Meet Me at Mary’s Place

I got a picture of you in my locket
I keep it close to my heart
A light shining in my breast
Leading me through the dark . . .

The fog outside the window glows in the moments before dawn.  The sun will soon rise, but I won’t be able to see it.  The fog is so thick that the river, 80 yards or so from me, is lost in the mist.  I laid my sleeping bag here last night so I could watch the sunrise through the floor-to-ceiling windows, but now I might as well get up.

Mary Elizabeth Richert (photo by Scott P. Richert)

The cold air draws me out of my slumber as I head for the basement.  I know the sound every stair will make before my foot touches it, though each groans with greater intensity these days, a function of their age and mine.  Grandpa descended these stairs every day to shave and to shower in the downstairs bathroom, even when the years and his hereditary bowleggedness had made it hard to do so.  The two bathrooms upstairs had their uses, but in the morning this one was his.

He designed this house and built it 51 years ago, on 25 acres of the best farmland in the entire Midwest.  Nestled in curves of the Grand River, the soil enriched by centuries of silt, his small farm brought forth a cornucopia of food that fed children and grandchildren nearly every Sunday, and visitors throughout the year, and during harvest time everyone went away not only full but carrying tomatoes and peppers and corn and okra and potatoes and cucumbers and cabbage and green beans—the staples of my grandmother’s table, lovingly canned or frozen and made into pickles and kraut, so that the harvest lasted through the long winters here along the Lake Michigan shore.

Twenty years ago, Grandpa passed away in this house, while taking a nap after one of those meals.  Grandma knew that something was wrong when the snoring that had been the background music of her life for over 60 years finally ceased.  For the next 20 years, she hoped that she too would breathe her last breath in the home they had built together.  In the end, God had different plans.

Last night was the first Jacob had spent at his great-grandparents’ house, and it will likely be our last.  We gather our sleeping bags, stop in the kitchen to make coffee and to sit for a few minutes with my aunt and uncles, then load everything in the car to head back to my parents’ house to prepare for the funeral.  As we wind our way back to Leonard Road, steam still rises from the river, but the sun is burning off the fog.  The sky is as blue as it ever has been; it will be a perfect day for a party.

Familiar faces around me
Laughter fills the air
Your loving grace surrounds me
Everybody’s here . . .

My cousins and I had planned this celebration of Grandma’s life fully expecting her to be here with us.  She always had been; yet eight days before her 100th birthday, and four days before the party, she no longer was.  And now she lies next to Grandpa, in silence this time, awaiting the day when our Lord will tell them both to arise and to join Him in a world made anew.

Back at the farm, cars pull into the pasture, and her children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren and even one great-great-great-grandchild walk the ground that Grandma had trod for 51 years.  Last night, these 25 acres and this house had suddenly seemed small to me.  When I was a child, they were a world unto itself.  I baled hay in these fields and fished in the river, harvested potatoes and sledded down the big hill with my cousins, celebrated birthdays and weddings and anniversaries and funerals, met aunts and uncles and cousins and more distant relatives for the first time.  Some I only ever knew here.

Today, however, this house and these fields no longer seem small, but too big ever to grasp and to hold in memory the way they deserve to be held.  I walk slowly from place to place, from room to room, trying to drink in every detail, so that I can remember it as it is, as it was, and as—I know—it will no longer be.  There’s not enough time.  There never will be, until, God willing, we’re all together again.

We talk for hours, eat the best roast pig my uncle and his sons and grandsons have ever made, and raise glasses of beer until most of the crowd drifts off, the sun disappears from the sky, and the chill creeps back into the air.  Those of us who are left head inside, to sit around the kitchen and dining-room tables as we have so many times before.  It’s an election year, but there are no heated discussions of politics, as there were when I was young.  Only memories.

Time slips away from me, and I have one glass too many.  In the walk-out basement where my grandparents used to retreat from the winter cold and the summer heat, there’s an empty couch facing the windows that look down to the river.  One more night here, and perhaps, tomorrow, one last sunrise.

First published in the November 2012 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

The United States of Generica

The scents of lilacs, fudge, and horse manure mingle to form the distinctive aroma of Mackinac Island in early June.  The tourist season is not yet in full swing; it starts in earnest with the Lilac Festival, the first day of which will be our final day on the island.  A mild winter and an early spring encouraged the lilacs to bloom early; two days before the festival opens, they are already slightly past their peak.  The scent of the fudge will peak about the time the scent of the horses does, in the hottest days of July and August.

