Every Tuesday night they have a little concert in Grand Haven’s Central Park. It used to be a few older people sitting around in folding chairs and maybe a couple hippie kids. Then some Juice Box Mom got tired of laying on a bunch of mattresses with an annoying pea poking her spine and she decided it would be campy to hang out down at the park with her perfect children. Okay, that’s still cool.
But now they started dragging the husbands down too. But that’s not the unbelievable part, they had to step it up a notch…they eat salads. I’m not kidding, Q and I were down there after our bike ride to the beach and there were couples sitting on blankets, a picnic basket beside them, and they were eating salads. Not just one couple, lots. I wanted to hide Q’s eyes, a sight like that could send him spinning in a direction that rarely ends in a football scholarship.
There was one guy sitting there with his wife and we made eye contact. He was sitting on a chair and the chair was on a blanket (thaaaaat’s normal), he had a Tupperware bowl on his lap (knees and ankles together) and he was pouring some home-made dressing on his salad. It wasn’t even manly iceberg lettuce; it was that dark green crap that women pretend to like. If he’d been pouring French dressing from a Kraft bottle onto iceberg I might have cut him a little slack but I felt like saying “Excuse me sir, I think I just saw your left testicle roll over by the bike rack.”
His wife was sitting next to him beaming like “Look, ladies, I’m eating salad in a park with my husband!” while he just looked at me like a beaten dog. I think he may have blinked “Please kill me” in Morse code.
And somewhere between those two worlds, the world of dirty nails, Keystone Light and back hair and the world of company towels, crossover cars, and sun tea lays normalcy. The pendulum swinging between Grand Haven and Muskegon reaches extremes at the end, it’s only when the bob is straight down that normalcy occurs. One side has the bikers, one side has the parade dads, and for two weekends every summer that’s a wide gap to…bridge.
Coast Guard Schmorshguard
By Tracy K. Lorenz
Walking around and taking notes before the Coast Guard festival…
Teenage girls never look happy, this unhappiness is tripled at a carnival. I was walking around the Coast Guard Festival carnival and this was the typical scene: Four girls would be doing the buffalo stance, slack jawed, one girl would have a phone pressed to her head but wouldn’t be talking. A tear would appear, the phone would hang up, and the girls would walk very fast to a different location, “phone girl” in front, following girls in descending order of hotness.
I swear that every single person in Grand Haven wears flip-flops, I don’t even know why we have shoe stores, it’s like I’m living in Hanoi.
One of the added benefits of living near downtown GH is some of the bands and dance troops practice day and night at the church parking lot near my house. Two nights ago I got to hear “Hi Ho, Hi Ho, it’s off to work we go” blasted through speakers carried in the back of a pick-up truck. Last night it was some marching band playing ten seconds of a song followed by a whistle and then yelling followed by small bursts of drum-fire. It seems drummers just cannot not drum. This morning I woke up to the sound of bagpipes. No one, ever, should wake up to bagpipes.
To me, bagpipes are like lobsters; someone had to be the first to look at a lobster and think “Hmmm, I’d like to eat that.” Someone had to be the first to put a flute in a sheep’s bladder, hear the resulting screech and think “Hey, I might be onto something here…”
He was wrong.
Same goes for the banjo.
I’m still amazed by people who have the guts to come into town three days before the parade and stake off another persons yard. Then again I’m still amazed that people go to parades.
There’s also a craft show going on. It would appear that over weight women are more attracted to craft shows than skinny women. This doesn’t make for ease of movement through the aisles.
It’s also apparent that overweight women have no clue what’s going on in any direction except straight ahead.
“Wooden cut-out Garden statues” are to art what the president inviting a cop and a race baiter to have a beer at the white house is to diplomacy.
If you didn’t know better, “sun stroke” sounds like it would be a nice thing.
How long before the Discovery Channel puts out a show about Carnies? “Deadliest Dart!” “Man vs. the Rope Ladder”, “Cash Flab”. Maybe once a year they could have “Tooth Week”.
In the carnival food hierarchy, the snow cone is dead last.
But lemonade is the biggest gyp.
Driver’s Training
By Tracy K. Lorenz
I passed a drivers training car today on the way into work and was impressed by the young lady driver. Her hands at a steady ten and two, eyes straight ahead, speed constant in the right hand lane; and I thought to myself “That’ll last about fifteen seconds after she gets her license.”
When I was a kid my drivers training lasted one day, the classroom part anyway. At Catholic Central they had some deal where if you played a fall sport you could take drivers training in the winter so you wouldn’t miss any summer practices. There was sort of a hand-shake agreement between the school and the parents that basically said “We (the school) will sign the papers saying that little rat-boy completed drivers training, but you (Dad) have to actually teach him how to drive.”
So I went to my one-day class and the football coach/driver’s training teacher gave us the written exam. It was a multiple-choice test that the coach decided to read out loud which made it much easier for him to give us the answers as a group. He’d read the question and then whisper the wrong answers and say the right answer really loudly like, “A, B, C, or D.” It didn’t take long to crack the code. Everyone passed with flying colors.
The driving part was a little different. We learned by basically being a delivery service. The coach would throw us in the car and one guy would drive him to Jones Sporting Goods to pick up bats and one guy would drive him back. No traffic cones, no parallel parking; it was a pretty low-stress gig. It was cool that the coach was taking it easyon us, an act that turned out to be ephemeral at best.
“The turn” was blamed on a young woman named Leslie. I don’t remember Leslie’s last name because she was a year older than I. I do remember she was a cross-country star and I remember her nickname was “Leadfoot.” NOBODY wanted to ride with Leadfoot Leslie. She got her name because she lacked the ability to push a pedal part way. If she wasn’t standing on the gas, she was standing on the brake. I rode with Leadfoot one time and I ended up taking off my seatbelt and lying on the floor in the back seat figuring that was the safest place to be at impact, honest to God. The girl was worse than Mr. McGoo.
So one day the teacher said, “Go,” and Leslie drove directly into a telephone pole in the parking lot. That’s when the crackdown began. Each student would be given one death defying maneuver to prove his driving ability prior to getting our certificate.
On “highway day” the driver had to drive to Grand Rapids, head south on US 31, exit onto 196, frogger across four lanes of highway traffic and then take the Ottawa Street exit heading south. From the time you entered
