functioning kitchen. “When the rest of the world is relaxing you’re working harder and going crazier than you ever have before,” Marla said. She was compelled to do her best in the face of toil and trouble. 

   “I found out if you over think it you will drive yourself crazy,” she said. “You have an order board in front of you, you’re trying to coordinate with the other cooks, and working on something else in the oven, too. You have to train your brain to take all that in at once and not forget any of it.”

   Memory separates what you know and don’t know. In a kitchen it’s like a rail yard with trains coming and going all the time, emptying out and filling up, working their way into and out of the yard. The kitchen swing doors at restaurants like Liquids and Solids never stop revolving as wait staff tack tickets to kitchen boards and deliver orders to diners.

   “I can barely remember what I did two days ago, but in a kitchen I can have four things going in the oven, be doing six other orders at once, don’t forget about the carrots, plate those two desserts, oh, here comes a new ticket, which is a charcuterie plate and an oyster, write that down, and, Oh, shit! the carrots are still in the oven, grab them, and handle the heat without passing out. That’s strictly from my experience there.”

   Two ovens and eight burners burning all the time were where liquids were brought to a boil and solids were baked, roasted, and broiled in the small kitchen. That’s why shouts of “HOT BEHIND!” are frequently heard in kitchens as pots of bubbling liquid are being moved.

   “It was hot in there,” Marla said. “You’re moving faster with hot objects than you’ve ever moved in your entire life. It was easy to get upset, get angry, because we were moving so fast and it was so damned blazing.”

   Except for Tim Loomis. “He was always moving fast, and sweating like the rest of us, but there was a calmness about him. His friends came into the kitchen all the time, shooting the shit with him. I always thought that if someone was talking to me I would freak out.”

   It wasn’t all noses to the grindstone, however. “They are really good at having a good time in the kitchen,“ Marla said. “Sometimes I thought they shouldn’t be having such a good time, but they definitely knew how to have fun.”

   One night in mid-July, on the third anniversary of the opening of the restaurant, despite it being the height of their busy season, they threw a party in the kitchen. A pick-up crew from Fledging Crow helping with the work.

   “It was a great night while we were all still working, and then we drank a little bit afterwards.” The life of a kitchen is making lemonade from lemons. Afterwards it’s refreshing to have a gin-soaked lemon gingerini at the bar.

   Over the course of her year at Liquids and Solids she grasped that Tim Loomis was sourcing and cooking food like what her teachers at Ballymaloe had recommended. “Tim’s cooking is fairly simple. It’s just picking good, fresh ingredients and doing it really well. We had a beet dish. It was just roasted beets with the skin peeled, with avocadoes and carrot and lime vinaigrette on top. It was so simple. I never would have thought of it. People loved it. Even beet haters loved it.”

   Tim didn’t brainstorm his ideas verbally. When Marla asked him what inspired him, he said, “I don’t know.” She discovered he was being full of air with her. He had his own method whenever the menu was changing. “He would sit at the bar all day, talking to farmers, finding out what was on the horizon.” 

   She found out how many local ingredients he was using, the attention he paid to their provenance, and how good he was at seasoning them. “He came up with a sauce for fried Brussels sprouts that is awesome,” she said.

   Brussels sprouts have been almost universally disliked for most of their history.  Parents urge their children to eat the mildly bitter vegetable, saying, “If you keep trying, you will probably like them in the end.” One reason they are misunderstood is most people don’t know how to cook them. At Liquids and Solids, they were transformed into a godly creation that has become a staple on the menu.

   “Tim’s mind works in a very different way than mine, and I think, from a lot of other chefs. Learning how to create his kind of food, his style, and his sauces was really special for me. That’s what was very satisfying about working there.”

   But, when the winter of 2013 became the spring of 2014 Marla began to think she was ready for something new. One tip-off was her nightmares. Marla’s monsters came in the form of cremated duck and shriveled asparagus. “The hours were really hard for me,” she said. “You work at such a high energy until one in the morning, and I’d stay wired until three. When I finally chilled and got to sleep I’d have weird dreams, kitchen dreams of everything going wrong. I’d wake up in the middle of the night in a panic.”

   The work itself took a toll on her, too.

   “I had back issues to begin with, and you’re always hunched over, on your feet, and my feet would be killing me. Your whole body just hurts. I don’t know how people do it for twenty years. I literally don’t get it.”

   Many cooks suffer sore backs from repeated heavy lifting and bone spurs in their feet from constantly standing. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics they are affected by more injuries than the average American worker.  Falls on slippery floors are commonplace. Cuts and burns are common mishaps. Cooks suffer the highest number of work-related burns of anybody in any industry in the United States.

   She also felt out of sync with her friends, especially her boyfriend. “I felt like I needed a normal schedule. I was getting bug-eyed, and I wanted to be closer to my friends and boyfriend in Keeseville, too,” she said. “When you’re a cook you never get to see your friends. Dylan was farming, so he was up at six in the morning, while I was working nights and living almost an hour away. I wasn’t aligning with that.”

   As spring turned to summer she moved to Keeseville, taking over the Clover Mead Café and Farm Store, an off-the-beaten path eatery with fresh-from-the-farm flavors and creative food combinations, as well as artisanal cheeses and yogurt made from their own cows.

   Tim Loomis bade her farewell and went looking for somebody new. “Our pantry cooker Marla is leaving us for something new. We need to replace her. As usual, an appreciation for punk rock, classic country, and 80s pop culture is useful, but not necessary.”

   At the farm café in Keeseville, she is the menu planner, cook, and manager, as well as the face at the front counter. “Marla’s a great baker and cook,” said Clover Mead Farm co-owner Ashlee Kleinhammer. “She was excited about starting her own thing.”

