Learning about French Culture in Windsor (Canada) and in Detroit at Moliere plays, at the art institute, and other activities with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget
Thanks to my
high school’s French club in Detroit, Michigan, I felt like I made a trip to
France every week for an hour before school started on Wednesday mornings. The Club was open to students who had
completed one year of French with a “B”
or better average.
I was elected Social Chairperson for my ability to come up with activities to
do on a weekly basis. On easy planning
weeks, we would play Milles Bornes™, the French card driving game, and learned
all the vocabulary and insults that went with it. We also played Parlor Games, the French play these at rallyes at home, like 21 Questions, Simon Says, Who am I? and I Spy in Franch.
We went to
see Molière’s (1622 – 1673) Tartruffe with
the third- and fourth-year French class that was performed by the drama department
at Wayne State University. Before going
to see the play, we read the play in French, so we could understand what was being said.
When many of
us became advanced French students, we wrote a play based on Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
and performed it before the junior French classes and the high school’s drama
classes in the school auditorium. I was the lamppost lighter, who chose to light up the world or dim it.
Despite a
heavy homework load, I arranged trips to the Detroit Institute of the Arts (DIA)
to see:
-the Detroit Industry Murals
(1932 – 1933) by Diego Rivera
-Martha and Mary Magdalen (c.1598) and The Fruit Vendor (c.1635 – 1620) by Caravaggio (1571 – 1610)
-The Wedding Dance (1566) by Pieter
Breugel (1520 – 1569), called Breugel the Elder
-The Visitation (1640) by Rembrandt (1606 – 1669)
-Ruisdael’s (1628
– 1682) Jewish Cemetery (1654 -1655),
Canal Scene (late 1640s), and Landscape (1665 – 1668)
-The Nigerian sculpture collection
-The medieval knight armor hall
The DIA had docents at the time from the University of Michigan, who gave tours for free, if you reserved ahead of time.
Going
to museums is a French national sport, so we planned several trips to the
Detroit Institute of the Arts, which we traveled to by city buses. We also visited the Detroit Zoo, the Botanical Garden, and the Aquarium and learned all the French vocabulary to describe what we saw.
Sometimes I
had to stretch my imagination for activities to do like planning a baseball and
picnic outing on Belle Isle. Belle Isle
is an island in the Detroit River between Detroit and Windsor, Canada.
The
island has a French name which reveals Detroit’s French heritage. The name Detroit is derived from D’étroit,
meaning “from narrows," because the Detroit River is indeed narrow.
On other occasions,
I would contact the French consulate in Detroit to get films, posters, maps,
and brochures for our club. We all learned about Loire Valley Châteaux,
Paris, the Côte d’Azur (French Riviera), and Normandy from these films.
We organized
dinner parties at club members’ homes and tried our hands at French onion soup,
crêpes, and tarte tatin (apple, upside-down cake). I was more of a taster than a cook then and
was happy that several French Club members knew how to cook. I am a good French cook now thanks to a lot of practice from both necessity and pleasure.
I liked organizing lunches in French restaurants in
Windsor, Canada for about thirty to thirty-five people usually at a fixed
price.
The restaurants would have us
arrive early and gave us a choice between two main dishes such as roast chicken or ratatouille. We would start the meal with vegetable terrines and French onion soup. Cheese, salad, and
chocolate mousse or ice cream would follow the main dish. Water or sodas accompanied the meal.
Long walks around Windsor followed the meal down Oulette Street to the flower gardens by the Detroit River before boarding the Detroit-Canada bus to go back through the tunnel and our
life in Detroit.
We danced to Jean-Michel Jarre music on the Boblo Ferry Boat as our last club activity before college.
By Ruth
Paget, Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France
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| Ruth Paget Selfie |
Traveling around England, Scotland, and Wales with my mom and great aunt by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget
The British said “River Thames” and not “Thames River” I
noticed as my mother and great-aunt purchased tickets for a boat and bus tour
out of London when I was on a trip with them as an elementary student.
