Notes for New to Town
Drafts
Introduction
Keeping Cool 76
Pronunciation 423
Daddy Daughter Dance 259
Rain 228
Published Columns
December 2007
January 2008
February 2008
March 2008
April 2008
May 2008
June 2008
Drafts
These are notes and rough drafts for future columns.
Introduction
Last year, McVey became a professor at EasternMichiganUniversity and moved, with his wife, daughter, and dog, 2000 miles from Tucson, Arizona, to Saline.
New in Town
September 18
Michael McVey
Keeping Cool 76
Up mountLemon – highway – raging river tore up the road like a ribbon.
Odd new family with windows open when it was 85. It was cool to us. You can tell the new people in Tucson in January. They expose their pasty white Ohio skin to the sun and march about the streets. The thrill wears off and after two winters in the desert you begin looking for sweaters when the temperatures hit the low 70s.
Pronunciation 423
“What’s in a name?” Shakespeare once wrote. It took us only days to make our first few pronunciation errors. My-lan is not Mee-lawn. And there were others. We learned to listen to the names pronounced by Michiganders before we tried them ourselves. I found myself stumbling into too many of these names. When I asked the new Assistant Principal at the Middle School how she liked it over Lee-on. I immediately found out it was pronounced Li-on like the big cat. There is a lot of pride here and a mispronunciation means you know nothing about their town or don’t care or, worse, are trying start something. So I learned to keep quiet.
Some are easy: Detroit, Grand Rapids, Lansing, Pontiac. Some I try to avoid saying the name at all: Macombe, Wyandotte, Ypsilanti, even Saline. My parents first called it Say-leen. I was able to correct them with a little hint of knowledge in my voice.
Of course, it was just the same, if not more so in Tucson. We would laugh a little at the winter tourists who pronounced it Took-sun, or stood beside a towering Sa-gwa-roe cactus for photos, or went down to No-gayles for shopping in Mexico. Of course, they didn’t have to open their mouths. They were the ones who went shirtless in January. We with our thinned out blood, were looking for sweaters when the temperatures dipped down to seventy.
I have also been learning the names of local politicians, Granholm, sports legends, Shembeckler, and have learned the difference between the green flags with the white S and the white E. I learned also that when IllinoisState comes to play at Eastern Michigan I should ditch the big red sweatshirt.
At times I have had to do the equivalent of squinting wth my ears. I flicked on a news story one morning that had something to do with turbans and jabs. I’m not trying to make fun of the ways people pronounce “turbine” and “job” especially with our economy so stressed, but I am concerned that my own accent is slowly changing. I use voice to text software so I can make notes about the papers I am grading without having to turn to the word processor. I have found that it is making more errors lately and is having more trouble catching the words I am speaking. The careful training I put it though back in Arizona, appears to be shifting into a whole new cadence and pronunciation pattern of my new home in Michigan.
Coat Culture 200
We had guests over one cool fall evening, our first knit be evening in saline, and for a moment we all stood in the foyer while our guests looked at us expectantly. After a pause, we noticed them fiddling with their jackets and it suddenly dawned on us that we had lost our coat consciousness.
Suddenly our daughter had a job, co-clerk, her role was to ferry the coats to a bedroom heap.
If you step into any classroom in Tucson. The kids drape their windbreakers over chairs if they bring them at all. We simply did not think about coats in the sunny Southwest. A closet stuffed with them. Park is, dress codes, windbreakers, raincoats, jackets, sweaters, cardigans, and scarves.
We had simply forgotten about coats The hooks on the on the booths at the grill, the cloak rooms, and the rows of hooks in classrooms. When I planned graduation ceremonies or conferences, coats simply never entered my consciousness. We considered a shade and bottles of water, but never coats. A colleague told me he bought a collapsible coat rack for family events. And hangers once we become saline regulars, those folks will disappear and fade into the background.
Daddy Daughter Dance 259
We almost missed it. The last day of trick-or-treating, the car seat sold at a garage sale, the last Barney tape.
One day, our new friends asked if we were going to the daddy daughter dance at the recreation center. My daughter, at 12 years old, open to the concept. The promise that her friend would be there with her father helped immensely. Next year she would be a teenager and too cool for such things. Of course, we decided to go. We joined over 120 other daddies with their little girls, some in puppy velvet dresses, some as young as four years old, one or two with corsages.
