Pure Michigan

When pinball was illegal, there, still, still. 1970, 1971. All five of us juniors under Arts and Letters, various: Classics, Mathematics, History, History, Theology. Sundays, we’d slip across the border from South Bend, Indiana for a cold beer. Saint Michael said drunk, “Why don’t we go to Ypsilanti,” drunk we all laughed at the sound of, “to see the ruins of a Normal school, burned down, was like a castle, and burned down,” and sober we arrived at Eastern Michigan University, unburned and whole, pristine.

And so. We carried on, to Detroit. No pinball, there, like I said, we found a place to drink. Michael, more or less, Michael stared at the ceiling, what had been a fire was still smoldering in his imagination, pinging, like uh, across the map: maybe Normal, Illinois, maybe Alva, Oklahoma the great city of murals, New Britain, Connecticut, Terre Haute, Indiana, everything he knew about knowing seemed in flux. I said, “Anyway, we gotta be back in class in,” I checked my watch, he stared, “seven hours.” If, then and there, in Detroit, time seemed to fly, it was just that, on blue highways, at dawn, it seemed a long drive back.