Candyman

Those who know me best have seen me a little off my game lately. A host of challenges (from a failed job search to a crappy performance review, with plenty more from the Department of Mediocrity) have managed to put a wobble in my gait.

But as everyone knows, it's tough to love the weak.

Snapping out begins now.

Leave it to a perfect stranger to help that process along.

Tonight I came home to this:

This isn't just any garden variety piňata. It's from Dulcelandia, a Willie Wonka-like storefront about a quarter-mile west on Fullerton, where every manner of candy--from wax lips to candy dots to pixie sticks--are sold brazenly, with no regard for toothbrushes or the advent of fluoridated water. Did you know there's a specific product called "piňata pack" that's filled with starlight mints and laffy taffy, meant to withstand several blows from a kitchen broom? It's made in Columbia but distributed out of Candy Works right here in Chicago, Illlinois.

The best piňatas are also filled with toys, so this one comes with a bag of party favors, including a yo yo, a tiny pack labeled "ojos de plasticos con dulce (plastic eyes with candy)" and an inexplicable plastic carrot, as if to add an exclamation point to this bold burlesque of healthy eating.

By all rights, I should probably hate this thing. I've just spent the last three years studying food deserts and how they disproportionately affect poor neighborhoods, where kids are left with sugary sweets and greasy fries in place of real nutrition.

But I don't. I love this piňata with all my heart. No just for its hot-pink crepe paper torso and shiny silver points. Not just for the way it will sway back and forth at our neighborhood block party three short weeks from now. But because Jason, a hard-partying guy I met the other night while collecting signatures in support of the party -- a guy who's rented an apartment just five buildings away for the last seven years, but who I've literally never seen before; a guy who probably will be working the day of the party, but still got on his cell phone to call a couple of neighbors out to sign the petition; a guy who boldly admits he never wants kids but was itching to make a contribution to the effort -- went over to Dulcelandia the day after we met, bought this piňata and all its trimmings, and dropped it off at my house so the kids on this block would have something to look forward to.

I challenge anyone to stay in a lousy mood after that. In some ways, it's the kind of block we live on. Not all the time, mind you. You may recall some gang- and drug-related homicides in the last six months, for example. But we also have people like Jason, our resident

Boo Radley, who makes a promise and keeps it, and seems to know exactly what a gigantic pink piňata left on a porch can do for deflated spirits. If you're around on Saturday, August 23, feel free to come by and try your hand with a whacking stick.

Beating the Heat

We've had a long stretch of sweltering weather lately -- no real surprise for late July, of course, so it's hard to complain. But it's also hard to absorb day after day. Everything in the yard is just, I don't know, droopy. And I'm afraid I'm no exception.

A few years ago we discovered the single best antidote to summer's malaise: real fruit Italian ice ordered window-side. There's no shop to pop into, no public restroom. Just a single person usually reading a book behind the screen, waiting for some overheated citizen to pop over and order up a coconut and papaya, pineapple and lemon, or my standard, raspberry and lime.

You can sit on one of two park benches positioned in the parkway outside. The benches face the building, which is adorned with the handmade birdhouses you see above. And it's suddenly easy to forget there's traffic speeding by or blistering heat beyond the shade.

And speaking of gardening . . .

Columbine is the perfect perennial for the horticulturally-challenged, like myself. It grows like a weed, and soon enough its leafy clusters have taken over the entire yard. There are certainly worse problems to have (like when the trumpet vines take over the yard, which is another quagmire altogether).

You can almost see all of evolutionary history in this columbine's petals. From dinosaur to chicken, it's all right there. My apologies to the half-pints, because I'm starting to think what's happening in this photo may be downright PG-13.

First Harvest

My mother gardened like a pro when my sister and I were kids. Put us in a horrible company town 25 miles from the nearest school, with unpaved roads, party-line telephones, thieving neighbors, and frogs everywhere, and what does my mother do but put in a gorgeous rock garden that may have been the one good thing to take root in that murky geographic and psychic goo.

A few years later, we found ourselves in a better place, on a half acre across the street from a small but lively horse farm. My mother tilled that soil till the nutrients came up from the bottom. She fed us and the neighbors for pretty much four summers straight: tomatoes, peppers, zucchini, pumpkins, and buttery lettuce like you wouldn't believe. But this was always something my mother did, with her farming roots and bachelor's degree in home economics. Anything she touched seemed to bear fruit.

Not so much with me, unless you count the weeds that invaded our yard the first three years we were here. So imagine my surprise when I tucked a few zucchini seeds into our new deck planter last summer, and some little green shoots started to peek up through the soil. It wasn't long before prehistoric-looking leaves subsumed the entire bed (sorry, sweet nasturtiums and wild coreopsis), and we actually found ourselves with a yield! A real live yield we grilled in a basket on our mini Weber. Carmelized like molasses.

Our deck adores zucchini, I realized, and back went the seeds for year #2.

