The first time I was mistaken for an “Ann Arbor Hippie”, I was practically a kid and didn’t even live on the Planet Ann Arbor. Of course, I mistook the person who mistook me for an Ann Arbor Hippie for one of those dreaded frat boys. Sheesh. He was from Bolivia and I was from Sault Ste. Siberia. Frat boy? Not. Hippie? Not. Although I can’t say that I didn’t think it would be cool to be a hippie back when hippies were doing all kinds of cool things and I was a totally uncool teenager stuck in a snowbank up there in Siberia.

Years later, I was mistaken for a “hippie” again. We were with our then elementary school age beach urchins at the Log Slide near Grand Marais in the good old Yoop. We were at the top of the log slide, high above Lake Superior. All four of us had tie-dyed t-shirts on, and we were kind of wandering around at the top of the slide. Some obnoxious divorced woman with kids (and believe me, we knew she was divorced only because she proclaimed it loudly to anyone within earshot) was babbling about dragging her school-aged kids down the log-slide. Something like, “we’ll have accomplished so much when we have walked back up.” You know the kind. Here’s a short video of someone else going down the logslide. The last thing I wanted to do was walk all the way down that log slide and back up in deep sand with little kids. I could see tears in that future, most likely mine. Yiiy. Anyway, she glommed onto our t-shirts and asked us where we were from. That’s always a complicated question for me to answer but the short answer is “Ann Arbor”. “Ohhhh, you are old hippies,” she said. Er, well, not so much, uh he is a computer scientist and I am a systems analyst. We own a rather typical ticky-tacky-type house, some furniture, and a few automotive vee-hickles, including a minivan in those days. We do like tie-dyed t-shirts. Yes.

Tonight. I got home from work and walked downtown to meet the GG for dinner. He had walked to work today and then to downtown. This was all my idea. We used to walk downtown all the time. The last few years, I have been a stick-in-the-mud. I can’t exactly explain why. A facet of my own personal grieving process in part and also ramping up into full-time employment after years of beach-slugging and whatever. We weren’t out late tonight. We ate at the Old Town and then walked around for a while and then the GG dragged me kicking and screaming into the martini bar (beware, site plays music) on the way home. And guess what? I *loved* it in there! I’m not sure what is with me sometimes. Click here or on the pic for a few photos of my A-squared city on Flickr.

G’night, yer wanna-be-once-but-not-quite-hippie kayak woman signing off from the back room of her loverly Landfill home on the Planet Ann Arbor. With the doors open because it is warm but it’ll prob’ly snow tomorrow. It is March and this is the Great Lake State, blah blah blah.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 19th, 2010 at 9:25 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.