   “When you’re cooking you never get to see anyone enjoying the food,” Marla said. “You sweat and cut your fingers and burn yourself and then what you created just disappears. I wanted to see the satisfaction that people get from my hard work.”

   By the end of summer, the café was beginning to meet its business goals and Marla was already planning for the next year, including adding meats from Mace Chasm Farms, a neighboring farmstead butcher shop, and beer from the newly opened Ausable Brewing Company down the street. 

   She still eats at Liquids and Solids. “I hate how far I live from it, but I drive the fifty minutes to Lake Placid because it’s so great,” she said. “I love the food there and I love going back.”

   What makes the long drive worthwhile is she doesn’t have to sweat like a sailor, either, to get a plate of homegrown, subversively creative, and expertly prepared food. She doesn’t set foot in the kitchen. She leaves that to somebody else, although she has been known to stand just outside of it and take in the smell of liquids and solids being transformed into culinary fare.

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.”

Paperback Yoga

Marching Orders

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By Ed Staskus

Ask any army navy marine air force officer recruiter chief of staff what is important about basic training and he will tell you it prepares recruits for all aspects of martial service, physical, mental, and emotional. Most important and far-reaching, however, is it forces individuals to put personal freedom aside and act as a group.

Ask any corporate recruiter what they look for in new hires and they will tell you the ability to make decisions and solve problems. Nevertheless, the skill they most look for is the ability to work effectively in a group.

Ask any yoga teacher whether it’s better to practice alone or in a studio setting and most of them will say yoga is an individual practice. It isn’t supposed to be groupthink. “Do what serves you” is often said and heard. In other words, think for yourself.

Singing from the same sheet of music doesn’t necessarily serve you.

But, they will point out, there are many valuable lessons to be learned exercising in a studio beyond just discovering the nuts and bolts of the practice, such as gaining insights and corrections from experts, sharing energy and purpose, raising consciousness, taking you out of your comfort zone when practicing mat to mat with different kinds of folks, and breathing in union with like-minded people in a dedicated space.

It unifies everyone in the studio in the team spirit of yoga. You can still be yourself, no matter the size of the flock, or so the thinking goes. Singing from the same sheet of music can make great choral societies.

Practicing solo at home, of course, has its go-to reasons.

“If you are self-conscious around other people, being in the safety of your own home can be comforting,” explains Mia Togo, a Yoga Works certified teacher and Life Coach.

However, going at it at home brings with it inevitable distractions, your family, your friends, your pets, your smart phone, and your own physical needs, like hunger, the bathroom, and hitting the sack. On the other hand, you don’t have to wear hundreds of dollars of fashionable apparel to earn your wings.

A t-shirt and a pair of sweatpants usually gets it done.

When did Lululemon’s Reveal Tight Precision Pants become the first serious step in suiting up for a studio yoga class? Do the Reveal Pants have something to do with revealing the inner self? Whatever happened to the fun of wearing sweatpants?

Although it’s true they’re old-fashioned and nobody looks good in them, it’s equally true they are made for one reason, which is exercise, and they fulfill their reason for existing without breaking a sweat or blabbing on and on about airflow and wicking.

The famous fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld looked down his nose on them, saying, “Sweatpants are a sign of defeat. You lost control of your life so you bought some sweatpants.” Nevertheless, they trap heat close to your body and help warm your muscles up quickly. You sweat more, you burn more calories, and you get a great workout.

After all, that’s what most commercial yoga is all about.

When did yoga become a studio practice? The easy answer is when it became a $16 billion dollar business in the United States and a $30 billion dollar-plus business worldwide. The real answer is it happened when it became a multi-billion dollar business everywhere.

When it comes to dollars and cents, even meditation and mindfulness are raking it in, more than a billion a year in the last calendar year in the United States. Group meditation classes, oxymoronic as that may be, have sprung up nationwide, costing real money for going inward. The “Muse” headband, if you want to know exactly what’s going on in the back of your mind, measures brain activity during meditation for only $299.95.

It doesn’t take any brains to know that is $299.95 too much.

Just like it doesn’t take any brains to tease out what the wizard behind the curtain is up to.

There is great good feeling to be found in yoga classes. That’s why millions of consumers go to them. That’s why many of them go to classes twice a week-or-more. That’s why they are willing to pay $12.00 to $16.00 a class. In some cosmopolitan areas it is almost double that. The wizardry of yoga studios is their awareness of the mesmerizing effect unrolling a yoga mat has on many patrons.

Just about everybody feels better walking out than walking in to a yoga class. It’s not because they’re happy it’s over. It’s because their muscles have been lengthened and strengthened and because they’ve spent an hour breathing calmly evenly steadily. The flow of prana, or life force, has been unlocked balanced juiced by the practice

GABA is a neurotransmitter. Low levels of it are associated with anxiety, mood disorders, and chronic pain. Higher levels are associated with the opposite. One way to replicate the activity of GABA is to drink beer, wine, or cocktails. Alcohol binds to some GABA receptors in the brain.

Another way is go to a yoga class.

According to the Boston University Medical School, people who practice yoga regularly have higher levels of GABA. In addition they have lower levels of cortisol, which is associated with a higher propensity towards depression. More GABA and less cortisol let the sun shine through.

Who wouldn’t rather be on the Virgin Islands than, say, Siberia at night in January?

In any case, a sunny disposition always trumps a cloudy day.

Loosening and lubricating joints muscles myofascial tissue and the mind all feel good. Rubbing the Aladdin’s lamp of endorphins, releasing the genie, leads to feelings of euphoria, appetite modulation, release of sex hormones, and enhancement of the immune response. Endorphins interact with the opiate receptors in your brain to reduce your perception of pain and stress.

That’s why 91% of regular yoga practitioners are satisfied with their yoga studio, among other reasons. That’s why yoga can be addictive, like happiness can be addictive. That’s why you go with the flow.

