I was reminded of another very special word when I was driving into Ann Arbor this morning, and that word is homecoming. Our family's had three homecomings to Ann Arbor, Michigan, in my lifetime.
When I went to Ann Arbor, University of Michigan, what I really wanted to be was a radio announcer.
I worked in Ann Arbor for two years, covering Michigan football and basketball in the early 1990s.
Michigan State is always welcome at Ann Arbor. Your teams in all the various branches of athletics are more frequent visitors here than those of any other institution. This is as it should be, for not two universities are closer together in every way than Michigan State and Michigan.
Yesterday I wrote the majority of a song called 'Burn the Nightclub Down' which was about kind of driving into Cleveland full of dread at the prospect of playing at this night club and actually just the night before I had called my girlfriend whose birthday it was. And it's her birthday and here I am on the road in some hellhole in Ann Arbor in Michigan.
I went to hockey camp at Michigan because my dad has some relatives in the Ann Arbor area. We went to visit them as kids, and you start to learn the language from being around people. At the same time, when I got to college, I thought my English was better than it really was. I learned a lot over my four years.
That's one of the most important things to me is that Detroit and Ann Arbor got my back. If you don't have hometown love, then what's the point?
In 1975, I quit my tenure, and we moved from Ann Arbor to New Hampshire. It was daunting to pay for groceries and the mortgage by freelance writing - but it worked, and I loved doing it.
Although I was paid a salary in Ann Arbor, my wife and children and I drank powdered milk at six cents a quart instead of the stuff that came in bottles. I was a tightwad.
There are other places, surely, for other people, but for me there is one place, Ann ?Arbor, for there it was I discovered what lifes bright possibilities were.
I was in Ann Arbor, and I was told that this singer-songwriter guy wanted to meet me. It was Kurt Cobain. Nirvana had just made 'Bleach.' Kurt interviewed me on a college radio station. It was very strange. He was a fan of mine, and he gave me his album.
I drove across country in my yellow 1970 VW bug (which I drove until 1986) to Los Angeles, having had enough cold weather in 5 years in Ann Arbor, and found a job within a few days.
I grew up in Ann Arbor, about 25 miles west of Detroit. And when you grow up in that area, you get a healthy dose of Motown automatically.
Being in Ann Arbor, if I wanted to go from my apartment to the gym, I could get on the bus and it would be a two-minute ride, or a 20-minute walk.
Judging the political climate in my state by walking around lefty Ann Arbor is like a polar bear judging global warming by staring at the ice cube beneath its feet.
I was born in Ann Arbor. I lived for a while in Ohio; Pennsylvania, California for 10 years, and now in Boston. And I lived in Iowa for a couple of years, where I studied at the Writers Workshop.
Arbor Day is not like other holidays. Each of those reposes on the past, while Arbor Day proposes for the future.