When the Grand Hotel first opened its doors on July 10, 1887, July and August were the entire season.  During the summer, life in the cities, as Bob Tagatz, the resident historian, points out, was unbearable.  It wasn’t simply the lack of air conditioning, or a dearth of lilacs and fudge shops to mask the scent of the horses, but the smoke and the heat from the foundries and factories, and, in such railroad hubs as Chicago, the stench of blood and guts from the slaughterhouses.  The railroads had helped to make city life in the summer unpleasant, but they offered relief to those who could afford it.  The Grand Hotel, constructed and owned by the railroads, quickly became the premier destination for the children of the Gilded Age.  The sons and daughters of robber barons and rising Midwestern industrialists spent not two nights, but a full two months on Mackinac Island, the crown jewel of the Great Lakes.

The history of the Grand Hotel is fascinating, from its construction in 93 days through its years as a speakeasy during Prohibition, to 1951, the first year it ever turned a profit, down to today, as it enters its third generation as a family-owned business.  A few days each week, Bob Tagatz regales guests with tales of the past 125 years on one end of the famous porch of the Grand Hotel, the world’s longest at 660 feet.

My wife and I are on Mackinac Island to celebrate our 20th wedding anniversary.  We have been to the island a number of times—we spent two nights at the Chippewa Hotel, down on the harbor, on our honeymoon—but this is only our second stay at the Grand Hotel.  As we had two years ago in September, when we were able to bring our entire family (“infants” 11 and under stay and eat free), we spent much of our three days on the island on the porch, enjoying the breeze and the conversation with each other and with our fellow guests.  When the weather is perfect (as it was every day we were there) the view across the Straits of Mackinac is breathtaking; when the storms roll in and the seas rise, it is even more so, at least for a boy who grew up on the shore of Lake Michigan and who still thrills at the sight of giant ore boats making their way through the darkened straits, guided by the beacons of lighthouses that are more than romantic relics of a distant past.

When I was a boy, summer lasted forever; now, it is over in the blink of an eye.  This is not simply a function of age; our three days at the Grand Hotel feel more like ten, and an entire summer season, back in the late 19th or early 20th centuries, must have seemed like a year in itself, to young and old alike.

The porch of the Grand Hotel has a civilizing effect on its guests.  The occasional cellphone or iPad makes its appearance, but laptops are few and far between, and newspapers and books are more than decoration for the tables placed between the rockers.  People who have built houses without porches will sit contentedly for hours, holding the kinds of conversations with strangers that their grandparents once held with their neighbors.

Bob Tagatz’s most amusing tales concern the activities that various social directors at the hotel dreamed up to keep their guests occupied, and the Grand still provides a full slate of activities.  But many are looking for what Amy and I have come here to find—not exactly peace and quiet, because a hotel this size is always brimming with life (and there is always live music playing somewhere in the Grand), but an atmosphere that acknowledges, contrary to what even Christian authors tell us today, that life isn’t all about the journey: The destination matters, too.

Much of Europe shuts down for the entire month of August; this, some Americans remark with scorn, is what separates us from our European cousins.  They are correct, but not in the way they think.  With all of our “labor-saving” technology, we work more hours than ever before, and we fill up what little leisure is left with premeasured entertainment that keeps us constantly aware of the passage of time.  When I was a boy, summer lasted forever; now, it is over in the blink of an eye.  This is not simply a function of age; our three days at the Grand Hotel feel more like ten, and an entire summer season, back in the late 19th or early 20th centuries, must have seemed like a year in itself, to young and old alike.

But back in what Bob Tagatz calls “the United States of Generica,” time rushes on.  And to what end?  To work all year, and to pile up debt, to fill our lives with Chinese-made contraptions that soon will clutter landfills, and our bodies with fast food that will preserve us in our early graves.  All of this seems self-evidently right to most Genericans today; yet to work all year to spend a month on Mackinac Island would be dismissed as the height of frivolity.

Such thoughts, however, belong to a different day.  For now, on the porch, time slows to a crawl.  

