GF's Excellent Adventure: Day 2

Behold: the entranceway to my home away from home, "Claire's Guesthouse," just outside the actual U of M campus environs (and it appears, close enough that I may hear the marching band practicing for Saturday's big first home game of the season).

After a very sketchy sleep at the Marriott last night (not the hotel's fault – it was so nice that I reserved a room there for the night before my very early morning departure for home). I think my problem was that I was too excited about today's adventures.

I got up early, therefore, grabbed a quick cuppa, and was off in the shuttle to catch an Enterprise bus to the car rental office. Those E-People are the way to rent wheels, friends; they were super-helpful and friendly, gave me a choice of three different autos (in Detroit loyalty mode, I chose a Chrysler Sebring, nice and solid, as I'm going to be doing a lot of auto-exploring, even unto darkest Canada perhaps). The drive over to Ann Arbor was quick and easy (dear brother Frank, I found Michigan driving just as simple as in California).

Negotiating the mean streets of my old hometown, however, is a different matter. First of all, how this little hick town has grown! Secondly, road construction seems to be a way of life here, far worse than anything I can remember in CA (Land of CalTrans); and finally, if my husband thinks he's seen "one-way-street madness" in Santa Cruz, he would be driven insane by the New Ann Arbor. What streets there may be that are not ringing with nine-pound hammers, have been turned into arbitrary one-way lanes. And no, this is not Italy: I'm afraid to try to claim, "But officer, I AM only going one way at the moment."

However, after a Starbuck's pick-me-up refueling, I was able to find my way to my first destination on this journey: St. Thomas the Apostle Church and School, where my earliest formative years were spent in study and prayer.

It was quite wonderful to be able to park the car in front of the school entrance that was exactly where I remembered it to be (though the building has been enlarged beyond any memory). As I walked back toward the church on the corner, I was retracing steps I'd followed for too many years to recall; in May Processions, going to practice playing the organ in the choirloft, or to choir practice with Professor Rochon (whose darling son Paul was the dream-fantasy of every girl in my grade-school class)..... I went in the same side door I'd always entered from the school property; and spent almost an hour there, gazing at the white marble altar and remembering the towering figure of our pastor, Monsignor Peek, as he thundered from the big pulpit about the abject failure of his congregants to donate enough in the collection plate. The Monsignor and the big pulpit are gone now, as are the two white marble archangels who guarded the Epistle and Gospel sides of the altar. But the statue of dear Saint Joseph, at whose altar I knelt so often to say my "Act of Contrition," after childish confessions, still smiles down on little congregants; I lit a candle there and prayed my thanks that God must have forgiven all my nasty little faults, since I've been allowed to come back and see Joseph's smiling face once more. (I added prayers for my own son Joseph and his family -- a group I could not possibly have imagined in my wildest dreams back in the day.)

I finally found public parking down near Liberty Street and Fifth, near where my Dad's office used to be located; and I had a quick lunch on a corner where it may well be that I'd imbibed so many chocolate-peppermint ice cream sodas at a fountain in the drugstore across from his place of labor (now a cafe called "Afternoon Delights.") They don't know from afternoon delights there, though, as they have never had a chocolate peppermint ice cream soda for 50 cents on a hot after-school afternoon.

By that time, my get up and go had got up and left; so I found my way to Claire's Guesthouse out here in the New Suburbia south of campus; and as crickets call in the garden outside my window, I am off to sleep-land. Another big day cometh tomorrow: high-school best buddy Diane arrives from Kalamazoo (Kazoo to us Michiganders) at 10 AM, and I want to be ready to recreate those memories with her for a day and an evening.