We were walking home from downtown and it was raining and I gave the “kids” in the pickup truck the best directions I could. Basically, getting to Dexter from where we were in the bowels of our labyrinthine neighborhood involved turning around, then going east and south. Twisty turny enough that I hate giving people directions to anywhere from the bowels of my neighborhood. I did think to ask, “Where are you trying to get to?” “Knights!” was the reply. I totally cracked up. How did I know that? It’s the second time this week one of us has fielded that question. The first time, people actually came to our *door* to ask! I wonder how they guessed that we would know where the neighborhood steakhouse / pub was? The problem is that Dexter, the street on which Knight’s resides, is totally torn up at the moment. You can get to Knight’s but the route is not straightforward. Knowing Knight’s clientele, they will not lose much business.

It was a beautiful walk downtown to the Oscar Tango tonight in a sweet sweet rain. Chilly (upper 40s) but no wind. That house in the photo is on Crest Street, two doors down from the famous 111 Crest house, where some of my fave cuzzints lived back in the day. I remember many good times there. My old coot’s bank always purchased a set of season tickets to U of M football games and we would travel down here once every fall to attend a game. The routine was something like this:

• Leave Siberia when school got out on Friday afternoon.
• Dinner at the Sugar Bowl in Gaylord. Steak sandwiches (medium rare) with fries for everyone. Coke for kids and beer for parents. (The Sugar Bowl is still alive and kicking!)
• Arrive Ann Arbor in the late evening and raise havoc with cuzzints.
• Donuts (?) and cider for breakfast Saturday, then Pooh and I would walk downtown and shop all the “hippie stores”.
• Get dropped off at the game via Chez Harry (who was probably greatly relieved to get rid of everyone for the afternoon, I know I would be). The parents had the high-falutin’ bank tickets. The rest of us would just walk in and pay something like $2.50 a person and sit in the *un-crowded* end zone. Yes, really.
• Us kids would walk home (or at least Pooh and I did, not sure if Jay and The Engineer also walked, or maybe they walked separately). The merry-go-round at Allmendinger Park was what was on *my* agenda. It wasn’t a fancy merry-go-round with horses and whatnot, just your everyday garden-variety playground type. Up in the yooperland, we had to go to Brimley State Park to use one of those and you can bet we didn’t go there very often because you had to *pay* to get in, don’tcha know. At any rate, Pooh always obliged me about that stupid merry-go-round.
• The rest of the afternoon, I dunno. Maybe we walked up to Virginia Park? Then dinner and hanging out in the basement playing records (Herman’s Hermits maybe?) and watching TV
• Sunday morning, breakfast and then — alas — we would head back over toward the freeway, out Huron/Jackson and up N. Maple past the neighborhood I have now lived in for about a gazillion years. Who knew? Sort of a reverse deja vu.
• Northbound I75 and eventually home.

We are actually *in* town for the second weekend in a row. I am back into some semblance of a flinging mode and some others have also made some inroads. I wonder what we’ll get done…

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