There is great well-being to be found in yoga classes. It’s always been like going to the store and buying a light bulb. The top two reasons people do yoga is its impact on health and stress. That’s what is behind what yoga studios market, often without actually marketing it. That’s why there are almost 14 million yoga practitioners over the age of 50 in the United States. Many older adults have three-or-more chronic health conditions. As we age, not only does existence become more painful, we become more sensitive to pain, as well.

Who isn’t up for an elixir?

It’s more than a tonic for what ails you. If the key aspects of life are physical, spiritual, intellectual, and emotional, then yoga is the three-point shot goal kick touchdown pass, all rolled up into a home run.

“Yoga, with its philosophical roots, flowing movements, and capacity to aid in regulation of our thoughts and feelings, hits all of these elements to provide an overall sense of well-being,” explains Sarah Sung in ‘What Makes Yoga Feel So Good’.

Yoga is about getting you feeling good in your own skin.

But why don’t more people, after they’ve mastered the basics of the practice, down dog their skins at home? Why march through rain snow sleet to the studio when you can throw on your sweatpants and roll out your mat in the rec room? Why go with the flow when even dead done fish go with the flow?

Why not get it done for yourself?

Even though 65% of yoga practitioners say they have practiced at home at least once, fewer than one out of four yoga practitioners in the United States have practiced yoga on their own in the past 12 months.

Yoga teachers stress it is important to be attentive to every individual in class so every individual can get the most out of their practice. That is easier said than done when there are a dozen-or-two people in class, much less fifty or a hundred. The larger the class the more cookie cutter it necessarily becomes.

Yoga studios advertise trust as an essential of their business. That’s the problem. Studios are businesses. Mutual trust devoid of mutual interest is sentimental nonsense. When yoga becomes a mutual transaction, it becomes a problem.

Just like guppies and most mammals, we are admittedly herd animals. When you’re in a herd you base your decisions on the actions of others. If you’re a guppy or a cow, that strategy works just fine. If you’re trying to walk the eight-limb path, that strategy is self-defeating.

Even though everyone in a herd is a self-serving individual, crowds are the phenomenon of people all acting in the same way at the same time. In a yoga class, the teacher on the platform is the opinion leader influencing persuading and leveraging. If you’re good at headstand, that’s good for you. If you’re not, make sure you let your neighbor know.

Herd behavior is all about being harnessed.

Who wants to live all their life with the bit between their teeth?

The key to creating lasting change is to do things on your own. Developing a personal yoga practice is part of that package. Doing what everybody else is doing in yoga class week month year after year, which doesn’t take too much willpower to do since it’s follow the leader, makes you just like everybody else. When you’re a member of the team, you rely on the team.

That’s why everybody knows there’s no ‘I’ in ‘TEAM’.

Self-practice, which takes no small measure of self-discipline, makes you into you.

“I think self-discipline is something, it’s like a muscle. The more you exercise it, the stronger it gets,” points out the cognitive psychologist Daniel Goldstein.

If yoga is a personal journey, as is touted far and wide, no one can truly be oneself in a flow yoga class. It is impossible to be yourself in the middle of a herd. It’s like sporting events, religious gatherings, and riots. Everyone goes with the flow. Getting down with the group mind is antithetical to standing up for oneself.

The private self in the public world is always at risk of being subsumed by the mass of marching orders of congregation corporation government.

Standing up for oneself is not up to a public vote. What you make of your yoga practice doesn’t have anything to do with studio classes or influencers. It’s OK to listen to others. It’s not OK to become a follower. It’s not a team game. It’s an individual game.

The biggest mistake anyone can make is to believe somebody else is pivotal central or crucial to one’s development. The best thing anyone can do is own their own practice. Watch the parking meters. There’s a reason there’s a slot for your money. Follow the leader long enough and you end up being an old abandoned car being towed away to the junk yard.

It isn’t about what you ought to be. It’s about what you can be.

Can you get the same results doing yoga at home as you can get at a studio class?

You’ll never know until you try it. Making oneself specific original and a conscious human being means marching the other way, away from the marching orders from on high, whether it’s parents teachers leaders ringleaders or bosses.

Shepherds are for flocks of sheep.

Bust out the dog-earred loose-fitting sweatpants. Just don’t look in the mirror. You might not like what you see. Are they chill? Yes. Are they all the rage? No. At least, all alone on your mat, there won’t be anyone around to judge you in your sweats and own original skin.

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.”

Baltic Place

Waking Up On Wasaga Beach

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   There might be flies on some of you guys, but there ain’t no flies on us.” Traditional Summer Camp Song

   There might be flies on some of you guys, but there ain’t no flies on us.” Traditional Summer Camp Song

   My brother and I both went to Ausra, as Kretinga today was then known, starting in 1959, later joined by our younger sister, who continued going into the 1970s, after we had grown older than the age limit allowed. When that happened there was no love lost in our lukewarm goodbyes to her, watching our sister leave for camp while we were left with crumbs at home.

   Everybody who was going waited all year for the first day of stovykla, or camp, and two weeks later, when it was over, saying goodbye to fellow campers felt like summer was over, even though it was still only mid-July. While there we ran around in the woods like knockabouts, there were humongous bonfires, and it was gangbusters hanging out with our friends. We would have traded any day in the real world for five minutes at summer camp.

   Austra was a summer camp in Wasaga Beach, ninety-some miles from Toronto. It is north of a provincial park and the town’s honky-tonk boardwalk. Americans, Canadians, and anybody who had a drop of Lithuanian blood in them was good to go. After the first year we never wrote letters home. The year we weren’t allowed to be campers anymore we wrote letters asking for an exemption, to no avail.

