Michigan Fall Quotes

The best sky was in Italy or Spain and in Northern Michigan in the fall

There are cities that get by on their good looks, offer climate and scenery, views of mountains or oceans, rockbound or with palm trees; and there are cities like Detroit that have to work for a living, whose reason for being might be geographical but whose growth is based on industry, jobs. Detroit has its natural attractions: lakes all over the place, an abundance of trees and four distinct seasons for those who like variety in their weather, everything but hurricanes and earth-quakes. But it’s never been the kind of city people visit and fall in love with because of its charm or think, gee, wouldn’t this be a nice place to live.

Perhaps swimming was dancing in the water, he thought. To swim under lily pads seeing their green slender stalks wavering as you passed, to swim under upraised logs past schools of sunfish and bluegills, to swim through reed beds past wriggling water snakes and miniature turtles, to swim in small lakes, big lakes, Lake Michigan, to swim in small farm ponds, creeks, rivers, giant rivers where one was swept along easefully by the current, to swim naked alone at night when you were nineteen and so alone you felt like you were choking every waking moment, having left home for reasons more hormonal than rational; reasons having to do with the abstraction of the future and one's questionable place in the world of the future, an absurdity not the less harsh for being so widespread.

During the late 1910s and early ’20s, immigrant workers at the Ford automotive plant in Dearborn, Michigan, were given free, compulsory “Americanization” classes. In addition to English lessons, there were lectures on work habits, personal hygiene, and table manners. The first sentence they memorized was “I am a good American.

It is a scientific fact that the crack between the stove and the kitchen counter serves as a kind of voracious black hole, sucking in all falling objects within a meter radius.

Keys parachuted down into one of the exact seats he purchased that he and his father sat in as season ticket holders in the Old Barn on Grand River Avenue. Keys slipped his arm around the empty chair dressed with his father’s withering Tiger’s baseball cap, secured to the seat with a quarter inch drywall screw. Keys reflected upon his father, who chauffeured Keys and other players, every weekend, to a hockey tournament somewhere, “You know pop…every kid you gave a ride too game or practice, came to your funeral. When this hat falls away, no more screws, pop. I’m gonna branch out…make new friends. Soon as these gypsy moths get a hold of your precious, Old English “D”, here--turn your glory years, Kaline and Mclain into tree threads.

Instead of eating his lunch, he told you what Oblonsky and Levin had for lunch in Anna Karenina. Or, describing a sunset from Daniel Deronda, he failed to notice the one that was presently falling over Michigan.

Michigan wasn’t broken for over a century. But when it finally cracked, from the inside out, the people who knew its history rose to fix it, and restore the meaning of a simple, timeless saying: This is Michigan.

During the late 1910s and early ’20s, immigrant workers at the Ford automotive plant in Dearborn, Michigan, were given free, compulsory “Americanization” classes. In addition to English lessons, there were lectures on work habits, personal hygiene, and table manners. The first sentence they memorized was “I am a good American.” During their graduation ceremony they gathered next to a gigantic wooden pot, which their teachers stirred with ten-foot ladles. The students walked through a door into the pot, wearing traditional costumes from their countries of origin and singing songs in their native languages. A few minutes later, the door in the pot opened, and the students walked out again, wearing suits and ties, waving American flags, and singing “The Star-Spangled Banner.

When I teach at Michigan, on the first day I tell the students, “You will not miss class. You will not be late to class. You will not use a laptop, or a cell phone, or wear a hat. My late-paper policy is simple: There will be no late papers, ever. That is my ‘late-paper policy.’ Why? This is Michigan.

I read a postelection blog post by the great Ursula K. Le Guin that said that we should stop using the metaphors of war. We should not think in terms of enemies and battles, because such thoughts, in themselves, change who we are. We need to be like water, she wrote. Water can be "divided and defiled, yet continues to be itself and to always go in the direction it must go." The water metaphor takes me many places. It takes me to the melting Arctic ice and the rising sea levels. It takes me to the Gulf of Mexico and Deepwater Horizon. It takes me to the toxic tap water of Flint, Michigan, and Corpus Christi, Texas, and Hoosick Falls, New York. It takes me to the water cannons used against you. But it also takes me to you, oh water protectors!

Messiah thought back, his mind floating back in time to the day he’d taken Mo to Stepping Stone Falls to let her high come down. That morning. He’d found out that morning. He had been diagnosed with cancer. It was the biggest reason he had warned Morgan that he would never be able to stay. That he would hurt her. That they would never be. There was no future with him. No wedding. No growing old together. He knew that it would hurt her to only have him for a little while, but that small moment of time that they had carved out was the best days of his life. Those days outweighed every ounce of pain he had ever felt. He looked at his illness as a blessing, because he would have never crossed the line with Morgan if he hadn’t been diagnosed that day. Hearing that he was sick made him want to risk what little time he had left on her. Messiah couldn’t allow himself to die without indulging in an angel. Morgan had been his biggest blessing and he had been her biggest curse. She would never know how sorry he was. He would never be able to tell her. “It’s been awhile. About a year or so,” he said. “You’re 180 pounds. According to your records from your doctors in Michigan, you were 225 at your last visit. You know what that means, right? They should have told you what to look for. The signs. You should have…” “I know,” he said. “I was busy living. I didn’t want to take the time out to die. I found a girl to love me for a little while. It was worth it.” Messiah stepped down and the woman looked at him in stun.