My daughter and her friend took off to a corner to figure out which two and they should lobby the disc jockey to play We managed to gather the girls for a goofy rendition of the chicken dance and the hokey Pokey both dance standards. If you want to hear the Jonas Brothers or all American rejects, my dear, it won’t be here. My emotionally intelligent doctor smiled and said about plotting for another tune that might be more appropriate. I loved the opportunity to meet my neighbors, to act a little silly for the cause of making some precious memories, and I realized, at that moment, that I had reached my own milestone. It was my last day as a newcomer to saline. I had a few friends, was taking advantage of what the town had to offer, new my way around, I am no longer new in town.
Rain 228
I spent many days, weeks of days, waiting for rain in Tucson. The sun is a full time employee there and blue skies were the norm. but spent much of my time indoors. We thought about water often in the Desert Southwest. When we watered our orange trees we were always conscious of how long the hose was left on and never watered during the heat of the day. We conversed with neighbors about such things as aquifers, is there escape in, water harvesting, and be watched anxiously the skies each July for the signs of our monsoon rain’s.
Driving 2000 miles to Celine was driving into a new attitude about water Puddles and lingered after storms, new gutters served their purpose, and our umbrella saw a regular action for the first time. There are new sounds that have moved into our consciousness The drip of melting snow, the Rasul down the eaves, the hollow burbling into storm drains, the sounds of wipers, the rumble of approaching thunder, full flop of drops on the sill of an open window once the storm had passed. On occasion, back in the land of regular sun. In saline, when the sun appears, is met with the joy of meeting an old friend on the street. A smile, and embraced, then an inevitable moving on and the promise to keep in touch.
Published Columns
Print these as a collection for Promotion and Tenure.
Columns published in the Saline Reporter beginning December 2007.
Last year, McVey became a professor at EasternMichiganUniversity and moved, with his wife, daughter, and dog, 2000 miles from Tucson, Arizona, to Saline.
New in Town © 2008 Michael McVey
December 2007
My family and I moved to the humid and intensely green Saline from the dry heat and baked brown ground of Tucson, Arizona, and it was the radical change in scenery that struck us the most.
We made our own discoveries about the people of Saline but the random encounters with strangers pleased me the most. People smile here and when you get the chance to tell them you have pulled up roots and moved here all the way from Arizona they positively beam. They do look a little concerned, though, when you marvel aloud at the water running in the creeks and streams. With the exception of the occasional monsoon downpour, our streambeds in Tucson are dry and sandy. They serve as pathways for families of javelinas, distant boar-like cousins of the pig.
During the first weeks here, spent in the solitary pursuit of installing ceiling fans and unpacking, I encountered a hornet’s nest under my deck. In Tucson, the occasional swarm of bees never bothered me much. Now I now see that living next to a forest can sometimes mean getting stung seven times and flailing about wildly at the edge of the deck.
My new neighbors, on hearing of my encounter with the hornets, pointed out hidden beehives in nearby trees, offered hints about how to remove the nest, and showed me where there were nests underground. When I first moved to Tucson it did not take long to be pricked by a Palo Verde thorn, so I will write off the insect stings as growing pains. Wisdom welts, so to speak.
By the second week here, we were reminding each other of the beginning of the afternoon monsoon rains back in Tucson. There, you can sense subtle changes in the air that meant rain clouds would soon tumble over the Santa CatalinaMountains ending months of drought.
In Saline, we would step outside the house and marvel at the moisture in the air, the wet after a rain and even the rain itself. We all looked forward to our new life in Saline with the green of the trees and the rich, wet ground. With shoes off, we would feel the damp earth under our lawn giving way beneath our toes. This lay in stark contrast to the sharp crunch of shoes on stone we had left behind.
A few months later we discovered the sharp crunch of snow.
January 2008
Back in Tucson, an evening walk around the block was a regular family activity. In the summer, we would leave as the sun was setting and sidewalks had cooled enough for our dog's paws.
We made a point of taking the same evening walks in Saline and found they were a great occasion to meet neighbors and to figure out who actually played with all those basketball nets we noted around the block.
During humid summer evenings, the street was busy with bikes, skateboards, dogs, and strollers. As summer gradually changed into autumn, baseballs turned into footballs, and we noticed fewer kids playing in the street as homework beckoned them. When the air grew decidedly crisp, we began to notice only the hardiest of walkers on the route.
It was a little after Thanksgiving, when the sun was setting by five o'clock and the leaves had mostly dropped from the trees that we called off our nightly walks for the year. Now, from the warmth of our house, we watch the occasional solitary runner and bundled up dog walker pass by.