   Founded in 1957, Ausra was a sports, culture, and religious camp wrapped up in a package on the south shore of Lake Huron’s Georgian Bay. The camp was and still is on twenty-four acres of sand. The sand is everywhere and gets into everything, your ears, shoes, pockets, sleeping bag, and toothbrush, on the first day and stays there until after you get home. The trees surrounding our camp are what we disappeared into for two weeks, far from home.

   The drive from where we lived in Cleveland, Ohio to the camp was longer when we were children. The highways weren’t all highways like they are now. Some of them were just roads. My father had bought a Chevrolet Brookwood as soon as there were three of us, a blue and white station wagon that was twice as big as any sedan. The third-row seat faced backwards. We called it the way back window, playing the license plate game and how many cows on my side game.

   The rear window seat was where my brother and I sat. Our sister had to sit alone on the middle bench seat. She wasn’t allowed in the back with us, although we sometimes let her play rock paper scissors with us, since she was so bad at it. My brother and I found out from a friend of a friend that she counted her lucky stars to have the middle seat to herself. When we asked her why, she just laughed like Woody Woodpecker.

   We were always so excited about going to camp we couldn’t sit still. It took forever to get there. I don’t know how my parents endured the 12-hour trip with the three of us in the back. I do know my father had a globe-like compass on top of the dashboard next to a plastic St. Christopher figurine staring blank-faced ahead. When our father started chain-smoking was when we knew things were getting wayward.

   The year the camp opened it slept eight boys to every Canadian Army surplus tent pitched over a plank floor. By the time my sister went to camp, wood A-frames were replacing canvas. Boys stayed on one side of the camp and girls on the other side, while the smaller kids slept on bunkbeds in roughhewn barracks. There were close to two hundred of us. There was a sports field, a parade ground, and an all-purpose open-air hall, adjoined by an amphitheater of tiered logs. 

   The amphitheater was where we sang songs, acted out skits, and had a lauzas, or bonfire. Everybody ran down to the bonfire and sing-along as soon as it started getting dark. There was so much loose wood everywhere we had a fire every night, as big as a log cabin burning down. “It’s not like now, when you have to drive to the convenience store and buy it,” a latter day camper said. “They only have bonfires on weekends and they are more the size of flashlights than three-alarm blazes.”

   Our camp activities director had been in the Foreign Legion. Bruno wore a black beret, a checked kerchief around his neck, and carried a hand axe on his belt. He didn’t chop any trees down. He mostly just picked up branches from the forest floor. Our woodpile was always sky high ready for a rainy day. Even though we were often reminded to never play with matches in the woods, every night it seemed to take a full box of stick matches and a half gallon of gasoline to start the bonfire. Everybody cheered when the big whoosh happened.

   The days were mostly sunny, sometimes windy and wet, but at camp there was no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather. The nights were often massively starlit and frequently damp. The summer sky on the Georgian Bay is a wide dome. It’s clean and full of life, too, full of pine warblers and broad-winged hawks.  We didn’t shower when we were at camp. Everybody was expected to clean themselves at the communal sink in the latrine. It wasn’t just a pit. It was a cinder block building that teemed with daddy long-leg spiders.

   Some kids hardly ever washed anything besides their hands and face. It could get disgusting, although none of us cared too much about it. One time somebody’s parents wouldn’t let him get into the car when his two weeks were up and he hadn’t cleaned all over even once.

   “No, go back, go hose yourself off,” his mother said through her nose. “What is wrong with you?”

   One year we had bedbugs. We caught them with scotch tape and stored them in a glass jar. We tried to kill some of them with poison spray, because when they sucked your blood they left itchy clusters on your skin, but the bugs didn’t seem to care. When the camp commander found out about it, he hired a bedbug sniffing dog.

   The Beagle was so good at his work he sniffed out a bedbug hiding in the folded page of a paperback book. The next day everybody whose tents were plagued by the bugs piled their stuff into plastic garbage bags and threw the bags inside whatever cars were at the camp, parked in the hot sun with the windows closed. All the bedbugs died.

   Bruno told us that a Canadian had invented plastic garbage bags. He was proud of that because he had become a Canadian citizen. He always had something historic to tell us, usually something about World War Two. Sometimes we listened to what he had to say. Most of the time we didn’t.

   Every morning at seven o’clock we were rousted from our cots by martial music and rag-tagged to the sports field for calisthenics. We stretched and did jumping jacks and ran the track. Afterwards we ran back to our tents, changed into clean shirts, and after raising the Lithuanian, Canadian, and American flags, sometimes preceded by lowering underpants hoisted during the night, we raced to breakfast.

   We ate porridge and scrambled eggs and Post Top 3 cereal. We always had PB&J on Wonder Bread. Sometimes we had sandwiches all day if something went wrong and there wasn’t anything else. The sweet jelly was a hit with bees and wasps. Metallic colored dragonflies, agile and powerful fliers, had the run of the camp. If the spring had been soggy there were clouds of mosquitos.

   After breakfast we pushed the long tables to the side, lined our benches up in rows, and sat down for religious services. Father Paul, Ausra’s resident Franciscan, said mass every day on a makeshift altar. He didn’t have any children, being a priest, but he was good with children. He cemented his coolness in the early days when a camper swiped the wine meant for communion.

   “I was about 12 years old and drank it with a girlfriend,” Dalia Daugvainyte said. “The trees whirled around us along with the stars that night.”

   She had to go to confession the next morning. Father Paul let her off the hook with less than a million Hail Mary’s and a solemn vow to never do it again. “Knowing him, he probably hid a smile,” she said. Since the confessional was out in the open, he probably had to turn his head to the side.

   Late mornings we were free. We cleaned up our tents, messed around, and played volleyball, the Baltic national game, according to our sports counselor. One day we played volleybat, which was baseball but with a volleyball. We found out it could be hairier than it sounds when the pitcher, who was closer to home plate since he had to lob the volleyball, broke his wrist fending off a line drive.

