Today, ten years ago

Ten years ago, I was in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I lived there. I rented a very gloomy studio apartment in an old house on Packard Street. I was a first year graduate student, spending my first winter alone in the eastern time zone. The house next door was filled with undergraduates who held late night drunken parties. The apartment downstairs was rented by a couple I had never met, who had sole control over the thermostat and would turn the heat off completely when they left town.

My apartment had two rooms and a small bathroom. The kitchen had a dark green floor and an old stove, and just enough space for a small table and two chairs. The living room / bedroom had gray carpet, and was furnished with a bookcase, a bed, and a huge desk. The bed was a rollaway with a lumpy mattress. The desk stood up against a window with years of dirt caked on the outside. Through its grimy panes, I could watch huge fat squirrels run through the neighboring trees.

By January 14, 1999, there was snow under those trees. I would awaken in the darkness to the sound of NPR and the local news. While I dressed, I listened to reports of school closures all over the county due to record snowfall and unusually low temperatures. But my classes were never canceled. Each morning I slipped over the snowpacked roads and sidewalks, picking my way over the gray ice to campus, a 15 minute walk. On the way, I passed rows of wooden houses with peeling paint, severe red brick university buildings, darkened dorms, and fast food restaurants with films of greese on their windows.

My office was a cave in the center of the building. Ten of us first year students were packed in under the glow of flourescent lights. Sylvia used to sing at her desk. Pete worried aloud that his grades might drop if he helped any of the rest of us. I mostly worked in silence at my corner desk, posting pictures of blazing red deserts to remind me that once the world was not all gray.

I was assigned as a visiting teacher through church. The woman I taught had severe clinical depression, and would call me late at night in tears and tell me of cold hopelessness, and of disappointment. Except what could she tell me? I was a disappointment. My grades were lower than they had ever been. I imagined the faculty watching me from afar with pursed lips, and suspected that Pete wondered aloud to Liz why I had qualified for the fancy fellowship and he had not.

By May I was gone. I payed three months of rent to get out of my contract. I dumped the desk for scrap metal.

But on January 14, in the record breaking cold and snow, I did wear on my left hand a ring and a promise of green Januarys. The one who gave me that ring lived three time zones away, and his was the voice I heard most that winter, with a hard plastic phone propped between us under my chin.

In the following years, I looked up at the sun through the palm trees in the coolness of a California January, and rejoiced. The light, the smell of growth, and the warmth filled my heart with pure joy, even under the threat of qualifying exams, oral exams, dissertation defense. I miss deeply my California Januarys.

By contrast, I have been back to Ann Arbor a couple of times since that year. I notice first the peeling paint, the gray sky, the gloom and the dreariness. I am sorry, Ann Arbor. Leaving you was the best decision I made in the last ten years.