We took a taxi to Maidenhead, where we boarded the tour
boat. We stopped first at Stokes Poges
and visited a church from Anglo-Saxon times called Saint Gilles that was more
than 1,000 years old. My great-aunt and
I smelled the antique roses with many petals, whose perfume seemed all that
much stronger in the misty air.
Back on the boat, we passed an English village, which looked
mysterious due to the foggy mist. This
village called Bray on Thames harbors Michelin four-starred restaurants, but I
was enchanted with Bray, because it looked like the drawings in my fairy tale
books.
Finally, we arrived at Windsor Castle. Windsor Castle was built around 1078 by
William the Conqueror as a fortress high on a chalk cliff over the Thames. As a child, my lasting impression of the place
was of the Queen’s Gardens. After
admiring the flowers, we set out for lunch at the Castle Hotel in Windsor.
After lunch, we took the bus to Runnymede where the Magna
Carta was signed by King John in 1215 to guarantee the rights and property of
barons; American colonists knew of this document and used it as a precedent for the American Constitution.
My maiden name is Ruth Pennington, and three Penningtons signed the Magna Carta. I was pretty happy to learn this later in life when I thought about running for president one day.
From Runnymede we took the bus to Hampton Court. The gardens there are fantastic as well, but
under no condition was I allowed to go into the maze made up of towering Yew
trees.
Earlier in the week, while my mother and great-aunt were
watching the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace from the Victoria Monument, I walked across the street and into Saint James Park. I started counting swans, because the Queen
kept track of them.
When I came back out of the park, the English
policemen were on the scene and the whole tour group was rather agitated. I just laughed at all the commotion and got
back on the tour bus for the rest of the London city tour. I had become a "lost child."
So, my time at Hampton Court was limited to photos in the
garden in my double-breasted, blue coat with brass buttons. My hair was in pony tails, because I had
succeeded in taking down the bun my mother had sent me out into the world with
earlier in the day.
I wanted to see a
castle a day, but I was quickly realizing that the gardens were the true
treasures of the British Isles.
The journal that my great-aunt and mother kept for me of
this trip made me realize that it was my great-aunt, who made me love gardens
so well.
Her handwritten notes about how
much she loved English roses are the best souvenir I have of the wonderful trip
I took to the British Isles many decades ago.
By Ruth Paget - Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France
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| Ruth Paget Selfie |
Learning about Canada's French Culture in Montreal by Ruth Paget
I learned about the vestiges of French exploration and/or
colonization from my high my first French teacher in Detroit, Michigan. She was
from Guadalupe and ran an efficient classroom.
She told us that French was a language of diplomacy,
business, art, cuisine, and fashion to introduce us to the language we would be
studying.
She also gave us expectations
for classroom behavior and homework rules.
She emphasized that if we wanted to go on the spring break trip to
Montreal that we would have to keep our grades up. “Up” meant a “B” or better.
I loved traveling and studied hard to make it onto the train
to Montreal in the province of Quebec, Canada for a week. Instead of taking the tunnel under the
Detroit River to Canada, my mother drove me to Windsor in Ontario over the
Detroit-Canada Bridge, so I could see the Detroit skyline.
As soon as you enter Canada, the signs are in
English and French, signaling a different way of life.
Almost all of the students in my school including me had
been to Windsor, Canada. Windsor offers visitors river front gardens, a great view of
Detroit with John Portman’s (b. 1924) Renaissance Center in the middle of
the skyline, beautiful restaurants, and crystal and china shops galore along
Oulette Street.
Montreal was a cousin to Paris albeit colder, we had learned
in our teacher’s orientation session before we set out on the trip. I thought Montreal must have had massive
traffic jams as it is located on an island where the St. Lawrence and Ottowa
Rivers meet.
Our teacher made sure that
we could order in a restaurant, buy clothes, purchase movie tickets, and get
directions in French before we headed out to Montreal.
