Remembrance of Things Past: A Visit to the Cheese Haven

“Tell me about the Cheese Haven,” said Adrienne.

“Oh, the Cheese Haven. You want to hear about how we tricked your uncle into going to a tourist trap called the Cheese Haven, even though he was terrified of cheese?”

Adrienne nodded.

I sat back on the scratchy sofa where we’d been chatting over our phones after dinner. “Oh dear, I don’t really remember. I think one time when we were staying in a hotel, your grandfather opened a jar of Limberger cheese he got at a shop, and all we siblings ran to lock ourselves in the bathroom because it smelled so bad, and your uncle was the youngest  of five and too slow, so he got trapped outside the door. Maybe that was why. Remember, we’re probably all on the spectrum. We’re very sensitive to smells. But anyway, he was terrified of cheese. He couldn’t just not eat it; he’d throw a tantrum if he was near it. And since he was the youngest and the Golden Child, he got away with everything. We all accommodated him instead of expecting him to get over it, when he was about three and four.”

“How do you accommodate a fear of cheese?”

“We didn’t make reference to cheese in front of him. We didn’t eat cheese in front of him. We learned to call macaroni and cheese ‘macaroni and butter’ and he ate it.  We called cheese pizza ‘plain pizza’ and he ate it. Parmesan cheese was just Parmesan. We called the cheese on plain pizza ‘pizza skin.’ It all worked out, a surprising amount of the time. And then it wouldn’t and he’d have a tantrum.”

Michael came into the room just then and observed that this was the most convoluted way to run a household, or words to that effect.

“Well, we got used to it. But that’s not the point. We used to go to the Chautaqua on Lake Erie, to Lakeside, every summer the week after the Fourth of July. It started out as a Methodist campground and your great grandmother is a Methodist. A Methodist is a kind of Protestant Christian. She liked to listen to the preaching, and she liked to sit in her wheelchair on the pavilion and watch the boats on the lake. My grumpy old bachelor uncle would come along and take us swimming. One day I’ll take you there. But on the way to Lakeside, there’s about two hours of driving through the flattest, most boring part of Ohio, where there were all these tourist traps. Remember, there wasn’t very much home internet in those days. You couldn’t just google “things to do in Sandusky” or something like that. So all of these random weird tourist attractions would advertise by setting up a series of billboards on the freeway to entice you to stop.”

Adrienne was fully engulfed in the story now, not even looking at the phone.

“One of the tourist traps was this fancy grocery store called the Cheese Haven. They had signs for miles and miles. ‘Only twenty miles to the Cheese Haven! We have 140 different kinds of homemade cheese!’ ‘Ten miles to the Cheese Haven! Ohio’s largest selection of different cheese spreads!’ ‘Only five more miles to the Cheese Haven! Don’t miss our collection of rare candy!’ ‘Here’s your exit for home-smoked sausage at the Cheese Haven!’ Something like that. And of course, we desperately wanted to go to the Cheese Haven. We were all begging my father to take a pit stop at the Cheese Haven. The last year we hadn’t been able to, but we wanted to go this particular year.”

“Okay. Okay. What did my uncle think of this?”

“Well, he couldn’t read yet. So we hatched a plan. We all secretly agreed to call it “The Buter Haven.”

Now Michael and Adrienne were both staring, incredulous.

“And he fell for it,” I went on. “It worked. The logo of the Cheese Haven is a round of cheese with one triangle slice taken out, and we told him it was a circular loaf of butter, and he believed us. We said there were 27 different varieties of homemade butter. He would see the butter all arrayed in the deli counter when we walked in. He believed it all. Remember, he was only three. When we got there, it was paradise. It looked like an old fashioned general store from a movie. We were all allowed to buy several things because the fridge at the rental house by the beach would be big enough and we could eat them all week. My father filled a basket with cheese and sausage. My mother got crackers and spread. There were those striped lollipops like they have in cartoons. There were candy buttons and wax bottles and wax lips, all kids of old fashioned candy, and we got way too much. And for the longest time, everything was going perfectly. It was like a comedy sketch. People in the shop kept asking questions, and the man behind the counter kept answering the questions using a word other than ‘cheese’ just by coincidence. He said ‘No, Ma’am, you don’t have to refrigerate any of it. I’ve got a block of cheddar on the board in the back that’s been there for twenty-seven years.’ Cheddar, instead of cheese.”

“Twenty-seven YEARS?”

“Mm-hmm. A good aged white cheddar, very sharp. The kind that makes your cheeks hurt. But of course, just when we were almost ready to leave, we blew it. Someone asked if the smoked fish was made on the premises, and the clerk said ‘No, Ma’am, we only make the cheese and the sausage.’ And your uncle gave me this terrified look and said ‘That man said they ONLY MAKE CHEEEEEEEESE!” and he fell down on the floor and had a tantrum. Mom had to carry him out to the van.

“But did you get to buy the cheese?”

“Somehow, we did. It was all in bags when we came out and we stuck it in the trunk when he was already in his booster seat. I think that trip was the beginning of the end of his being so sensitive. And then we were at Lakeside. We used to pretend the old Victorian hotel was haunted. And there was this cave underneath the monument with the liberty bell; I would imagine I was a conductor on the Underground Railroad, taking people to Canada–”

Adrienne got up just then, uninterested in my rambling anymore, and went to do something fun.

I sat at the computer and started googling all those tourist attractions up by Lake Erie. Most of the ones I remember are still there. The Cheese Haven is there. 

One day I will go back.