By Scott Sullivan
Editor
Energy
Twenty-four hours is a long time to stay alert riding tandem bike loops around Belle Isle. Sights, other bikers, spinning wheels, meal stops, varied becomes familiar. My friends’ crash convinced them this day and night’s ride was over.
Mitchell, by his accounts a Kansas inventor’s son who ran off, joined a carnival, then the Coast Guard, lit briefly in Muskegon where I met him while editing my first post-college paper. Karen was older, ex- of a charismatic lawyer who with three others read Shaw’s “Don Juan in Hell” onstage in the art museum auditorium.
That and Hackley Public Library, a pink syenite granite castle next door downtown, were my word and camera hangouts. There was music too. Breakoff West Shore Symphony artists presented 12-tone works by Schoenberg, Webern, Berg also in the museum basement. The Frauenthal Center hosted full orchestral works including one show for which I lucked into front-row seats to hear mezzo-soprano Jessye Norman return to paint the hall’s ample acoustic corners and, even better, the WSSO rip through Bartok’s “Miraculous Mandarin” with control, energy, abandon.
The lawyer’s new wife Stella Hipkiss with English teacher Bev Turner started a Great Books Discussion Group of which I was the youngest member that met every other Saturday morning in the library to enact our version of Mortimer Adler’s prescribed and sometimes-adhered-to shared inquiry. Homer, Greek playwrights and philosophers, The Old Testament, Shakespeare, the Dead White Men’s canon, semi-systematically we worked through it. Some of us spun off exploring more-recent fiction: Flannery O’Connor (for whom my wife years later named our daughter), Joyce, Kafka, Ibsen, we moved it around. Writers groups? Those too; we’d do exercises, read results to each other aloud. There seemed urgency in those years.
My veterinarian friend/sometimes consort Kay and I launched a Muskegon Lyceum that held free downtown confabs on topics like near-death experiences, really? Judge Fred Grimm pitched his views on Swiss-American psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s studies challenged by Shirley Rapoport.
Alice Walker’s novel “The Color Purple” soon to be made a 1985 Steven Spielberg film with Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey was a big thing then. Kay wanted to do a session on that; I didn’t think the book was so good but we did. I stressed her out with my “young soul” energy; our anxieties clashed but we were grateful most times for each other’s company.
Then came fairer accomplices. “The Blue Light” about a laundromat and change machine came out and caught it, I thought. Repeat, reveal. Blue light on Lake Michigan, Blue Star on highway later.
Ring as a noun means circle, as a verb to surround. The road ringing Belle Isle squares Sunset Point, but a tandem wheelbase turns differently than a mono. We loaded the broken bike in a van and beat it back west through the Motor City to Muskegon.
There to here. Kay had been an equestrienne as a girl, as a vet treated racetrack horses. She didn’t like what was done to them nor developers’ dreams for what became Great Lakes Downs, a 5/6-mile parimutuel harness track southeast of town I went to once with Keith Kohnhorst. He walked with a cane and came into my office with a piece about freeing snow clogs from car wheels were the kicks he got. Tepid ecstasy I agreed.
We studied forms, placed bets, bought a beverage and watched trotters pull drivers snapping whips from atop their sulkies in bleachers enclosed behind large glass windows.
Keith went back to snowless LA, his mother Lucille stayed in North Muskegon and had me to dinner. Don’t proselytize me I said and she didn’t.
Kay had grown up in Fredericksburg, Pennsylvania Dutch country northeast of Harrisburg. I stayed with her mom Mary Grimes, same name as a character in Joyce’s “The Dead”: “Now, Mary Grimes, if I don’t take it, make me take it, for I feel I want it …” en route the first time I drove solo to visit New York City, Boston, Washington.
New York was faster than even Philly, from which Kay had fled a career and husband — relentless, on always, exhilarating. You could circle the world in a block, then on to the next one. I’d collapse in my Lexington Hotel efficiency with deli food to slow down and sort things.
Back home a tanning booths advertiser had added a sensory-deprivation tank which I tried and then wrote, “In Muskegon a sensory-deprivation tank is redundant.”
All my lines went round; I knew something must be new.
To be continued