First published in the August 2012 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

A Good and Faithful Servant

Pete MacKay. (Photo by Scott P. Richert)

“MacKay.”  I struggled for some time with how to render those six letters, in a vain attempt to convey some sense of what it was like to hear Pete pick up the other end of the phone line.  I could never do justice to the experience.  Somehow, Pete managed to stretch the two short syllables of his last name out over several seconds and to turn them into a summary of his whole being: from the low and humble muh to the crescendoing kAY, following by the falling Ay, which the person making the phone call might have mistaken for a syllable in itself, had he not known better.

His was a voice so deep and rich and, outside of the Winnebago County Board meeting room and other political venues, so soft-spoken that it was sometimes hard for me to make out what Pete was saying over the phone.  But I never had any trouble understanding his name.  If a man’s word is his bond, Pete’s family name was his honor.

Peter M. MacKay passed into eternal life on December 13, 2011, at the age of 78.  He was among the last of a certain generation of public servants—no politician, Pete—who were born early enough to remember the hardships of the Great Depression and the sacrifices of World War II, but late enough to come of age during the middle of the “American Century.”  Those experiences helped make him the man that he was: Frugal and patriotic were among the words that always sprang to mind when Pete’s name was mentioned.

There were other words as well: principled and loyal chief among them.  At Pete’s funeral on December 17 at Saint Edward’s Catholic Church in southeast Rockford, Frank Manzullo, one of Pete’s two oldest friends and brother of longtime U.S. Rep. Don Manzullo, read a letter that he had written to Pete during the final hours of Pete’s life.  (He wrote the last sentences after learning that Pete had passed away.)  In it, Frank recalled Pete’s first heart attack, on a day when Frank and Don were supposed to have dinner with then Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich.  Instead, Frank was there at the hospital when Pete arrived by ambulance, because, he said, “You taught me the value of loyalty.”

Pete was the kind of man who inspired loyalty, because he was so loyal himself.  First elected to the Winnebago County Board in 1978, he served his district until 2009, with only one interruption.  The voters of his district—even those who didn’t entirely agree with him—trusted Pete because they knew where he stood.  Too often politicians convince themselves that they need guile in order to advance their principles, and eventually end up full of guile and devoid of principle; but there was no guile in Pete MacKay.  He knew what he believed; he told the voters what he believed; and he voted his conscience, every single time.

Pete still believed in the Old America, and no amount of fancy talk could convince him that the country he knew and loved, at least as he knew and loved her, was gone for good.

With his handlebar mustache and his increasingly white beard, Pete looked like a man out of time—and, in a sense, he was.  He still believed in the Old America, and no amount of fancy talk could convince him that the country he knew and loved, at least as he knew and loved her, was gone for good.  For Pete, the Constitution didn’t require interpretation; it was perfectly clear, and anyone who couldn’t see that didn’t want to see it.  Not without reason was Pete occasionally called Winnebago County’s Ron Paul, and, indeed, Ron Paul was the public servant he admired the most (followed closely by Ronald Reagan).

But if he was a man out of time, Pete was never a man out of place.  He was born in Rockford and lived here all of his life, with the exception of a stint in the Army (where he rose to the rank of drill sergeant) and a few years as a police officer in Chicago.  Other local elected officials (especially Pete’s bête noire Kris Cohn) saw their offices as stepping stones to something greater.  But Pete was happy right where he was.  For him, politics wasn’t about promoting Pete MacKay; it was about advancing policies in the best interests of his constituents.

Pete wasn’t just the first winner of The Rockford Institute’s Good and Faithful Servant Award; he was the man for whom we created it.  The event caused a bit of a stir, because between the time that we had notified Pete of our desire to honor him with the award and the public announcement of the same, Pete had decided to jump into the Republican primary for Winnebago County Board chairman, in an attempt to unseat the incumbent Republican holder of the office, Kris Cohn.  A number of local dignitaries declined to attend the award ceremony, or even to send a note of congratulations to be read, ostensibly because they thought The Rockford Institute was trying to influence the race.  The chain of events was proof enough that we weren’t, though after Pete’s announcement, Aaron Wolf and I (in a personal capacity) worked hard on his campaign.  Though Pete lost (and by a fairly large margin), I never had so much fun working on an election.  Pete was a signmaker by trade (he took over his father’s business), and the one minor transgression of the law that he was willing to tolerate concerned the placement of campaign signs.  The night that a few shadowy figures nailed a four-foot by eight-foot MacKay yard sign to the wooden fence of a restaurant frequented by Kris Cohn and her cronies has become the stuff of legend.  The sign stayed up almost until the day of the primary, because Cohn and the other professional politicians approached the restaurant from the north—the side closest to the county administration building—while the sign was on a fence to the south side of the restaurant, a direction from which only normal people would approach.

