Dough, Ray, Me: a Home-Baked Solution to Community Bliss

Last week, in my small town of Three Rivers, we watched with pride as our Lady Cats basketball team fought its way to the state championship in Lansing. They lost, but not for want of vocal support. Nearly 2,000 purple-clad fans drove two hours to see the game -- about 25 percent of our population. When the team bus arrived home at 11 p.m. it was faithfully met by a fire truck, police cars and even an RV that led them on a victory lap of downtown.

Even if you don't care much for sports, you've got to appreciate such a generous display of community spirit. I was sad to see it end, and wished the excitement and camaraderie would've lasted a few weeks more. But alas, to everything there's a season.

Or is there? As I thought of other ways that communities can build unity through shared experience, another event came to mind. This one took place in Munising, an unpretentious Upper Peninsula town on the shores of Lake Superior.

It was early afternoon and we'd stopped for a picnic lunch at a lakeside park. While the kids played on the beach, I saw a guy -- let's call him Ray -- loading split chunks of maple into what looked like a wood-fired pizza oven. Except that it was outside.

"So what do you call this thing?" I asked.

"Oh, dis is da community oven," Ray said, with a classic Yooper accent. "I'm firin' it up for my girlfriend so they can bake in it tonight. Gotta keep 'em happy, eh?"

When we came back that night, it wasn't just Ray's girlfriend that he'd made happy. Hundreds of townsfolks had gathered for a free outdoor concert. It was a kaleideocope audience: young parents with kids on blankets, old folks in lawn chairs and walkers, kids on bikes and bikers with beards and black leather jackets. The musician, an acoustic minstrel who'd slept in his van the night before, played enough Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Kurt Cobain and Johnny Cash to keep his eclectic fans happy.

But the singer was no more a hit than the oven was. There it sat, a sturdy beehive of brick as humble and lovable as a plump grandma in her kitchen. From its mouth came forth a procession of blueberry muffins, biscuits, cheesy bread and some incredible little hand-tossed pizzas. Volunteers manned the oven with long-handled paddles and as each batch hit the table it sold out immediately to a swarm of customers. A seductive, fresh-baked fragance hung over the entire evening like a benediction.

The oven was low-tech and low-maintenance -- no electricity, no mess to clean-up. The bakers showed up, rolled out their dough and once it was gone so were they. All proceeds went to charity.

It all reminded me that a community's like a tribe of sorts. Yes, we gather to cheer our young warriors, resplendent in their local colors and totems, as they fight rival tribes on the fields of athletic conquest. It's a healthy outlet for our competitive human bloodlust.

Yet tribes also have an inborn need to celebrate and feast around a common hearth. That's how it was in the Middle Ages when villages often had a shared oven where people could bake bread and rehash gossip in equal measure.

Community ovens have caught on nationwide and I hope we build one in my town. There's a perfect spot by the fire station on a grassy bank that overlooks the river. The firefighters could savor the smell of blueberry muffins as they laid another coat of polish on their big red trucks. And when the baking's done, maybe an escort of Lady Cats could bring them over a plateful.

A Sure Route to Stardom

The March weather has been unseasonably chilly, but last week it finally warmed up enough to enjoy the night sky. You remember the night sky, right? That eternally dark void that looms overhead for much of the long winter? That vast vault of space that we ignore as we rush into the house after work or a trip to the store?

It was my daughter Emily, an antsy eight-year old, who convinced me to go outside and take a look. "Dad," she said, "I saw this robot thing up in the sky. It's really cool, you've got to see it!"

From our front yard, the robot was easy to find. For millennia, it's been known by Greek, Arab and Chinese astronomers as the Great Hunter -- the constellation Orion. I told Emily about the dagger that hangs from Orion's three-starred belt. And about Orion's brightest stars, Betelgeuse and Rigel. I also pointed out Sirius, the dog star that hunts at Orion's feet and Lepus the rabbit, and then I ...

"Yeah," Emily interrupted, a bit unconvinced. "But it still looks like a robot."

And she's right. For that matter, Orion also resembles a football referee with his arms raised to signal a touchdown. But with low-tech stargazing, that's part of the game. The expert answer doesn't have to be your answer. If you think, as I do, that the constellation Auriga looks more like home plate than it does some deity on a chariot, who's to say you're wrong?

Many stargazers don't even use a telescope. I know: the one I got for Christmas a few years back now gathers dust webs in the barn. For beginners, telescopes are actually a barrier because they focus on a narrow point in the sky. You can't learn to identify constellations one star at a time. You've got to scan the whole horizon -- much as a barefoot, goat-herding astronomer would have done on the plains of ancient Arabia.

Our Digital Age knowledge of course helps. You can download a free on-line star chart, and with that, locate dozens of constellations with the naked eye. Just start with an easy constellation like Orion, then stairstep your way to others in that quadrant of the universe.

That's what Emily and I did as we looked north to find the Big Dipper. It was here -- and dads live for such moments -- that she recalled something I'd said a year ago: "Where's the big W -- Cassie-something, the one that's chained to a rock?" We found the W, Cassiopeia, although it's actually her daugher, Andromeda, who's chained nearby. But she'll be detained there for several light years, so Emily's got plenty of time to get her facts straight.

For lay people, the sciences can seem distant and cold-hearted; bound by facts and drained of emotion and humanity. With the stars, we've struck a compromise. Today's astronomers may use the Hubble telescope to discover galaxies, black holes and nebula that go by lifeless labels such as M-42. Yet we still call our beloved constellations by some of the oldest names of all. Long after I'm gone, I hope these legends, writ large on the starry scroll of the sky, will help my daughter find joy and wonder in the night.