The Bean Queen,

Been There Done That

By Barbara Lindquist

I went to a week-long Elderhostel workshop on German culture at the University of Wisconsin/Parkside through their program, Adventures in Life time Learning (ALL), in the summer of 2000.

At a meeting for the forty participants to get acquainted, Virginia Burlingame, a psychologist/gerontologist who writes a column for the Racine Journal Times monthly Lifetime, introduced the bean game for us to play.

Sitting in a circle, we were all given a paper cup. A bowl of dried beans was placed near the center. Each person had a turn, going clockwise around the circle to say their name, where they were from and tell the group something they had never done.

Example:

I have never been to New Zealand, or I have never flown an airplane.

If the others in the group had done such a thing, they got up and took a bean from the central container and placed it in their own. At the end of the game each person counted up the number of beans in his or her cup. The winner was the one with the most beans.

I won the game!

Not only that, but I played the game again at a seniors' art group, The Geezers, I belong to and won again.

And again we played it at Virginia Burlingame's penthouse apartment when a church group got together. I won again, just barely beating Virginia herself.

I know it was the year 2000 because that was the year my first great-grandson, Tyler Martin, was born. Someone said, I never had any great-grandchildren. I got a bean in the game because his birth was imminent, (the group agreed that counted) and he was born the last day of the workshop when we wound up the ALL week by going to Germanfest at the Summerfest grounds in Milwaukee.

Who Am I

I have been so blessed in my life to have done so many wonderful things and been so many wonderful places.

I have four children, eight grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. I was married for 21 years to Jack Lindquist and have been with my partner and soul mate, Jeanne Arnold, for nearly 30 years. I will be 73 in May of this year.

I live in Racine, Wisconsin. Our city is famous for its Frank Lloyd Wright architecture. Among examples of Wright's works are the Johnson's Wax Building, the Johnson's original family home that has now been converted to a conference center named Wingspread, and a couple of other houses in town.

Racine is also famous for its Danish bakery delight, the kringle, that we eat often and ship all over the place for gifts.

The city is right smack on the shore of Lake Michigan. We call it the middle coast of the United States. We have a 200-boat marina downtown and two municipal boat launching ramps. Commercial fisherman are based here. There are three yacht clubs and more marinas, docks, boatyards and launch ramps up and down the Root River that runs through the center of Racine.

After our fish population was almost wiped out by the inundation of Atlantic alewives and the moray eel through the St. Lawrence Seaway ship canal, large fish were seeded into the waters of the lake from west coast rivers. Racine is now one of the deep lake fishing capitals of the world. The week-long Salmonarama festival every year draws people from all over the country to catch thousands of pounds of 12-to 35-inch or bigger salmon, lake trout, coho, salmon and rainbow trout.

The salmon and trout spawn up our Root River and we have an egg collecting facility in a park in the center of the city. Fisherman wade up the river below the Horlick Dam to fish in shallow waters for salmon, often so thick during the spawning season you could scoop them up with a shovel.

Lake shoreline fishermen are sometimes rewarded with lake perch, but their population is still down from all the foreign species invasions. In the old days you could go down and fish off piers and breakwaters and catch a hundred or so perch in one short evening. The spring smelt runs bring net fishermen every year.



Last year, I asked my kids to get together and give me something exciting for my birthday instead of all the gimcracks, geegaws and blue glass that I collect. They bought me a fishing trip on the lake. Jeanne, my son Skip, and three of my teen-aged grandsons went out with me and the charter boat captain. We all caught big fish, no prize-winners, but big fish! It was exciting. What a great day, and we still have chunks of salmon in our freezer.

Another bean.

Lake Michigan shoreline views are spectacular and every time I drive downtown and spy the lake, I think, That's my lake. It has so many various and sundry moods that inspire or express the emotions of the day, and it has been my lake for my whole life starting in Chicago where I was born and grew up.

From my writing notebook,

The wind was unsteady this morning. The flag on the pole in the neighbor's yard fluttered its fingers at the audience of houses in all directions. It was a day drained of all color, flat, bland, and a day were there were no shadows, no blacks and whites, no good and evil. The lakescape looked like an overworked watercolor painting. Colors were muddy and undefined. Shapes ran together, with no pure light white spaces anywhere, an utterly gray day.

Or-

For a moment the sun caught behind a gnarly tree trunk cast screams of brilliant light in all directions. All the preceeding days of light starvation induced a form of light gluttony. I wanted to stuff the rays through the lenses of my eyes. And the lake was a brilliant blue, shimmering and dancing and alive.