One morning, snow that had been threatened for days finally arrived and we awoke to eight inches on the ground. Thankfully, I had bought a snow shovel the week before, its handle still dusty from months of leaning against the wall of the hardware store. Last year, we had a one inch snowfall in Tucson that refused to melt until late the next morning. Nobody on our street owned a snow shovel and Tucson children had their first snow day in recent memory.
As I anxiously stepped out to shovel my first Michigan snow, I was surprised not to see my neighbors. I was halfway finished with my solitary scraping when I realized my rookie mistake. A bright orange snowplow was making its way down the street leaving a jagged heap of crusty snow at the end of every driveway.
Minutes later, I heard snow blowers roar to life up and down the street, throwing snow in tall white plumes to the wind. My neighbors, when they passed, waved and greeted me with wide grins asking if I was missing Arizona yet. I always paused to answer that I loved the snow. As I began to scrape and chuff through my pile, I would add, “That’s it for winter now, right?”
They always left laughing.
February 2008
Once we had finally unpacked our boxes and arranged our furniture, it was time to have neighbors over. We decided on a Sunday afternoon brunch with coffee and pastries. Since we roast our own, we thought a gathering over coffee would be a great conversation starter.
When the day came, we were delighted that ten families showed up. Interestingly, some of the neighbors had never spoken to each other before so we felt like we had brought some people together. We also invited a new family who had arrived from Wisconsin at about the same time we arrived.
During our talk over coffee and Danish, I noticed a few people pointing out locations to each other on their outstretched hands with Detroit at the base of the thumb. I had heard about this geographic gesture before but what was new to me was that some of our new friends were including their left hand to indicate the Upper Peninsula.
In Michigan, you either know the U.P. or you don’t, just like you either get jazz or you don’t. Some of our neighbors had been raised there while others had spent many wonderful summers there. If you had not already enjoyed an extended period of time in the North Country, it seemed to be a difficult place to explain. So we have put the Upper Peninsula on our travel list because we want to understand Michigan and our neighbors.
While pointing out where you live or came from on your extended hand is a way of locating yourself in Michigan, we had our own way of finding our directions in Tucson that I do miss on occasion. In that city on the desert, we were surrounded by mountains arranged like points on a compass so there was little chance of getting lost while driving. Catalinas were to the north, TucsonMountains to the west and RinconMountains to the east.
I never realized just how much I counted on those mountains for my bearings until I was returning from a conference on the far side of Detroit. I called my wife for directions, but when she asked which way I was driving I had absolutely no idea. The sky was so thickly overcast that I couldn’t even figure out north from south.
Perhaps it is time to buy a compass, or a better map, or a navigation system.
March 2008
We arrived in Saline before our furniture, so we spent our first night in sleeping bags on the family room floor. That first morning I rose early to enjoy the sunlight through our leafy green forest.
Suddenly I saw what appeared to be three large dogs running across the lawn. I quickly turned and bounded downstairs. Surely Saline had leash laws. On the way down I thought it odd that all the dogs I had seen in this neighborhood so far were leashed and firmly attached to their owners. I also thought it odd to have seen three at once.
As I spun into the living room, Dalai our Tibetan Terrier, was on all fours, body rigid, and staring out the window. You see them too, eh? I froze. What I had mistaken as dogs were actually a mother deer with two fawns standing quietly no more than two yards in front of us.
I had seen deer before but rarely this close and certainly not in front of my own window. Mother deer checked that there was no traffic and the three of them skittered across the street, bounded onto the lawns, and vanished into the dark woods.
Back in Tucson, we once experienced three javelinas ambling down the street at dusk and I startled a coyote with my headlights as he stood near the foot of the driveway. But this encounter with the deer seemed like a part of a special welcoming ceremony.
The day before, during our first minutes in the house, my daughter explored her new empty and echoing bedroom. She was still tentative about the move and significantly undecided about her new life in Michigan. She spent a few minutes looking out her window onto her bright green yard and the dense forest, so different from her orange and grapefruit trees and the raked brown stones she had grown up with in Tucson.
As she gazed out her eyes widened as she spied a solitary deer gingerly stepping out from behind the thick green foliage. It tugged at a plant, chewed a little and looked up. It was at that moment that my daughter felt more at ease and started to think of her Michigan life as an adventure.
On our evening walks as a family, we would encounter deer many times, pause a moment to marvel at them, and then continue on our separate ways.