Everyone stayed up all night on the train talking with our
friends, telling jokes, and playing logic games like 21 Questions and Who am I?
Upon arrival in Montreal, we loaded our suitcases into a
tour bus and took an all-day city tour, which required several stops and walks
up steep hills. The hills seemed steeper
than they were, because we were tired.
The stop that interested me the most was our visit to St.
Joseph’s Oratory. I had been in Catholic
Churches before, but had never seen a pilgrimage site before. Canes lined the walls along with crutches and
wheelchairs left by people, who had been cured by a visit to the Oratory.
According to the Michelin Guide I read years
later, Brother André, born Alfred Bessette (1845 – 1937) created the devotions
to Saint Joseph at this church that healed ailing pilgrims.
Some of us lit candles and prayed for loved ones.
Our next hilly stop was Parc du Mont Royal which was planned
by the landscape architect Frederic Law Olmstead (1822 – 1903), who had planned
New York’s Central Park.
We drove
through the exclusive Westmount neighborhood to get to the park and took many
photographs of the nineteenth century mansions, which reminded us of Detroit’s
exclusive neighborhoods of Palmer Woods, Indian Village, and Sherwood Forest.
Later in the week, we took another tour bus out to the
Olympic Park built to host the 1976 summer Olympic Games. These games were fresh in our teen minds in
1979. I loved the excitement of sports;
the skier Franz Klammer was my favorite athlete.
We all complained to our French teacher that she had not
arranged for us to go swimming in one of the six pools of the aquatic
complex. I think she might have wanted
to throw all of us into a swimming pool after five days in a youth hostel.
The best part of our trip, though, was getting to spend a
day in a bilingual high school. We
attended algebra, English, and biology classes.
In English, we read parts in a readers’ theatre of part of Shakespeare’s
Macbeth in a Grade 13 class;
Canadians go to school for thirteen years. The algebra and biology classes were taught in French.
I could keep up with the algebra class and was happy,
because I knew that Canadian schools at the time were among some of the best in
the world when using international testing standards.
I also learned from one of the English-speaking teenagers
that she liked studying French, because it reinforced her understanding of
English grammar. I was not entirely sure
of what she meant until I studied French for another year.
When and why to use certain verb tenses
became very clear to me in English as I studied the same verb tenses in French.
When I diagrammed sentences in English class, I knew exactly
what to do with subordinate clauses thanks to studies of French as well. French was my insider secret to doing well in
English class. That secret was the best
souvenir I brought back from Montreal.
By Ruth Paget, Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France
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| Ruth Paget Selfie |
Attending Tea Parties in the US, the British Isles, and the People's Republic of China with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget
“The hors d’oeuvres are for the adults only,” said the
English colleague of my mother, whom she had invited with his wife for tea at our
house.
I, the
eleven-year-old princess, was not going to be denied the liver pâté on crackers
that my mother was serving as part of the tea.
I went into my bedroom to execute my plan.
I immediately began making placards to wear over my chest
and back. I wrote out my message,
attached the placards with a string, and put them over my head.
I took the American flag out of my mother’s closet and
reappeared in the living room. I circled
in front of the coffee table before the English couple with the flag held high
and the message “Equal Rights for Kids” emblazoned in red marker on the
placards.
“You just have to like some children,” the Englishman said
as he was guffawing American-style now.
Victory won, I sat down nicely to enjoy the liver pâté and drink
tannin-rich Red Rose™ tea from Canada that we always drank in my childhood home
in Detroit, Michigan. I willingly fought
for my tea, because I knew that “biscuits” known as “cookies” in America would
soon appear.
Thanks to a trip I took to the British Isles with my mother
and great-aunt when I was seven, I already knew what a tea held in store. On our trip, we visited my grandmother’s
English pen pals, who plied us with cucumber, radish, and butter sandwiches
served on white bread without crusts.
