Grocery by Michael Ruhlman

Author:Michael Ruhlman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Abrams
Published: 2017-06-02T16:00:00+00:00

14.

A WALK IN THE MEDICINE CABINET

When I contacted Dr. Todd several months later to ask if I could talk to him about grocery stores, he didn’t ask me to meet him at the offices of his practice. He said, “Why don’t we go for a walk in the woods?”

Given the stresses of the day, and the fact that it was July, a walk in the woods sounded like a good idea. Cleveland has a series of interconnected nature preserves called the Cleveland Metroparks, twenty-one thousand acres with hundreds of miles of hiking trails, referred to as the Emerald Necklace for the way this verdant, forested land surrounds the industrial and suburban city. Todd suggested the North Chagrin Reservation, where my soon-to-be ex-wife and I used to take our kids when they were young, a favorite family outing on summer weekends. A truly lovely place for standing under waterfalls and turning over rocks looking for crayfish. In fact, I hadn’t been here since those more carefree days.

Todd arrives, only a little late, in his gray 2014 Jeep Rubicon. His last car was an Inca-gold Jeep Sport, which he called Old Yeller. He drove her without a top through all seasons for the last three years he owned the car. When he traded in the car with two hundred thousand miles on it, oak trees were growing in the backseat, acorns having seeded in the leaf litter.

He’s wearing a black short-sleeved shirt, beige trousers, and his light gray Sanuks. He carries a brightly colored handwoven satchel, its strap knotted at the shoulder.

“Let’s walk,” he says, and leads me out of the parking lot and into the woods to an inclining dirt path about six feet wide and surrounded by what, before this walk, I would have called shrubs—forest ground cover and lots of tall trees. For Dr. Todd, I soon learned, it was a medicine cabinet. As we rise along the path, he explains why he asked me into the woods: “I wanted you to get a sense of who I am. This is who I am.”

It is a weekday afternoon, we are alone on the path, and the only sounds are our voices and the birds. It rained earlier, so the path is muddy and the scents of the woods are rich. When the path we ascended levels off, Dr. Todd steps off it and into the ground cover beneath the canopy of trees. He holds out his arms and slowly rotates his torso to indicate a circle around him.

“Right here,” he says, “where I’m standing is this incredibly complex ecosystem. It’s a symphony, a harmony, both temporal and spatial and illustrative of the interconnections with everything within this ecosystem, of which we are a part. Mind, body, spirit, environment. We connect to the trees, we connect to the forest.”

I have to admit, it is pretty lovely and relaxing to be in the woods.

He looks down and says, “This is spicebush.” He picks some of its tiny green berries and asks me to crush them between my fingers.

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