Calvin & Tiny

I haven't been up to Marion, MI in a long time, since my mother died some years ago.  Bored, I drove up there a couple days ago, just to see if it was still the same.  It pretty much is.  I ran into a couple fellas I knew back in the day, Calvin & Tiny.

Calvin had to move into a trailer on his brother-in-law's dairy farm after he lost his 400 sq ft cabin on the Middle Branch river. He borrows his brother-in-law's truck every now and then and drives by his old place, to see what's been poached. A little wood deck has been stripped off, a storage shed is gone, as is a winter's worth of firewood. He used to get by doing odd jobs farm-to-farm, repairs, painting, hauling, whatever needed done. But now nobody has money to pay for labor, the locals either do the work themselves, or let it go undone.

"Well," I says to him, trying to find the bright side, "it looks like you haven't missed too many meals, at least."

"Shit," he says, "I work a few chores for my brother-in-law, takes two hours a day, if I move slows. Then I eat and eat. Sit in the trailer and get fatter and fatter. I get fat and think about my cabin. I built it my God damn self. It ain't nothing much, but I miss looking out at the river every night."

Tiny owns a gas station and party store on M-115—but the last couple years there haven't been nearly as many city slickers from SE Michigan coming up to *get away from it all.* Tiny used to give a couple high school kids part-time summer jobs—not anymore, now he and his wife do all the work. Tiny figures he can hang on two more years, then after that? “I’d rather not think about it,” he says. Tiny's wife, who is nearly as *tiny* as Tiny, says they'll probably end up working at the Wal-Mart in Cadillac. "If we can even get that," Tiny adds.