The sandwiches occupied the bottom tier of a three-tiered
tea goodie tray. The smaller tier in the
middle usually held dry yet sweet triangular scone muffins that tasted good
once you dunked them in tea. The very
top and smallest tier held dainty desserts and cookies. As a child, I munched away on cucumber
sandwiches just waiting to get to the top tray.
More than the cookies, though, drinking tea even at the
young age of eleven, conjured up the magic landscapes I had seen in the British
Isles.
I liked standing in the doorways of the stone farmhouses we
stayed in overnight and looking out over the misty, emerald fields with stone fences
of irregular heights separating them. I
always felt like I was dreaming while I was wide awake while looking at this
scenery. Sipping tea helped me recall
that otherworldly feeling.
Tea brought on other feelings in high school when I had the
chance to visit the People’s Republic of China in 1979. At that time, China prided itself as having
an “iron rice bowl” or social security blanket for all.
After reading about the Chinese war for
independence, communes, and the Cultural Revolution, I had a rugged view of the
Chinese, who wore blue Mao jackets.
How surprised I was to find that communists liked
overstuffed furniture covered on the backs with white lace doilies. No matter where we went – train station
reception rooms, hospitals, factories, hotel lobbies – we invariably sat
through presentations and question-and-answer sessions in chairs like these
with a warm cup of tea beside us.
Chinese tea cups offer countless play opportunities, especially
while you are listening to a presentation about how tennis ball production has
improved yearly since the 1939 Revolution.
The mug-sized teacups came with a cover. Every time you would take off the cover, you
would get a cloud of jasmine-scented tea that you could waft toward you. Jasmine tea appeared to be China’s official
function tea.
By Ruth Paget, Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France
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| Ruth Paget Selfie |
Eating Greek Food at Home Parties and Holiday Foods with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget
The pungent, cold odor of lemon and oregano rose from the
calf skull that I carefully held together with the two sides of my “doggie
bag.” The skull was what was left of my
meal of boiled brains in Chicago’s Greek town.
I entered my college dorm at the University of Chicago. I looked over at my Greek-American roommate,
who was peacefully sleeping, and stifled a laugh. I quietly walked over to her bed and put the
skull under her nose, which immediately crinkled.
Her eyes popped open and she let out a shriek. “I told you I’d bring home some Greek food,”
I said as I menaced her with the stinky skull.
My good sport roommate liked my awful sense of humor and
invited me to spend weekends with her family in the Chicago suburbs. I tried some Greek foods in her home that do
not show up on restaurant menus like Thanksgiving turkey stuffed with a mixture
of ground lamb, pine nuts, raisins, and rice.
I discovered that the Greeks use lemons almost like salt when I ate
roasted chicken with potatoes that were bathed in olive oil and lemon
juice. On hot days, we would sit on the
back porch and eat feta cheese along with plump, black Kalamata olives.
Thanks to eating in Detroit’s Greek town as a child, I was
already familiar with Greek foods like pastitio, a baked macaroni dish with
meat sauce that is lightly flavored with cinnamon.
During one of my weekend visits, my roommate’s mother had made
pastitio and none of the kids except me wanted to eat it. They wanted American food. My roommate’s frustrated mother pointed to
two rows of cereal boxes on top of the refrigerator and said, “There’s your
American food.”
“Why do you have so many cereals,” I wondered out loud.
“Mom’s always stocking up for war,” one of kids said, which
made us all laugh.
We were still laughing when my roommate’s mother served us
platefuls of horta, a mixture of boiled dandelion greens, chicory, escarole,
and/or kale generally.
“Keep laughing,” my roommate’s mother chided us. “During the War (World War II), all we had to
eat was the horta we could find on the mountainsides.” I doused the greens with olive oil and
freshly squeezed lemon juice to take away some of the horta’s bitterness.
