That Michigan

His favorite lake: Superior. Mine: Michigan.

- Meredith Grahl Counts

When John and I were near-strangers, in the same master’s writing program in Chicago, he showed up late one night to a Michigan party that my friend and I used to throw for Mitten expats. Looking around, he raised his voice above the Motown soundtrack and told us we were “not that Michigan.” I was not immediately charmed.

See, I am pretty Michigan. My great grandpa, who suffered paralysis on his left side, customized his car with a suicide knob and got the first handicapped taxi cab driver’s license in the state. Automotive ingenuity? Pretty Michigan. As a very small child, my grandma and her big brother, Frankie, sat in the empty, seatless back half of a car on the drive to Canada and rode home perched on disguised rum barrels. My family’s roots are here. On my upper arm there’s a tattoo of both peninsulas, from 2001. I got it when I was down there studying on that other side of Lake Michigan, homesick, and young enough that I thought I’d never move back, that writers had to go live in New York to write, and I’d need to carry my home with me. No guy was going to tell me I wasn’t that Michigan.

A couple of years after we talked at that party, each of us were living with our respective parents back home, and oddly, working in the same suburb. I opened the small-town newspaper we sold at the gym café where I worked, and there he was: That jerk who thought he was more Michigan than I was.