My latest encounter with that came a week before Christmas, was touched off by a smell and happened in a place I’d never set foot in and hadn’t planned to visit that day.
Yutzy’s Cheese House is on the north side of East U.S. 36 in Urbana. Deb Brownlee had mentioned it as a landmark in giving me directions to her office in the same building.
I’d pulled into a parking spot beside Yutzy’s and probably would have had to ask directions to Brownlee’s office had it not been for a steady stream of people coming around a blind corner in my direction.
They were coming out of an agency whose name recalls the saying about a camel being such an ungainly looking beast that it had to have been invented by a committee – and an indecisive one at that, since the vote was split over whether the design should include one hump or two.
But inside the offices of New Directions of Consolidated Care, Brownlee proved as easy to talk to as the agency’s name was awkward. The interview turned into the kind I love: One that develops into a discussion, a sharing of insights and a discovery of deeper connections that promises a warm re-connection should we meet again.
Back outside a cold wind pushed me back around the corner toward my car like a discarded paper cup, and I was surprised when, after stashing my laptop behind the front seat, I took a few steps back into the wind and pulled on Yutzy’s door.
The Yutzy name, speaking of the genuineness associated with things Mennonite or Amish, like carpentry and noodles, had seemed like an invitation. The first breath I took inside told me it hadn’t all been a come-on.
I don’t know just what the idea of homemade smells like, but it clearly involves cinnamon, butter and yeast, which seemed to spread over my brain like melting butter on a fresh-from-the-oven cinnamon roll.
The smell there was so genuine I was laughing at myself when I asked the young woman behind the counter whether it had come from a spray can.
She defensively said it wasn’t, but another customer who immediately saw the idiocy behind the question accused me in as friendly a way as I’ve ever been accused of being a cynic.
Bags of different sorts of homemade noodles had already provided more evidence than was needed to refute the suggestion of a deception, and fresh rounds of cheese in the plain refrigerator provided weighty corroboration.
I was so floored by the genuineness of the place that I couldn’t stop myself from asking whether Yutzy’s were still involved in the business. The young woman said that she was either the lone or one of the few non-Yutzy’s employed there.
Again, I’d known the the answer and asked simply because I so often feel like I live in a world in which a Manhattan marketing whiz is planning to solidify his career by claiming a name like Yutzy as trade name, then suing everyone born a Yutzy if they ever use the name again.
The ways of the world call to mind a television commercial aired not long ago in which people were blindfolded and taken into musty-dirty and garbage-strewn rooms whose air had been freshened by a spray product.
In a world in which I sometimes suspect that the purpose of focus groups and marketing surveys is to discover blind spots that help marketers fool us into thinking we’re in a mountain meadow while we’re actually seated in a Dumpster, my visit to Yutzy’s left me almost giddy.
The genuineness I’d wandered into was as delicious and satisfying to my mind as the taste of Yutzy’s smoked gouda and the texture of the fresh colby felt on my tongue.
Try as we might, we can’t beat real.
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