Luckily, bitter herbs were only part of the Greek menu in
America. Getting ready to pull an all-nighter
of studying to complete term papers or study Japanese characters, I would smile
as my roommate’s mother set out a small pyramid of melamakarona cookies for me
to nibble on during the night. These
cookies are made with butter and dunked in orange-flavored hot honey and topped
off with ground walnuts – very good brain food.
Tables groaning under the weight of melamakarona and other
honey-laden desserts like bakalava featured prominently at all the Greek
community parties I attended with my roommate’s family.
These parties included Greek Independence Day
celebrations, village dances complete with circle dances, and dances organized
under the auspices of the Greek-American youth organizations called the Sons of
Pericles and the Maids of Athena.
Celebrating Greek Orthodox Easter, though, with my
roommate’s family remains my favorite college memory. We attended midnight mass and as we left the
church lit only by candles we said, “Kristos Anesti (Christ is Risen)” and
wished each other “Hronya Pohla (May you have a long life.)” We repeated these greetings when we arrived
at the relative’s house for the midnight meal.
The main dish of this midnight meal is a lemon and scallion
flavored soup made with lamb tripe, lungs, heart, and liver. During the meal, we tapped the ends of our
gleaming red eggs against one another’s eggs to see whose would crack. The person with the last unbroken egg won
them all.
The next day, red eggs showed up again peeking out through
bread lattice-work in the festive round loaves made by all the ladies for
Easter. While we waited for the
spit-roasted lamb to finish cooking in the backyard, we noshed on Greek village
salad, heavy with plenty of cucumbers, purple onions, green peppers, anchovies,
tomatoes, black olives, and feta cheese.
We used bread as if it were another utensil to soak up the
oregano-flavored vinaigrette.
Sitting there balancing plates of this delicious food on my
knees as I talked with the Greek cousins and friends, I thought of how I wanted a life like this, too.
By Ruth Paget - Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France
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| Ruth Paget Selfie |
Trying Russian Cocktail Food in Chicago with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget
“So tell me what glasnost is before we get there,” I said to
my college buddy as we waited to cross one of Chicago’s eight-lane streets on
our way to a cocktail party honoring glasnost.
“Don’t you read the newspaper?” my college buddy asked.
“No, I gave it up when the student subscription ran out,” I
said as we crossed the street fighting the autumn wind and crowds of people
coming from the other side of the street.
“Don’t you watch the news?” my college buddy asked, trying
to keep her little red bow from blowing in her face. I wore a similar bow with my blue suit in an
early 1980s attempt to emulate male neckties at IBM.
“I work too late to see the six o’clock news, and I’m in bed
before the eleven o’clock news,” I responded in the pre-CNN year of 1987.
“How do you keep on top of things,” my college buddy asked
in disbelief. I had gone to a PR briefing on CNN at J. Walter Thompson, advertising agency in Chicago, but I did not watch it.
I laughed and said, “I eavesdrop on conversations.”
“Don’t tell me you haven’t heard anyone talk about glasnost,”
she said.
I pushed my little red bow out of my face that was flapping
in the wind and looked over at her.
“Don’t
pick on me,” I said. “I know glasnost is
Russian, but we’re more into things Asian in my unit at the firm.” We both fit the type of organization types in
our blue suits, even though we had said in college we would never wear these in
college.
We arrived at the restaurant and immediately headed to the
restroom, so we could comb our windblown hair.
“Who’s sponsoring this shindig?” my college buddy asked.
“The invitation said it’s a radio station that has a Russian
political commentator. Maybe they’ll
think we’re potential advertisers and ply us with food and drink,” I gleefully
thought aloud.
“I love your reasoning,” my college buddy responded.
We left the restroom and walked towards the meeting
room. “You never did tell me what
glasnost is.”
“Well, it’s hard to define exactly…” my college buddy
started in.
“Oh really. I thought
you would know since you read the paper and watch the news all the time,” I
said.
“Don’t push it, Ruth.
I could leave you in the dark about it all evening.”
