Pies and Politics in Lexington, Michigan

Navy veteran, Mary Salmonowicz has been selling pies from her home in Lexington, near the shore of Lake Huron, for 22 years. When you walk into her small kitchen, the smell of fresh baking compels you to breathe deeply. But before you can enter, a hand-made sign grabs your eye.

Next to a picture of President Bush, a wordy, but direct message:
“Iraq Security ‘We can take care of ourselves.’
Iraq’s government said on Friday morning we’re taking a month break from our duties because it’s too hot. Mr. President, bring our troops home now. Iraq doesn’t need us. They don’t want us. We need our troops here. Quit playing with our military and our life and our money just because you can. Grow up.”

Her Dutch apple, cherry crumb and red raspberry pies with their light, flaky crust entice customers who disagree with her politics. “If people don’t like my sign, they just come in, get their pie and leave,”she said.

61-year-old Salmonowicz began her pie business after leaving nursing. “I just jumped in and did it. I had no idea what I was getting into.” Within ten days of quitting her job, she set up a separate kitchen at the back of her house, obtained licensing from the Michigan Department of Agriculture and started baking.

She had been a visiting nurse for private agencies, but became disillusioned as profit grew more important than quality of care. “The agency would receive a specific amount per case. If you closed the case before all the money was spent, that extra money went to the agency. There was a pressure to rush, get the patient done and get out of there.”

She tried a return to nursing five years ago, but found the demands on her time crowded the pie business. She keeps her nursing license current and imagines a kind of nursing that would emphasize patient comfort. “I would start a new type of nursing–comfort nursing. If patients are comfortable, truly cared for, and someone listens to them, they are happy. They heal faster.”

Caring for people motivates Salmonowicz’s pie baking. “I do this because I love to please people. If it pays the bills that’s all I ask.” Her customers come in for conversation as much as pie. “Sometimes I feel like bartender,”she said.

With her retirement approaching, she is making an instructional DVD of her pie making technique for her customers, and perhaps a broader audience. “A lot of people have told me they’re going to be unhappy when I retire, so I decided to make this DVD.“

This summer, Salmonowicz’s business seemed a bit slower. She says fewer visitors are coming up from metro-Detroit and attributes this to the shrinking auto industry and high gas prices. “People are selling their cottages because they have to, not because they want to,”she said.

Fortunately, her business does not depend solely on tourism. In the fall, winter and spring she bakes sirloin pasties, which she boasts “are better than anything over the bridge.” The Mackinac Bridge, that is.

Located at 5846 Lakeshore Rd. (M25) her hours are: Friday 11-4 p.m., Saturday 11-3:30 p.m. and Sunday 11-4 p.m.

Blue Angels Over Willow Run

Today the Blue Angels thundered over Willow Run in a show sponsored by the Yankee Air Museum. The full title for the event was: 2007 Chrysler Jeep Superstores Thunder Over Michigan Air Show, an ironic name given the presence of the GM Powertrain facility in the former WWII bomber plant just west of the airport.

I hadn't planned to see the show, but stopped on the way into Detroit. Joining the dozens of other cars parked along the service road north of the airport, I was amazed and awed by the spectacle.



Admiring the excellence, precision, and daring of the pilots, I pondered our unending involvement in Iraq--the lives lost, bodies maimed, hearts broken, psyches permanently altered by battle trauma. These jets were breathtakingly beautiful flying low and high, defining the space above us.

The website for the event offered free tickets for youth between the ages of 18-24, plus an opportunity to meet the pilots. The show served as a Navy recruitment opportunity, of course.

If you see the Blue Angels in action, you will admire them. You must. They are athletes, artists and warriors commanding powerful machines defying gravity -- and they are loud. Their speed booms in your ears and chest. You want them to be fast, to shake you to your core. They will and you will be safe because this is not war. This is a demonstration event for the Navy.

Along the road, with airplane enthusiasts, veterans, families with small children, shirtless nascar fans, I thrilled at the raw might above. I was completely drawn in by the engineering marvel and flying prowess.

If only it were a demonstration of excellence and mastery for peaceful purposes. But we are fully engaged in Iraq, doing something variously called fighting, rebuilding, occupying, reconstructing. Fighting there so we don't have to fight here. It's rather a blur at this point. We now understand that the war was unjustified--that the conflation of 9-11, terrorism, weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, alleged yellow cake deals and Saddam's tyranny was a stone soup of excuses and lies. We broke it; we own it. That was Colin Powell's warning (read his account of trying to talk Bush out of the Iraq war in the Times Online, 7/8/07). I've always heard a different version, more apt: if you break it, you pay. We're going to pay for this for many years to come.

The Blue Angels are amazing and worthy of admiration--like so many of the soldiers and support staff serving in Iraq--performing whole heartedly. The servicemen and women in Iraq must believe in their work, for their sanity and survival. We at home have the privilege and responsibility of discernment from a safe distance. Hate the war, love the warrior.