THIS is a CLOSE-UP?

  In the summer of 2013, when I packed away the last stuff I was ever going to take from my first-ever house on Resort Pike Rd. outside of Petoskey -- a small place twelve minutes from the College, purchased at a slightly inflated price from two work colleagues and ultimately sold for far less -- I had a moment’s sorrow where I cried in the guest room / music room, shedding tears by myself for a moment that seemed longer than it was, thinking about promises made and promises broken while an uncertain but exciting future lay ahead.  I'd left plenty of apartments in the past without a second glance, but this was my first goodbye to a house, and it was tougher than I expected. But the transition away from the Perch Lake house that I called home for almost exactly seven years, pictured above in the bottom center? My first house as a married dude with a wife and two little doggos, my first house on a body of sparkling clear water, my most expensive purchase to date? Leaving that ho...

In January of 1984, a thirteen-year-old boy took the SAT’s in a large and uncomfortable room surrounded by hundreds of other kids and scored a 920 combined. That score was good enough for me to qualify to attend a three-week summer academic program (a.k.a. "nerd camp") at Alma College from 8 July to 27 July called the Midwest Talent Search. Given the choice between a mathematics or English program, I chose English.  I chose English largely because of a middle school teacher named Mrs. Brown, who taught a 7th + 8th grade English Enrichment class of which I was a student. In the two years that I was in English Enrichment, my writing simply wasn’t consistently good enough for Mrs. Brown, and I got the worst grades of my middle school career. At the time, my grandfather was the assistant principal and athletic director, so perhaps I suffered for the sins of the (grand)father, as not everyone warmed to the unyielding countenance of Earl Haight. Or perhaps it was the simple fact th...