River, Cafe, Dinner Redux

March 13, 2025

If it’s Thursday in Ann Arbor — day four of my visit — it must be a good day for a river walk, time in a cafe and dinner with my peeps.. on this, another sunny, cold day.

Today’s version of the perfect day: another warm and wonderful breakfast at Sarah’s, this time with a crop of prospective grad students here to evaluate if Ann Arbor is the place they want to spend the next 6-7 years of their academic careers. These kids were German studies and comparative lit students, whose prospective departments put them up at the Burnt Toast (lucky them, much more charming than a hotel). They were impressive, passionate kids. I (of course) thought about Peter who lost out on the wooing aspect of grad school selection due to Covid. He’d been scheduled to fly in during the annual March university-wide grad school evaluation process and go through exactly what these students were going through, but for the Covid breakout of 2020. Instead, he accepted U of M, sight unseen. He’d gotten to visit U of Colorado (Boulder) and loved that experience, before everything shut down that year. There were more besides, but U of M checked all the boxes. Glad it did!

I wrote about all that here: https://lifeofwry.com/2020/03/20/umich/ It’s about as accurate and prescient a post as could be written!

After breakfast, I set out on what I thought would be the same river walk as yesterday, but I got a bit lost (I know, hard to do when following a river). I couldn’t find the spot where we’d crossed the river, so retraced my steps and crossed in a different location. It was about the same distance, as it turned out, as I missed the crossover spot by mere feet (just around a corner). Today’s walk was equally beautiful..

As you can see, the sun is melting the ice. It was a lot less solid than just yesterday. So sunny, a guy was running in shorts. It was definitely not that warm.

I headed over to (again!) the Lowertown Bar & Cafe.. this time for coffee and reading. Starting Leah’s book again (Maya’s mama)…

I got all bogged down in “an” vs “a” historian. The cover, as you can see, uses “a,” while the text within the book uses “an.” I’d just argued (online) the day before with Marty, in a photo I’d posted on FB about my staying in “an” historic hotel in Grinnell, about the proper article (he favors “a”), so this was most amusing to me! (And distracting.. as I didn’t get very far in the book.)

Headed back to the BT and then off to meet Lisa and Claire in Loch Alpine. We logged into the weekly Indivisible zoom at 3:00… always incredibly rich in current political info, brilliant in strategy, and totally inspiring. Completely admire and respect founders Leah and Ezra; they are a staple in my activism these days.