The first two beauties of the season are pictured at the top of this post, and at the risk of summoning one of those film strips that shows the progression of mooing cow to delicious ribeye, I'll share my zukes' evolution from stalk to plate, just about an hour ago. Here's hoping your dinner was as tasty as mine.

Sunday in the Park

Try to spell the name of the park nearest our house -- Kosciuszko -- and you'll understand why it goes by the nickname "Koz." Here was the scene today as John and I took a breather with our softball and gloves.

Kids on the playground, or exhausted from the playground:

Vendors doing a brisk business selling coconut ice, sliced cucumbers, or chicharrones:

And a girls' soccer match that reminded me of my days as the star fullback of our 4th-grade team (Saul's Saints; we had one win that year). These girls would have made quick work of me blindfolded:

Koz is an underfunded park that, until recently, had no nets on the basketball hoops and sagging ones on the tennis courts. Thanks to the people who live in these pictures, the City is reinvesting resources and making Koz a nerve center again: the kind of place you want to go to play on the swings, grab an elote, or watch a soccer game that makes you glad you're not a fullback anymore.

Day 8: Powered by the Finish Line

If this were Day 2, we would have been doomed.

Day 2: Wiscasset to Brunswick, via Bath (24 miles)

The word of the day was pain. My right knee hurt when I woke up but got steadily worse with each passing hill, grinding on inclines more than 7 or 8%. Hills I could have taken blindfolded yesterday proved to be endurance tests beyond, well, endurance. There were tears and gritted teeth, plus a demoralizing moment when, for the first time, I had to alight the bike on nothing more than a bunny hill and walk it up to the top. The joy that's greeted us around every corner -- because it might be a lovely town or glassy body of water -- today felt like an adversary. The agony of defeat.

John was a trooper, staying slow behind me and offering words of encouragement when I came close to falling apart. The roads, though, were kind and forgiving. And a brief junket to beautiful Bath (the perfect town to picture living in for a good long stretch, if not for the missing bike shop) let us rest our aching bones, grab some locally-roasted coffee, and get directions from the two angels of the natural food store, who seemed to read my mind, and body, in suggesting a flat if roundabout route into Brunswick.

This was the same road we'd learned about from that second cyclist stopped by Boston Bob the day before. I ran into him outside of Red's Eats and he tipped me off to a great bike path that wasn't on our map. A merciful thing, because it was a paved, traffic-free, and relatively even stretch that, best of all, spit us out right in front of Frosty's donut shop in the heart of downtown Brunswick, Maine!

Brunswick came up quickly and caught me by surprise, and by the time we pulled into the Sea Dog brewery for a victory beer, I was overcome by emotion in a way that also surprised me, and I blubbered like a baby . . . for our 325 miles in eight perfect days, for the 40+ mile/day average distance, for the agonizing knee pain that burned now even on the downhills; for all the majestic views, great nights' sleep, and kindness of strangers; for the way my 42-year-old body rose to an occasion I never even envisioned doing, much less doing well; for the reliability of my trusty Bianchi (thanks to Kevin at Boulevard Bikes for handpicking my perfect steed); but mostly for the way a trip John and I knew could go either way -- we could get along famously or drive each other over a cliff -- felt so fully like a partnership, like such a peaceful and productive collaboration, that we fantasized about just chucking it all: the jobs, the house, the urban living, and just going until our resources ran out.

Alas, one key resource -- a healthy body -- had its number come up today. But even that cup was over half full. If this had happened Day 2 or even Day 6, there would have been the deflated call to my parents to come pick my sorry ass up off the asphalt. As it is now, we'll ride triumphantly, if painfully, into their driveway, and they'll welcome us with open arms and eager ears. Our good fortune continues to shine.Now, sadly, the real world begins to encroach. There are at least five televisions on in this restaurant, and we've learned despite trying to block them out the recent baseball scores, political scandals, and weather reports. Back at the house the internet will offer its temptations (I should really clean out that inbox before it's even more full of spam). Our cell phones will come out of roaming and we'll probably balance our checkbooks.

But for eight much-too-brief days, all of that was irrelevant, and we were just bodies with machines, and bodies as machines. This is as important, I think, as flexing the mind. I only hope this time next summer, we may be sitting in a place not unlike this one, recounting another ride.

Day 7: Powered by Ibuprofen

Pain is the enemy of miles. Thankfully today was a short one.

Day 7: Pemaquid to Wiscasset, via Damariscotta (32.75 miles)

Waking up to the sun after a good night's sleep. But also a bit of an allergic reaction -- bottom lip swelled up like a plastic-surgery mishap. Probably from all the Deet. (Deet, our love affair may be over, alas).

My legs seem to be operating at full capacity again, but my right knee is screaming from what's probably a repetitive stress issue finally catching up with me. John made a quick adjustment to my seat, so hopefully that'll do the trick. Either way I'm loading up on ibuprofen. Just two more days between here and the finish line; I refuse to give up so close to the end.