“Oh, come on. I’m
trying to educate myself here,” I said.
“Let’s just say glasnost is about promoting political
openness,” my college buddy said.
“Is that all! It
sounds like Mao’s “Let 100 Flowers Bloom Campaign” that encouraged dissent, so
it was easy to identify critics and jail them later,” I said.
“My, you’ve gotten some mileage out of that degree in Far
Eastern Languages and Civilizations,” my college buddy laughed.
"I know. My relatives asked if I was an expert on Philadelphia, Boston, and Bangor (Maine) when they saw the Far East Languages and Civilizations BA notice I sent out for graduation money," I said.
The radio presenter was giving a presentation when we walked
in the conference room. We headed towards
the food and drink and viewed our first Russian zakuski table. Zakuski in Russian means “little bites” I
learned later.
I had eaten Polish food before, so I recognized the pirozhki
(Russian ravioli stuffed with beef and onions) and the cabbage leaves (stuffed
with ground beef) On the other side of
the table around the outer edge were dishes like beet salad, carrot salad,
radishes in sour cream with scallions, and glass dishes of black and
orange-colored caviar.
Carafes of plain and flavored vodka sat in the center of the
table with shot glasses surrounded by baskets of black rye and white bread.
My college buddy, who was Polish and Lithuanian on one side of her family,
knew about vodka. She poured us some of
the innocent looking potato-based fluid.
“You’re supposed to drink it down in one swallow,” she said. “The fumes are what make you drunk.”
The vodka burned my throat as I contemplated the caviars in
their glass bowls on ice. “I’m not bothering with the potato salad,” I
said. “I’m just going to eat the caviar,
because it’s the most expensive thing here.”
“Have you ever eaten caviar before?” my college buddy asked.
“No, I wonder what you’re supposed to do with it?” I asked.
“We can just drink a bit until we see what everyone else
does,” my college buddy suggested.
After a few more shots of vodka, a few more people did come
and eat the caviar, which had its nuances.
The small, black caviar got eaten with white bread. The orange-hued salmon caviar got eaten with
dark rye bread.
Some people added
chopped raw onions and lemon juice to the orange caviar. I tried both kinds of caviar and liked the
salty squirts of liquid they left on the tongue.
We both continued to generously serve ourselves with regular
vodka. My college buddy finally asked, “Don’t
you think it’s time for our dessert vodkas?”
We had a choice of apricot, cherry, and lemon flavored ones to choose
from.
We could hardly keep up with the serious drinkers around us,
though. I only discovered the historical
saying “Drinking is the Joy of Rus” years later when I worked in a gallery
selling Russian icons among other art objects.
In the tenth century, the Grand Prince Vladimir unified Russia and
wanted to confer a religion on his subjects.
He was ready to accept Islam as the state religion until he found out
that it forbade alcohol consumption.
I thought it was quite neat that I had been able to attend a
glasnost cocktail party without being asked my opinion of glasnost. Towards the end of the evening, though, one
of Chicago’s consul generals (the Greeks do moocher patrol in the Windy City) came up to us and asked if we were journalists,
which made us laugh.
I told him that we had recently graduated from college, and
then asked, “Do you think glasnost is going to have a lasting effect on
politics in the Soviet Union?”
He gave what I am sure was an intelligent response, but I
was having a hard time paying attention.
My college buddy had choked on her vodka, and I was trying not to laugh at her.
By Ruth Paget, Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France
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| Ruth Paget Selfie |
Learning about Scandinavian Culture in Door County (Wisconsin) with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget
I had the chance to visit Wisconsin’s Door County,
located northeast of Milwaukee on a peninsula that juts out into Lake Michigan
with my family when I lived in Wisconsin. Door County is famous
for the fall colors of its trees, and since it was September I naturally wanted
to visit.