   Every afternoon, barring mid-afternoon thunder and lightning, we assembled for the best part of the day, which was going to the longest freshwater beach in the world, a ten-minute hike from the camp. We lined up in our swimsuits and towels and tramped through a stand of pines and birches to the Concession Road gate and past the corner variety store to the New Wasaga Beach coastline. Whenever we could, we made a run for the variety store, breaking out of our two-by-two ranks for bottles of Bubble-Up and bags of Maltesers.

   Bruno was unlike most of the other counselors. He wasn’t a parent or a young adult. He was a wiry man in his forties with wavy hair who wore his khaki shorts hiked up to his belly button. He led our expeditions to the beach, a whistle stuck in his mouth. He had been a military man and every summer thought he knew how to assemble children for close order drill, only to see us scatter pell-mell as soon we got close to the shoreline.

   Fish-n-chip shacks on stilts and fat family cars, which were then still allowed to park on the beach, dotted the wide sand flats. The surf line was a hundred yards out and the water was often flat as a pancake. We didn’t swim so much as play in the water, running and belly flopping, tackling one another, flinging Wham-O Frisbees, and splashing every girl we saw.

   “You’re getting us wet,” the girls yelled, even though they were in the lake the same as us. One girl who I liked hated getting water in her eyes and up her nose. She wore enormous green goggles and said they were for swimming, even though she always just stood and floated around in one spot. I never splashed her.

   What none of us ever noticed was the loose cordon of watchful camp counselors on the outskirts of our horseplay, keeping their eyes peeled as we played. Walking back to camp behind Bruno we would sing “Hello, goodbye, Jell-o, no pie” because we knew we would be having Jell-o for dessert when we got back. Sometimes I walked next to the green goggle girl.

   Bruno liked to snack on koseliena, or headcheese, and thought we should, too, but our kitchen had the good sense never to serve it, fearing mass nausea. We ate four times a day, served by eight cooks, volunteer mothers and grandmothers, who made burgers and French fries, pork chops and mashed potatoes, and kugelis, or potato pudding. Potatoes were a staple, like Wonder Bread.

   Going swimming was the only time we were allowed to leave camp. It was a strict rule. Everybody feared the consequences, especially expulsion from the camp. One summer a fifteen-year-old was spotted cavorting on the Wasaga Beach boardwalk and given the choice of going home or spending the remainder of the camp in the small kid’s barracks. He chose a top bunk in the barracks, his new campmates a gaggle of eight and nine-year-old’s.

   Another summer two other boys who had messed up did penance by staging a memorial to Darius and Girenas, the 1930s adventurers who died flying from America to Lithuania. After a week building a model of their orange monoplane, they strung a clothesline over the bonfire pit, and painted rocks depicting the route, from New York to Newfoundland, Ireland, and finally Kaunas.

   That night, with the whole camp assembled at the amphitheater, they pulled the plane along the rope, telling the spellbinding story of the ill-fated flight, when near the marker depicting Kaunas they yanked too hard on the guide rope. The plane careened backwards, shook and shuddered, plunging down too soon and too fast and crashed into the bonfire, exploding into flames.

   Everybody hooted hollered groaned and wolf whistled. It was the buzz of the camp for days. The green goggle girl was quiet. Somebody said one of the pilots had been her great uncle. I bought her a bottle of Orange Crush from the variety store to cheer her up.

   Although Ausra no longer exists, except perhaps in memory, the summer camp on the shore of Georgian Bay is still there in the same place. More than half a century after tens of thousands of Lithuanians fled Europe for North America it thrives on the thin, sandy soil of Wasaga Beach.

   Toronto’s Church of the Resurrection bought the land for the camp from a parishioner for a nominal amount in the 1950s and operated it until 1983, when it was re-christened as Kretinga. Since then it has evolved into three camps. There are two weeks for English-speaking and two weeks for Lithuanian-speaking children of Lithuanian descent, and another week for families whose children are too young for the other camps.

   There is a weeklong basketball camp in August. In 2014 Mindaugas Kuziminskas, a former Kretinga camper, played for the Lithuanian National Team in the World Cup in Spain. Summer after summer many of the same children and families across generations return. “It’s my second home,” one recent camper said, while another said, “Greatest camp in the world!” Another camper wearing a double-sided Kretinga t-shirt summed it up. “I love this camp so much and I have been going since forever.”

   The son of a Lithuanian who lives west of Cleveland, like me, goes to Kretinga and eats in the same mess hall as my brother and I once did, shoots hoops on the same asphalt court, and every summer helps restore the same sand map of Lithuania behind the flagpoles. I asked him if he was going back next summer.

   “Oh, yeah,” he said. “My friends and I have been together for five years in the same cabin. Waking up and being at camp is the best time of the year. We get there the first day and there are high-fives knuckle-touches bro-hugs all around. We punch each other and laugh it up. When all the moms and dads are finally gone, we have sandwiches in the mess hall. Father says a prayer and the camp commander makes a speech. Then it’s off to the races.”

   He had already made plans for when his eligibility for the races went out of date.

   “After next summer, after my last year at camp, when I’m not allowed to be a camper anymore, I’m going back as a counselor,” he said. “That’s a sure thing. I can’t wait to go back.”

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.”

Chasing Infinity

Christian Science Goes Country Western

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Chasing Infinity

Family Affair

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By Ed Staskus

The first thing Jody Candow does after getting up at 6 AM is quietly slip out of her home and drive herself to Boot Camp.

“It’s where you work with a trainer every morning,” said Mrs. Candow.

Boot Camp fitness mixes calisthenics like pushups, crunches, and other body weight exercises with interval training. The difference lies in the intensity.

“It gets my workout in, which is partly to keep me sane.”

