Mobile Midlanders

Okay. So I'm past all that messiness now. One of the big things I've noted over the years is how Michiganders (yes, that's the word!) and especially Midlanders get about.

For the former, standing in a LONG line to buy a ticket to ascend the Eiffel Tower about four years ago, I learned the couple in front of us lived only a few blocks from my old elementary school in Ferndale, MI. (I am guessing the economic situation in Michigan is pretty bad, with such old buildings still in use -- when the Salk-Sabine polio oral vaccine came out, I received mine in that very same building. )

But I keep running into Midlanders, wherever I go.

Soon after we arrived in California I joined Junior Achievement. (Even, or especially, in 1968 it seemed to be on its way out -- outside of the investor and entrepreneur classes, Capitalism was a Bad Thing.) Among my first acquaintances was... somebody from Midland. Who had moved away about the time we arrived, we'd attended the same church, many of my friends had been his friends, and so on.

A few years later I met a couple at church who had lived in Midland for a few years after I'd left. I seem to recall he taught there, but what and where I have forgotten; in any case, they were now in Mountain View, California.

About three years ago we had a temporary receptionist who... turned out to be from Midland. My guess is she was born three to four years after I left, but I am not sure. She still has family in Midland, out on the east side that my 1960s map says was not developed back then. (It also does not show the then-unbuilt now-mothballed nuclear plant that might sit atop an old girlfriend's former home to the southwest.)

And a professional society colleague here also turns out to be a Midlander. Though he attended Dow HS, not MHS. (They were still building Dow HS when I left; I have never seen it.)

I am not sure why I sometimes have this sense of "Michigander" or even "Midlander" when I meet folks, but the sense generates very few false positives (and few false negatives). Maybe it's part of having been "more native than the natives," as well as the proclivity of Michiganders to move about. I don't know.

But we seem to be everywhere.