A Visit

I don’t remember what my dad and I were talking about as he paid the attendant.

 

But he pulled the rental car out of a foreign parking structure, and turned right on to a foreign street.

 

We had just finished a tour of the University, part of a set of allotted activities designed for the Campus Day that allowed accepted students to get a taste of what life at Michigan would be like if they chose to enroll.

 

That first taste was sweet, with a couple doses of sour.

 

As I stood in a ballroom of the Union, watching fathers sing the required iteration of The Victors with unparalleled bravado, I wondered if I had accidently stumbled into a cult meeting. I pondered how the walk from Markley to Angell Hall was humanly possible to endure on a daily basis.

 

And that February afternoon, my dad asked me what I thought of everything. I told him, distance from New York aside, that I liked it. He did too, especially The Victors.

 

As he stopped at what I now know is the intersection of Maynard and East William, my anxiety about coming to Ann Arbor without a guarantee of admission to the Ross School of Business weighed on my mind again. But for a brief moment, an instinct that I still can’t explain came back to me.

 

“Maybe I could write for the business section of the school newspaper,” I told my dad.

 

He thought it was a good idea.

 

It was a passing thought. To this day, I wonder what would have happened if he drove straight, past 420 Maynard Street — home to The Michigan Daily.  

 

But he turned left, we watched the Michigan basketball team play in the Big Ten Tournament from Cantina, and my college visit drew to a close. In time, I would grow to understand those fathers’ bravado, and that the walk is survivable.

 

Maynard Street would become all too familiar, too.

 

Because that left turn was really just delaying what I now believe to be an inevitable first date with my student newspaper.