gauche

My old boss once told me,Ann Arbor is a little town, somewhere in the midwest, bordered on all sides by reality.He’s right. And I love it.

We have said … well, we have said what we have said about this being a difficult world, a hard place, and demanding and uncomfortable, a place to which we may respond in the end in holiness or in misery.

But it is a times compelling to pause, and to note that the sun is shining on a world in which a man may walk down the streets of a city he loves, to a place he has friends, where he works and is happy.

And if, on his walk to work, he rounds a corner to hear from a radio on a momentarily abandoned porch a song he once loved and had forgotten, and he pauses, and takes two or three steps onto the brightness of a stranger’s lawn, so much the better.

I’ve been going here since January of ‘99. I’ve worked for the Deli since November of ‘03. It has been more of a home to me than any other place I’ve been in a very long time, and I shall miss it dearly when I leave for law school this August.

I grew up on a farm in New Hampshire, is what I tell people, even though this is not entirely true. My parents bought a farm in New Hampshire when I was thirteen; I spent my first decade, and a third of my second, in Connecticut, a tow-headed, round-cheeked, home-schooled Christian boy, reading voraciously and being scolded for my terrible penmanship.

We lived with my grandmother in those days, and she was a cold woman who was never comfortable sharing her house or her things. In light of the events of last two years, which have caused me to reevaluate much of my childhood, it is not clear to me how formal my parents’ arrangement with her was, and I suspect that it evolved from weaknesses on both sides into a dependence of the worst sort. Though my parents made terrible financial decisions that would eventually force us to move, she would never have left the house her husband built and her children grew up in, and she would never have given up the dubious fineries that only a child of the depression can accumulate. It was from her, I think, that I inherited my fear of the future, and of change.

After the lung cancer and pneumonia took her, though, and with a foreclosure in the very near future, my parents sold the house and took us to Maine for the seven months between september and april. In Maine, it is winter for six of those seven months.

My parents found a farmhouse in New Hampshire which was acceptable to the life they thought they would lead, so in April of that year we moved in. That was when I began to grow up.

South Bend is where I will attend law school this fall, at a little-known catholic college they have down there.