ANN ABOUT TOWN: The Life

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Tuesday, March 24, 2015, 11:20 am
By: 
Alice Dreger

Photo: Terry Scharf (left) and Liz Cosby (of Red Haven), last night

Alice Dreger here. Don’t worry, you get Ann Nichols back next week. As ELi’s Managing Editor, Ann is busy nudging folks to donate to ELi before our spring fundraising campaign ends on March 31, so this week I get to play Ann about Town.

It seems appropriate, then, for me to write about where Ann was on the town last night. She was at my house, along with about 50 other interesting people from the area, for a party to celebrate a book I’ve just had published. Captain Carnivore was with her, and he kindly hastened to get me a fresh cocktail when he noticed mine had run out while I was deep in conversation with a friend who has worked for years in local community service projects, including Habitat for Humanity.

There was also the Michigan Make-a-Wish foundation friend I met a little over a year ago, when we were both trying to get people reconnected during the BWL power outage. There were the ELi tech managers who also work for All-of-us Express Children’s Theatre, the neighbors who run the calendar for ELi and who function as secondary parents for our son when we need them, the old friend who just retired from working for the state legislature, the friend who runs a dwarf talent agency, the nurse-neighbor-friend and her partner, a labor economist and City councilmember, our chief contractor, his wife (an Okemos Montessori teacher), and her friend who wanted to see our house.

There was the neighbor who is a professional house painter and who paints in gabardine slacks and cashmere sweaters and never gets a drop on him, the MSU professor and local activist organizing a trip to Cuba to work on creating a sister city program for East Lansing, and several medical school colleagues of ELi’s astronomy reporter, with whom I share a bed. (Clarification: the bed-sharing is only with the astronomy reporter.) There was the friend at whose dining room table the Better Art Museum (BAM!) Committee had formed to agitate for what would eventually become the new Broad Museum—and her son, his wife, and their lively grandchildren. There was the friend who is a minister at the Okemos Presbyterian Church, her husband, and their children. . .

The conversations were lively, engaged, supportive, and full of this kind of thing:  “Oh, I know who you are—my son works for you!” “Gosh, we haven’t seen you since we worked on that campaign together 15 years ago.” “I have a tree in my yard that I think is a descendant of a tree that is on the corner of your street.” “I have your chili recipe because our mutual friend gave it to me.” Forget six degrees of separation; everyone seemed to have at most two.

My work often takes me to big cities—Chicago, New York, L.A. And so my work often leads me into conversations with people who cannot understand why I would want to live in East Lansing. I will admit that that is one reason I asked Ann to write an “Ann about Town” column for ELi—because I thought it would help people who don’t get why we love living here to get it. I thought it would especially help people who arrive here from big cities and try to tell me there’s no there here.

Still, even with Ann’s painting in of the map, it seems rather impossible to convey to the Big City skeptics what I mean when I say to them, “the reason to live in East Lansing is the people.” There is something about a small college city where people come from all over the planet and then stay that turns it into a village. Your village.

I think maybe sometimes that village-ness is hard to “feel,” but I feel it when there is a gathering—the neighborhood picnics, the potluck dinners, the sleepy Sunday crowd at the farmers’ market, wine night at Beggar’s, and the occasional cocktail party. Sometimes I think the culture of this town—everybody works hard, everyone seems to be in bed by ten—pushes against our ability to be together enough. Most of the people I saw last night I see only individually when I am “about town.”

But sometimes we have the moments when a bunch of us come together, and at such times, I find myself wishing the Big City skeptics could be flies on the wall. It is true we lack for certain things here. But there is a life that is possible in a village in which one stays for a long time that is, I suspect, very hard to obtain in the lands of skyscrapers.

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