Back from the gym, her house has come to life; her husband, Rich, a Lakewood, Ohio, mail carrier, is preparing for work, and her four children, teenager Riley, twelve-year-old Kameryn Rose, and five-year-old twins Carter and Ethan, are on the lookout for their mother.

“We tag team, make breakfast, get them ready for school,“ she said.

“My husband drives our son, goes to work, I drive my daughter, the twins come along for the ride, then they stay with my mom, and I go to work.”

The work Jody Candow does is her own, which is the management of her new full-service Kameryn Rose Salon on Linda Street in Rocky River.

She got started when being a stay-at-home mother got to be less of a necessity.

“My kids were getting older, so I started working as a receptionist at a salon six years ago.”

In less than a year she was pregnant again.

“That was a surprise.”

In her second trimester she scheduled a follow-up ultrasound because she was measuring large and because of the baby’s liveliness.

“I always said to my husband, this baby is crazy, it was so active.”

Midway through the test the technician turned off the prenatal ultrasound and suggested her husband join them.

“I asked what was the matter and they said there were two heads. I asked if there were two bodies and they said yes.”

After returning to work part-time, she moved up the ladder to manager, finally striking out on her own. Supported by her family and husband, she reached an agreement with the Sean Luis Salon to lease their vacant second floor. After renovations her salon now features three stylists and two nail stations in a space lit by natural light beneath an open beam ceiling.

“It’s a really nice salon,” said Laurie Fox of Cleveland, her head festooned with silver highlighting foils.

“When I go to get my hair done here I can relax, kind of be pampered.”

One of twelve children, Mrs. Candow lives on the same street she has lived on most of her life, which is the same street her parents, Vicky and Paul, have lived on during all of their 42-year marriage. Many of her brothers and sisters continue to live in Ohio, while one sibling serves in the military.

Once at work, Mrs. Candow’s work is seemingly never done. She leaves the salon to take her twins to pre-school in the early afternoon, and leaves again in the late afternoon to retrieve them and her daughter.

“My son is 16, so he does his own thing with his friends.”

After school her husband rides herd on the family while she makes dinner, and afterwards returns to work, massaging the details.

Mrs. Candow’s long-time stylist and friend Julie Jurek describes her detail-oriented boss as ‘a little OCD’.

“Jody runs the business the way I would want to,” she said. “She’s fair and honest, but, she’s a tweak, everything’s got a place, and everything’s got to be in that place.”

It is her attention to detail that makes the salon a preferred destination.

“It is a place you can walk into and not be intimidated,” said Mary Caruso of Rocky River.

“They are down-to-earth girls, but they are smart businesswomen, too.”

New businesses fail at a high rate, more than 50%, according to the Small Business Administration. Poor management and neglect are often cited as the number one reasons. Given Mrs. Candow’s drive, experience, and commitment to customer service, it is success that seems to be her better option.

No matter the care and effort she puts into her work, Jody Candow always reserves some special consideration for her daughter, disabled from birth.

Born with low muscle tone, Kameryn Rose suffered infantile spasms as a baby, and although appears an average 12-year-old, has never spoken a word, read a book, or ridden a bike. She has receptive language skills, but at a 2 or 3-year-old level.

“She looks totally normal,” said Mrs. Candow.

“You would never know. We’ve had a million tests done and all of them have come back normal.”

After multiple tests by doctors at the Cleveland Clinic and elsewhere, she has never been diagnosed with any specific malady.

“We’ve had geneticists tell us she’s a medical mystery.”

One of the biggest challenges Jody Candow faces managing her new business is the time it consumes, taking her away from her family. When it came time to find a name for the salon, she found the decision an easy one.

“I named the salon after her, because her name is totally beautiful, just like she is, and she’s my only daughter, perfect.”

But, like any girl in an otherwise all-boy family, she knows how to bother her brothers and hold her own.

“There’s no resting in Kameryn’s wake,” said Mrs. Candow.

Whenever the weather cooperates the family spends their time outdoors, the back yard, at parks on the lakeshore, and visiting the Cleveland Zoo.

“We always take Kameryn,” she said

“She’s a little slower, she doesn’t keep up, but we hold hands and just take our time with her.”

It is the ability to care that matters, not disability.

Every day clients come to the Kameryn Rose Salon from as far away as Sandusky.

“When people come here they feel welcome, like they are part of our family,” said Mrs. Candow. “We look forward to seeing them.”

Once her children have gone to bed, Jody Candow finishes her day at the salon.

“Then I chill out a little, go to bed about midnight, and start it all again the next day.”

Postscript:

After two years the Kameryn Rose Salon moved into its own dedicated, modernist space on Lake Road on the edge of the Rocky River valley. “A five star rating,” said Wendy Jackson Richardson after having her hair and nails done, looking like a star stepping out on to the street.

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

Mammon Goes Mantra

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By Ed Staskus

Tim Feldmann and Kino MacGregor met in India, studied Ashtanga Yoga with Sri. Pattahi Jois, married and moved to Miami, and co-founded the Miami Life Center in 2008. Tim Feldman is an accomplished teacher much in demand for workshops in Asia and Europe, while Kino MacGregor is the author of books and producer of videos about the practice,

When they were asked by one of their yoga studio employees, who doubled as front desk man and janitor, if they would be interested in his take on their financial performance, it is to their credit “Mind your own business” wasn’t the first thing they said.

“I was the guy who took out the garbage,” says Matt Tashjian. “But, it was perfectly fine with me. I never thought about it.”

What he did think about was the yoga center’s bottom line.

“There’s some down time during classes when you sit behind the front desk. I started poking around the computer, looking at their numbers, and one day I sent Tim an e-mail suggesting there were a couple of things they could do to improve their numbers.”

Over tea at a local coffee shop he shared his thoughts with them. “We never thought about that, that could be of great value to us,” they said, and for the next year they met monthly, talking business. As they did Tim and Kino began to suspect Matt was someone who knew exactly what he was talking about.