When my daughter would want to join the conversation, I
would say, “Tell me when you see cows, too,” so our talk was interspersed with
cow sightings along the way. As for me, I
did not want to miss anything related to gastronomy and worried that I would
miss the fish boil as we passed all the secondary roads we had to take between
Madison and Door County to get there.
We arrived an hour before the fish boil, but that was not
much time to get dressed for dinner. I got
my hotel room key and went to my room in the sprawling complex that made up the
resort. I arrived at the room, inserted
my key, and broke it in half, leaving a piece in the lock. My daughter started crying, because we would
not be able to get into our room.
I called from a hallway courtesy phone and explained my
predicament. The hotel staff person
arrived promptly and told me that I was trying to get into the wrong room. He took me to the right room without
lecturing me. Time to get to the fish
boil was slipping away.
I met my long-suffering car companion downstairs, and we
drove to the restaurant where we met our spouses. The telephone book in our room had a good
explanation of this culinary specialty that put all the essentials in a
nutshell. I have paraphrased and supplemented
the information as follows:
The Legendary Fish Boil
Scandinavian settlers and lumberjacks in Door County
prepared fish steaks with potatoes and onions.
They threw it all in a pot and boiled it over an open fire. Just before serving the fish boil, you throw gasoline
over the fire and let the flames cause some of the stew to boil over . You eat the fish with plenty of melted butter,
a favorite beverage, and cherry pie.
Door County is famous for its cherries.
The next morning my husband, daughter, and I went to the
hotel restaurant for breakfast. We sat
by a window and looked out over the tops of trees that were already turning
orange, red, and golden yellows. I
castigated myself for being such a city girl and not knowing the names of the
trees. I could not take my eyes off the
scenery. I felt very fortunate to see
this spot and understood why so many people from Chicago came here to escape
the big city.
When my daughter and I came back to the room, I made plans
to go into Egg Harbor. Egg Harbor I
discovered is trendy with many of shops selling clothing, crafts, and
souvenirs. There was no historical
museum in town, or maybe I just could not find it. I did get a small brochure at the information
center that described how the town got its name in 1825 in one sentence, which
basically said that there was a fight with eggs between six men on a trading
flotilla.
I was on a quest to buy a guide book about Door County and
its history. I went to a fabulous market
on Main Street. I only had a few minutes
to look around, but a few items caught my eye – big city newspapers in the
doorway, roasted chicken, anchovy paste, a great selection of wines from Europe
and California, freshly baked muffins and breads, and vegetables carefully
displayed in woven baskets. I bought
some postcards of Door County for my journal.
After that I went to several trendy shops. I bought a great, inexpensive book at a store
about the wood stave churches of the world.
Most of these churches are found in Norway, and I hoped I would visit
them someday. Until then, I would soak
up what I could from the little book. I
walked down to the harbor through Harbor View Park. The yachts would soon be stored I thought as
I felt a slight chill in the autumn air.
We returned to the hotel to discuss lunch plans.
I told my husband how great the market was that I found, and
we decided to go buy our lunch there. We
bought a roasted chicken, a pound of pasta salad, a bag of freshly baked wheat
rolls, and a dozen apples. We ordered
dishes for our room from housekeeping and had a feast. My daughter loved the chicken and was
delighted to get the big piece of the wishbone when we pulled it.
After lunch my family took naps while I wrote. When they woke up, we drove to Gill’s
Rock. My daughter played at the rock
beach with her dad. I checked out the
tourist spots. You know you are in
tourist territory in Wisconsin when you can buy plaques with Chicago Bears
insignia on them less than fifty miles from where the Green Bay Packers
rule.
On our return home, we concentrated on playing “Find the
Barn” and “Count the Cows” with my daughter through a forest of blazing fall
colors dotted with farms.My husband left before me to go to a meeting and arranged
for the spouse of one of his colleagues to drive me and my daughter to Door
County. I chatted about raising children
and the fish boil that we were supposed to attend once we arrived.
By Ruth Paget - Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France
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| Ruth Paget Selfie |