The night that a few shadowy figures nailed a four-foot by eight-foot MacKay yard sign to the wooden fence of a restaurant frequented by Kris Cohn and her cronies has become the stuff of legend.

During his campaign for county-board chairman, Pete trusted me to write the text of his radio commercials, and a small band of happy warriors who have appeared in this column over the years, including Aaron Wolf, Mark Dahlgren, Mary Hitchcock, Ward Sterett, and Art Johnson, recorded them.  Pete insisted, though, on ending each with his own tagline: “I’m Pete MacKay, and when I’m elected county board chairman, I’ll drive my own car.”

Writers’ memories aren’t always the most reliable, because over time we tend to remake events as they should have been rather than exactly as they were, a tendency exaggerated when writing about Pete because his personality lent itself so easily to mythmaking.  Still, if Pete didn’t flub one of the takes of that tagline by saying, “ . . . I’ll drive my own damn car,” he should have.  The fact that the county provided Chairman Cohn with a tricked-out SUV was, for Pete, the perfect symbol of the corruption that had led to the creation of a separate elected county-board chairmanship to begin with.  (Most other county boards in Illinois elect their chairman from among the members of the board.)

Many years before, when the position was first created, Pete gave the voters of Winnebago County one last chance to undo the damage, by running for county-board chairman on a platform of abolishing the office as soon as he was sworn in.  Alas, after Pete lost that race, everything he predicted came true: County government (and, consequently, county taxes) increased dramatically under the elected county-board chairman, and the residents of Winnebago County lost a number of their freedoms—and too many lost their property, as the county (especially in the Kris Cohn years) aggressively used an especially virulent form of eminent domain known as “Quick Take” to pursue unnecessary public projects.

Pete was a man of few regrets.  The stupidity and mendacity of local politicians angered him, and he was disappointed when the voters rejected his attempts to do what he knew to be right on their behalf, but as much as he liked to recount the stories of past defeats (and occasional victories) Pete saw no sense in complaining about things that could not be undone.  He focused instead on what he could do, which led him, in the last phase of his public life, to combine his service on the county board with two terms as Rockford Township Highway Commissioner, where he lowered the road tax levy for four years straight, while providing the same level of service.

That Pete endorsed candidates he believed in regardless of party affiliation had always annoyed many local Republicans; that they supported a Democrat they did not believe in just to defeat Pete tells you everything you need to know about their commitment to principle and party loyalty.

Pete’s example of efficient local government was not appreciated by other local politicians, especially his fellow Republicans, who, in January 2009, while Pete’s beloved wife Rosie lay dying of cancer, held a caucus rather than a primary in order to try to deprive him of the Republican nomination for highway commissioner.  Even though Pete wasn’t at the caucus, his old friend Frank Manzullo placed his name in nomination, and Pete emerged victorious, on the saddest day of his life: Rosie had passed away while the caucus was taking place.

Foiled briefly, those same Republicans quietly threw their support behind the Democratic candidate in the general election, and Pete suffered his final defeat.  That Pete endorsed candidates he believed in regardless of party affiliation had always annoyed many local Republicans; that they supported a Democrat they did not believe in just to defeat Pete tells you everything you need to know about their commitment to principle and party loyalty.

The few things Pete did regret were those over which he had had some control.  He and Rosie had dated in the 1960’s, but they drifted apart only to reconnect in 1978 and get married in 1980.  They had two daughters, Margo and Meredith, in rapid succession (13 months apart), but age prevented them from expanding their family further.  Every time we spoke, no matter how recently we had previously talked, Pete asked about my children, and told me how blessed Amy and I were to have had such a large brood.  Similarly, when he finally entered Rosie’s Catholic Church in the last years of her life and they had their marriage blessed, his only regret was that he had waited so long.  He embraced the Faith with a joy reminiscent of St. John Chrysostom’s Easter Homily: “For the Lord, who is jealous of his honor, will accept the last even as the first.  He giveth rest unto him who cometh at the eleventh hour, even as unto him who hath wrought from the first hour.”

Well done, Pete, thou good and faithful servant.  May God grant you eternal rest. 

First published in the February 2012 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.