For good reason.

After graduating with a degree in economics from Arizona State University Matt Tashjian worked at and then led a wealth management group at Citi in Hartford, CT, and since 2009 has been the chief advisor, and founder, of the Tashjian Group of Merrill Lynch.

But, before leaving Hartford and moving to Miami in 2008 two things happened: he ran out of steam and had a falling out with a close family member.

“My moving was a result of what can happen in the banking world, which is you get burned out,” he said.

“I was in my late 30s and very focused on professional success and money and got pulled into a cycle of achievement and striving.” As the liquidity crisis of 2007 became the global financial crisis of 2008 he withdrew from the economics world almost entirely. “I went from working 90% of the time to working 10% of the time.”

He found relief by doing more yoga, which he had been introduced to some years earlier, and sought advice at a Buddha Sangha.

“I was looking for a way out of the suffering. It opened my eyes,” he said.

“I reconciled with my sister and realized my life was more important than just work, and I needed to meet those needs. It so happened Miami could fill some of them and that was the impetus for me to start a different life.”

While shopping at lululemon for yoga shorts a sales clerk recommended Miami Life Center to him.

“I started taking classes and eventually asked if I could work there, behind the desk and mopping the floors. I went from being one of the top 500 financial advisors in the country to making sure the bathrooms had toilet paper.”

His personal practice started one day in the mid-1990s when he took a yoga class at a local gym instead of lifting weights.

“I didn’t have any predisposition to yoga or spirituality,” he said. “What piqued my interest was our instructor talking about the breath, patience, and being in the body. I got into it a little bit, started studying yoga, and then Buddhism.”

Sometimes one will go to a yoga class and get the exercise they need to get through the day. Other times they will start thinking about connecting to a higher energy.

“I would say my gym’s yoga class led to a transmutation of how I think about the world. Before yoga I experienced the world through the external, but now I experience it through the internal self. The primary takeaway to my practice is that ultimately all yoga leads to being more compassionate and empathetic to everything around us, and more sensitive to how we’re all connected.”

Compassion and empathy are not common benchmarks of stockbrokers and financial planners. Ambition and desire are the normative ideals, rather, as well as a dollop of greed.

In the modern world making money justifies any behavior. The incentives against financial crime are nominally zero. Almost no one, literally, has been arrested for the banking and market meltdown of the past seven years.

“Is it any wonder that we as a nation seem to be in search of spirit?” asked Kino MacGregor. “What else is left for America to invent than an authentic self in the midst of such rampant materialism?”

If yoga is mixed into the cauldron of capitalism the brew can begin to smell sweeter.

“When you’re deeply ingrained in the yogic path you relate to people differently. What I attempt to do with my clients is infuse the virtues of a balanced life,” said Matt Tashjian. “What’s the sense of having all the money in the world if you’re miserable?”

Sometimes a transformation of motivation can lead to healing and redemption.

“I now try to take a more holistic view with respect to how I interact and counsel clients.”

When Tim Feldmann and Kino MacGregor restructured their yoga center in 2013 they invited Matt Tashjian to join them as a partner.

“There are distinct pros and cons to running a yoga studio,” he said. “The pros are you are surrounded by thoughtful people who care not only about themselves, but other people, too.

“But, like any small business, there are many moving parts every day. Who’s going to change the air conditioning filter or update the holiday schedule on the web site? It’s death by a thousand paper cuts,” he laughed.

The Miami Life Center business model is to employ integrated tools, assimilating reiki, arurveda, as well as life coaching, reflecting Kino MacGregor’s approach to supporting people’s paths holistically. “There is a magic there that can’t be expressed in words,” said Claudia Borges about practicing at the studio.

At the heart of the practice is Ashtanga Yoga.

“Ashtanga is definitely very physical in nature,” said Matt Tashjian, “but it really speaks to more of a spiritual practice. Ashtanga studios like ours, by their nature, put their emphasis not only on asana, but on the other limbs of yoga, too.”

But, at most yoga studios it is exercise, not introversion or meditation, that is the de facto breadwinner.

“We’ve Americanized yoga, made it into an exercise,” said Matt Tashjian. “Asana is certainly a component of it, but asana is really to keep the body healthy so we can comfortably sit in a meditative state.”

Sitting and meditating don’t pay the bills, however.

“Studios that are more spiritually oriented face economic dilemmas that exercise-centric studios do not.”

To further their aims he has incorporated economic compromises into Miami Life Center’s mission statement.

“We’re committed to the Ashtanga lineage and we’re committed to the idea of bringing forth something that is more than just vinyasa,” said Matt Tashjian.

“It may not be for everyone, and it’s conceivable that we will make less money, but we want to be the kind of business in the business world that not only does good economically, but more importantly does good, all rolled into one.”

It is the financial advisor in Matt Tashjian that makes him understand it is spiritual snobbery to believe we can be happy without money. It is the yogi in him that reminds him to make sure there is money in his wallet, not in his heart.

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.”

Chasing Infinity

Minister of Music

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Lavert-Stuart-organist

By Ed Staskus

On any Wednesday evening for the past two decades-and-more whenever anyone looked toward the musician’s pit to the right of the reader’s platform at the Christian Science Church in Rocky River they would have seen, as they still see today, the back of the pony-tailed head of Lavert Stuart.

What they wouldn’t have seen is that serendipity always rewards the prepared. Mr. Stuart has had his fingers on a keyboard from the time he could stand up in a crib. He was ready for the Schantz organ at the Rocky River church

“The substitute for Berdie d’Aliberti, the regular organist at the church, couldn’t make it one night, so I filled in,” said Lavert Stuart. “Then when Berdie’s teaching duties at Baldwin Wallace University got so she could only play on Sundays I became the Wednesday organist, and now we’re looking at more than 25 years.”