After a tasty breakfast sandwich at New Harbor's Cupboard Cafe, we rolled into Damariscotta, a vibrant town with a great independent bookstore and adjacent coffee shop. We ordered two walkaround mochas for a quick jaunt through Main Street. Then, it was on to Wiscasset.

We were about four miles out of town when a septuagenarian on a moped flagged us over to the side of the road. He introduced himself as Boston Bob and said he'd biked most of the country. He loved biking and all who biked, he said. He was upset we hadn't come through the day before because he would have insisted we stay at his place, leaving me quietly relieved we hadn't come through a day earlier, though I'm sure it would have made a great story. After we mentioned we were from Chicago, he told a convoluted story about a friend of a friend's son, or maybe his own son-in-law (we lost track), who turned out to be Arne Duncan, CEO of the Chicago Public Schools. Boston Bob insists that if Obama is elected, Duncan will be Secretary of Education, mark his words. As a parting gift, he handed us what may be our oddest but most coveted souvenir of the trip: a poem plunked out on a manual typewriter that morning (but dated the following day), about being a "Mainer" as opposed to a tourist, and watching the world from "inside the windows" -- curious claims from a guy who calls himself Boston Bob, but he was a wonderful kook and it was worth the stop. We were silently grateful for the next cyclist who scaled that hill, though, since Boston Bob called him over and gave us the opening to say our fond but slightly overdue good-byes.

Wiscasset's Main Street is also Rt. 1, so traffic roars through the center of an otherwise quaint downtown. It also makes for some tough crossing to Red's Eats, home of the purportedly best lobster rolls in the country. A PBS documentary about the history of the sandwich actually featured Red's some years ago. Sadly, the actual Red, who'd run the place since the 1950s, died just over a week ago. Red's passing doesn't seem to have affected the length of the lines, though. A couple of regulars ahead of us said they're as long as they've ever been.

After more than an hour snaking our way up the side path to the tiny ordering counter, I had one of the deservedly hailed lobster rolls -- just cold pulled lobster on a grilled roll, melted butter on the side, no mayo. They even had a grilled cheese and some thick-cut onion rings for John. I doubt I could hold a job if I lived in Wiscasset; I'd spend an hour in that line everyday if that sandwich was on the other side of it.

Fat and happy, we cycled our way to the Chewonki campgrounds, on the Chewonki Neck peninsula. This was just a tiny triangle on our map but ended up being the most beautiful and well-maintained camping facility either of us has ever seen. It's on a strange road that shoots off Rt. 1, and the approach is dotted by a bunch of light-industrial operations, including a small airport where prop planes take off and land all day, directly over the camp (which is actually pretty cool).

You can imagine our surprise then to turn the corner and find a lush, green, hilly campground, with saltwater marshes, flocks of wild turkeys, and two adirondack chairs at the top of a hill for gazing out over the full expanse of it. They also had tennis courts and a saltwater swimming pool, but this makes it sound so ridiculously resort-like that I almost hesitate to mention it. It's actually as pristine a place as I've ever stayed.

So pristine, in fact, that for a meager $9 an hour, you can canoe or kayak those saltwater marshes, and because only a fool would pass up a chance like that on such a beautiful day, we grabbed a couple of oars and set off on our way. We rowed ourselves through the narrow channel and underneath a railroad trestle to a small waterfall. John did most of the rowing like a pro. I took over until I saw a group of animals bobbing their heads out of the water (I assumed, of course, they were frogs. It's saltwater, I know, but with phobias there's no convincing). Frog scare notwithstanding, that canoe brought a kind of peace I didn't know was possible for me anymore, the sun glinting off the water, the trees shimmering gently in the breeze, and my breathing slow and steady as the rowing.

We'd picked up a loaf of rosemary bread in a nice shop in Wiscasset and a bunch of provisions from a little green grocer along Rt. 1. This was the stuff of our picnic, the last official dinner of the trip and therefore sort of melancholy. We tried to make a fire with some wood left behind by a previous camper, but the logs were too big and still slightly too damp. It was a valiant effort, but took more nurturing than either of us had the patience for. So we walked the grounds and watched the sky turn a dusky purple. We helped ourselves to those two adirondack chairs at the entrance to the camp, not far from the house where the sister/proprieters live.

Very faintly, we could hear the sweetest bluegrass music coming from the house. We glanced at the windows and were surprised to see not a stereo system, but one of the sisters actually bowing a fiddle with a small group of other musicians. We itched for them to come out to the lawn, or just to play a little louder, but instead we craned our necks to listen for a while. John said, "Just when you think a place can't be anymore amazing . . . " When we felt we'd invaded her privacy long enough, we headed back down to the dock for the last of the sunset.

It's an understatement to call Chewonki charmed -- it's a place we hope might become a tradition on our periodic trips to Maine. This was one of those magical days when everything comes together in a way that may be more than you deserve, but still exactly as much as you need.