IThe Tuesday lunch group meets at a public house on US-131 just north of town, past the old Methodist encampment of gingerbread Victorian homes called Bayview. It is my favorite thing here in town, the fanciful campus of frame cottages that date to the 1880s. Some have been restored in astonishing detail, all the filigree down up in accented colors. This colony is the archetype of  the Methodist camp movement of the late 19th century. They had a lecture hall and library and tennis courts and a golf course. Things have changed over the years. Temperance was a central tenet of the movement, and those days are long gone. Strong spirits are a major component of life in the Northland, though  increasingly that is only a tangential aspect of the Tuesday Group.

The guys began to gather on Tuesdays originally because that was Ladies Day at the Bayview Club. The women had the course that day, and the men were left to their own devices to find lunch. They settled on The Side-Door Saloon, conveniently located just north of the fence on the 7th hole. The guys are retired, for the most part, though still active in the community. My Dad is a councilman and the Mayor Pro-tem of the City. All the other guys were movers and shakers of one stripe or another, Chief Executive Officers or corporate lawyers or entrepreneurs. They are the sort of men who know what is going on in town. It is a casual group, nothing formal, but Win normally arrives first and sits with his back to the wall. Win is in his mid-80s, a retired lawyer. Astute, though his skin is starting to get the translucent quality of age.

Dad introduced me to Win, we chatted for a moment and then Duke and Dick arrived and slid in across from us at the circular table in the front corner of the restaurant. Dick is a wiry little guy with a tanned and leathery complexion with strikingly youthful blue eyes. Dad told me later he might be in the Michigan Amateur Sports Hall of Fame for some sport involving sticks and balls. He looked like he was a tough customer in his time. Duke is the entrepreneur. He was a big man, still is, and wears big glasses now. You  can sense his vitality. He wore a bright yellow sweater, since it is a bit cool by the bay today. His son runs Petoskey Plastics, and a sort of running joke at the table involved the life-sized plastic statues of The Big Boy that once stood in front of the Elias Brothers hamburger chain all over this state. The figure had a goofy grin and red overalls and jet black hair pommaded into a curly-cue. His right hand was upright, holding a platter of double-deck! er Big Boy sandwiches. Ray Kroc of Macdonald’s appropriated the idea that become the Big Mac. The statues were bolted to the ground, but still were stolen periodically. I mentioned to Duke that I had always wanted one for my living room and he responded dead-pan that he had dozens in his garage, just stop by and pick one up.

I was sandwiched between the Bills, my Dad and a retired corporate lawyer from the University of Michigan. He writes and publishes children’s books in retirement, and recently bought a deer camp over by Rogers City where he repairs for solitude. He has furnished the place with a combination of the Good Will and the WalMart. His wife won’t go near the place, and thus he has his fortress of solitude from a relationship that is over fifty years in the making. Bill made a special effort to keep me in the loop on the conversation, leaning over to me the connect the dots on the shorthand comments of these men who have been joking together for a decade.

Last to arrive was George, a dapper Irishman with swept back silver hair and an easy manner. He was the only one who had a beer with his lunch. It seemed right for an Irishman, and Amy the waitress was all over it. She knew her crowd, who had the pulled pork sandwich, who the burger, who was going light and just having the soup. I asked her about the Chainsaw burger and she said it was good. No fries, though, the Side Door was a little like John Belushi’s joint on the old Saturday Night Life. Just chips and a burger in a basket. George took heat for not being a real citizen, a probable terrorist with the IRA. He said he was an Orangeman, a little indignantly, able to turn his accent on and off at will. He said he was the only one at the table who had a certificate of citizenship and Dick said they all had certificates, too.

Birth certificates.

Amid the banter were the serious topics of this lunch. These  were local crime and war with Iraq. The local cops were embarrassed. They had nabbed a couple who were engaged in a local crime spree, systematically looting summer houses for electronics and stuff to sell. This is an emotional topic for folks who leave their homes to travel south to Florida in the winter. Their latest raid wound up in a probable connection to arson. The police let them go over the weekend to make arrangements for their children while they were in custody. They were to report to jail first thing on Monday. When last heard from, they were in Oregon. The Police tersely announced that they had egg on their face. Dick snorted and said it wasn’t egg. The Group is on top of the local situation.

They asked me about war with Iraq. I told them I had no special insight on the matter, but that to a casual observer it looked like we were going. That might affect my plans to retire next year. They seemed to take the view that war was not an enterprise to be embarked on lightly, and Duke mentioned Vietnam and 58,000 dead for nothing.

There were others who were missing from the table, but whose presence was real. We got the call the night before. “Did you hear?” said the voice from Downstate. “Jack passed away. The memorial is Friday.” I shook my head. The dapper P-40 pilot was gone. I remember his boyish grin and his close-cropped fighter jock dark hair at the lake colony years before. “I’m sorry to hear that” I said to my Dad. “Don’t be” he responded. It was awful at the end. Diapers.” He shook his head, thankful that Jack was free to push the throttle on his Warhawk again.  The service was to be down in Detroit and it looked like it would be too complicated to attend.

A half-hour later I was talking to a friend from Leelanau. She thanked me for the news about Jack and told me to mention that the family was going to hold a memorial for Bruce in mid-September. Bruce had been a neighbor back in Detroit, and a talented artist. The young husbands were all veterans and formed a neighborhood club called The Balloonist Society. The point of the club was to wear odd bits of uniform insignia from Silversteins’s Army-Navy surplus store and drink beer on Saturday nights. Bruce found the suburbs constricting moved his family North to the little paradise of Leelanau a long time ago and had become a local fixture in the art community. My friend mentioned that he was a hero, too. Dad remembered the story, Bruce had told it when my Uncle visited and they chatted on the phone. They were both veterans of the 8th Air Force. Before one mission Bruce had found a new survival harness and tried it on. It had clips affixed to it so that an airman could quickly sn! ap a parachute to the webbing and bail out if necessary.

They were high over Germany and Bruce said he felt a “Whump” in the back of the long aluminum tube of the fuselage. The four engines of the Heavy roared and Bruce turned and clicked a chute to the vest. He was turning to the front when there was another “Whump” and then suddenly it was very quiet and Bruce was alone in the sky, no airplane around him, no crewmates, no sound, no nothing. His buddies were gone in an instant. He pulled the handle and the silk blossomed above him floated down from the sky with the angry black puffs of ack-ack to meet some angry Germans. For him, as they used to say, the War was over. He came back and got on with his life the way everybody else did in those days, but the memories aside except when they came in the depth of the night, always with the wonderment of why. My uncle bailed in March. Bruce bailed last month and Jack pulled the cord this week. It has been a year of departures.

So those that are not present at the table are still very much there. And the Tuesday Group continues to meet at a very comfortable place just north of the fence on the 7th hole at Bayview Country Club. World without end.

Amen.

Copyright 2002 Vic Socotra