What Mr. Stuart didn’t say was that he has been a church musician for almost 50 years, since he started at Cleveland’s Mount Zion Congregational Church in 1965. In the years since he has performed as a pianist and organist at many Protestant churches, from the Historic First Parish in Lexington, Massachusetts, to the Cathedral de St. Trinity in Port au Prince, Haiti.

Although not a member of the Rocky River church he says he is a Christian Scientist “by osmosis”.

The son of a Cleveland policeman, who was cousin to Carl and Louis Stokes, noted Ohio politicians, and a librarian who went on to become the first black insurance saleswoman in Ohio, Mr. Stuart started small.

“When I was a baby my mother kept my playpen next to the upright piano in the front room. It was so she would know where I was. As long as she heard me picking out notes she knew I wasn’t getting into anything else.”

Mr. Stuart grew up in the Glenville neighborhood at a time when it was known as the Gold Coast, crowded with immigrants, delis, clubs, department stores, and churches. He attended Empire Junior High and John Adams High School.

The first in his family to pursue a higher education, he won a scholarship to Ohio University, where he majored in organ. After graduation he moved to Chicago, working for the Board of Education, and playing at several churches, including Salem Lutheran, founded in 1868 by Swedish immigrants. While there he studied with Edward Mondello, the University Organist at the University of Chicago.

“He was a wonderful teacher. I got a lot of the romantic 19th century style from him, playing in the Rockefeller Chapel.”

After being recommended for the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, he studied there for two years. He was the musical director at the First Congregational Church in Weston and later played his graduation recital at the historic Old West Church, where the phrase “no taxation without representation” was first coined.

While living in Boston he helped coordinate the creation of the 1.6 mile Black Heritage Trail, which winds through the Beacon Hill neighborhood and ends at the African Meeting House, the oldest surviving black church in America.

“The first person to die in the American Revolution was a black man,” Mr. Stuart points out. “It was a terrible time.”

Even in 1976, during the Bicentennial celebrations in Boston, when a man at an anti-busing rally tried to kill an African-American bystander with the pointed pole end of an American flag, captured in a Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph.

“I was only a few steps away from that incident when it happened.”

Thirty-five years later Boston City Council cited Lavert Stuart with a proclamation honoring his “spiritual leadership through music ministry and commitment to developing interest and knowledge in Black heritage and culture.”

Having finished his studies he returned to live in Cleveland.

“It was my experience with institutions, and the sense of history in Boston, which made me interested in the organizations and history that brought me to where I was, and who I was.”

He returned to Mt. Zion Church, serving as their organist and choirmaster for the next ten years, as well as serving as supply organist for several other churches and chapels. He began a 25-year relationship with the Stuphen School of Music, serving as their musical director. The school experienced a renaissance under his leadership.

In 1996 he began his long association with Antioch Baptist Church as their organist for the Sanctuary and Gospel Choirs.

“His ministry of music has been a blessing to me,” said the Reverend Marvin McMickle of the Antioch Church. ”Lavert Stuart has been our local version of the Music Man.”

Mr. Stuart is a long-time supporter of the Antioch Development Corporation, whose mission it is to develop personal and collective self-sufficiency within individuals, families, and organizations throughout impoverished neighborhoods of Greater Cleveland.

“Sometimes you don’t realize the things people have to go through.”

As well as a career in classical, sacred music, Mr. Stuart has had a secular career in jazz and popular music. He got his start at the New England Conservatory under the aegis of Gunther Schuller, a composer, conductor, and performer who was then the president of the music school.

“He really put jazz on the map there,” said Lavert Stuart.

In 1973 Gunther Schuller won a Grammy Award with his Ragtime Ensemble.

In the late 1980s Mr. Stuart was the pianist at the Sweet Water Café in downtown Cleveland, and for more than ten years played three nights a week at Mantell’s in the Radisson in Willoughby.

“They had a grand piano on a platform in the shape of a grand piano.”

As well as playing jazz standards at clubs and restaurants, he has worked as a conductor-pianist for theater productions at both Karamu and the Ensemble Theater. He toured with Karamu when its production of ‘Langston’ performed at Lincoln Center in New York City.

He was the featured pianist in Philip Hayes Dean’s biographical play ‘Paul Robeson’.

“I always wanted to do something on a cruise ship, too,” he said, laughing. “Maybe in a next life I’ll be able to do that.”

As if his plate weren’t full enough, Mr. Stuart volunteers at the McGregor Home, a senior living facility near University Circle, playing the piano in their dining hall.

“One of my last adopted mothers is there,” he said. “She was my car mom when I was a boy, driving me home from church. I sit at the piano, start picking up the vibe, and play for her and her friends. It adds some quality to their lives, which is important, because it’s the little things that count.”

The Reverend Marvin McMickle remembers Mr. Stuart doing the same for his mother. “He would take a keyboard into my mother’s room and play the hymns of the church as she lay in her bed in a nursing home. I believe she is looking on from glory today and sharing in his musical celebration.”

Every Wednesday Lavert Stuart plays a prelude, accompanies three hymns, and finishes with a postlude at the Testimony Meeting at the Christian Science Church in Rocky River. Those who stay for the postlude are sometimes treated to his signature piece, the Carillon de Westminster, written for the organ by the French composer Louis Vierne as an embellishment on the chimes played from the clock tower of the Palace of Westminster.

After nearly two-and-a-half score years the minister of music continues to play organs with consummate skill and enthusiasm.

“It all started when I was a teenager and heard it at Mt. Zion. I would go to the library and get records. I loved to hear that sound,” he said.

For many centuries the organ has been known as ‘the king of instruments’.

“There’s something about the sound of the organ. It’s a light unto itself.” 

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.”