Jerry Writes About Charlevoix

We are on a family vacation in Charlevoix, Michigan. Not an adventure journey. No danger, unless you call an Egg McMuffin dangerous, and many would.

Robin and I, along with daughter Lisa, her husband Britt and their three children are in a beautiful rented home for a week. Kids are Marshal, age 16. Mimi, 12, Davis, 4.

Staying at Chip Terrill’s house. You can see it here: www.snn.com We’ve been in this house before – five years ago. Been in Charlevoix many, many times. The house looks out at Lake Charlevoix. It’s quite large. More than big enough for the seven of us.

It takes about eight hours of safe, non-stop driving to get here from Cincinnati. But McMuffin, Subway, bathroom and gasoline stops easily turn that travel time into ten hours. Be warned: it’s a boring, seemingly endless drive.

Arriving in very early July – we got here on the 3^rd – can be risky. That’s the front of the “season” in Northern Michigan and it’s often too cold for comfort. Not this year. This year it was too hot for comfort both Saturday and Sunday. Mid-August hot. But great for the beach which is just two blocks from our front door. One person in the family is thermostatically challenged, and the heat is a real problem for that person who will not be named here unless Mimi decides to say in her entry in this blog.

We eat on the porch. We play on the substantial lawn. We all read books. A true family vacation. Today, the 5^th of July, was overcast and rainy. But the temperature dropped ten degrees and now feels more Michigan-like. The thermostatically challenged person is still a sweatball, even at the lower temperatures.

The only real complaint I have, other than the terror we all feel every time we flush the one low-flow toilet here (There are three more), is that there’s no WiFi in this house. For example, this evening I composed a long email on my laptop only to remember it can’t be sent until the morning from the downtown coffee shop or from the library.

Finally, let me tell you our about conversation at dinner last night. Someone said, “I think he’s a, quote, famous person.” So then we talked about the fact that most of us use verbal quotes that way. We put the word quote in front of another word we’d put quotes on both sides of if we were writing. But when we say the word, rather than write the quotation marks, we almost never close our spoken quotes. As in, “I think he’s a, quote, famous, unquote, person.”

Think about what that means. Every word we speak after first saying “quote” is part of an endlessly long open quotation. I’m certain many of us go to our deaths without ever closing a quote that was verbally opened perhaps decades before. Then someone at last night's dinner said the Executor of an estate could close a quote, post-mortem. Others argued that only if the deceased had signed a Quote Closure Codicil to a Will could the Executor close quotes for a dead person. Don't die with your precious words all caught in an open quote. Close now.