As Reagan’s first budget director, Stockman, a former two-term congressman from Michigan, was the point man for the supply-side economics the new administration was pushing— the theory that taxes should be lowered to stimulate economic activity, which would in turn produce more tax revenue to compensate for the lower rates. With his wonky whiz-kid persona, computer-like mental powers, and combative style, he browbeat Democratic congressmen and senators who challenged his views. But he soon incurred the wrath of political conservatives when he confessed to Atlantic reporter William Greider that supply-side economics was really window dressing for reducing the rates on high incomes. Among other acts of apostasy, he called doctrinaire supply-siders “naive.” The 1981 article created a sensation and prompted Reagan to ask him over lunch, “You have hurt me. Why?” Stockman famously described the meeting as a “trip to the woodshed.” Though the president himself forgave him, Stockman’s loose lips undercut his power at the White House, and in 1985 he left government to become an investment banker at Salomon Brothers.

Sam scanned the orchards. U-Pickers laughed and posed for photos with apples on their heads, babies in the baskets, hugging trees. She lifted her head to study the sky, blue as her eyes. The clouds moved across the sun, blocking it out for long distances at a time, causing the landscape in front of her to become illuminated one patchwork piece at a time: the rolling hills lined with grass and endless rows of trees, peach, tart cherry, apples of every variety; blueberry bushes sitting at the bottom of the hill where the rain pooled; the old red barn where high school kids doled out baskets for fruit, which Sam's father weighed when they returned; the old shed where more high schoolers handed out free donut samples and sips of apple cider to arriving cars; the farmhouse with shutters- designed with apple cutouts- where her grandparents, Willo and Gordon, lived; the blue-green waters of Suttons Bay stretching out beyond the trees, the Old Mission Peninsula jutting into it; the family cornfields that sat across M-22 and would soon be cut into an intricate corn maze filled with spooks and goblins to scare fall visitors. This slice of northern Michigan was Sam's home, her whole world.

I preached at First Congregational Church of Battle Creek, Michigan, in June 2017, and they shared this version of “Come Thou Fount” with me. I share it with you here as a call to action and as an invitation to the politics of resilience in an age of the tyranny of the now: Come thou fount of every blessing, give me courage to resist. Oh dear God they came and killed you, but at death you shook your fist. Make me clever like the steward, make me angry like the poor, teach me to unbind the captive, teach me to unbar the door. O dear God, I have such power, that I never toiled to earn. Help me wield it for liberation, may the fires of your justice burn. Guide me God to read you truly, may your truth be named and heard, When I read the holy scripture, help me God to hear your Word. Moving Wind, your seed of justice, grows into a mustard tree— it is so big, and obnoxious, is there room there, God, for me? O my Jesus, come like leaven, infiltrate our hearts and minds as we struggle to be human, help us to decolonize. When the powers stand against us, when we join hands with the meek, help us God against their fury; wield the weapons of the weak. As we stand up to oppression, as we speak the truth to power— Holy One, you walk beside us: we need you every hour. While I struggle with my hatred, with my fear and bigotry: help me Lord to join your struggle, help me dance this way with thee. Give me prophets to confront me, give me comrades in the call! Give me visions of that day when we will see the powers fall!

Filming was done outside San Antonio, Texas. The scale of the production was vast and complex. Whole battlefields were scrupulously re-created on the plains of Texas. Wellman deployed as many as five thousand extras and sixty airplanes in some scenes—an enormous logistical exercise. The army sent its best aviators from Selfridge Field in Michigan—the very men with whom Lindbergh had just flown to Ottawa—and stunt fliers were used for the more dangerous scenes. Wellman asked a lot of his airmen. One pilot was killed, another broke his neck, and several more sustained other serious injuries. Wellman did some of the more dangerous stunt flying himself. All this gave the movie’s aerial scenes a realism and immediacy that many found almost literally breathtaking. Wellman captured features of flight that had never been caught on film before—the shadows of planes moving across the earth, the sensation of flying through drifting smoke, the stately fall of bombs, and the destructive puffs of impact that follow. Even the land-bound scenes were filmed with a thoughtfulness and originality that set Wings apart. To bring the viewer into a Parisian nightclub, Wellman used a boom shot in which the camera traveled through the room just above table height, skimming over drinks and between revelers, before arriving at the table of Arlen and Rogers. It is an entrancing shot even now, but it was rivetingly novel in 1927. “Wings,” wrote Penelope Gilliatt simply in The New Yorker in 1971, “is truly beautiful.” Wings was selected as best picture at the very first Academy Awards ceremony in 1929. Wellman, however, wasn’t even invited to the ceremony.

University, where she is an adjunct professor of education and serves on the Veterans Committee, among about a thousand other things. That’s heroism. I have taken the kernel of her story and do what I do, which is dramatize, romanticize, exaggerate, and open fire. Hence, Game of Snipers. Now, on to apologies, excuses, and evasions. Let me offer the first to Tel Aviv; Dearborn, Michigan; Greenville, Ohio; Wichita, Kansas; Rock Springs, Wyoming; and Anacostia, D.C. I generally go to places I write about to check the lay of streets, the fall of shadows, the color of police cars, and the taste of local beer. At seventy-three, such ordeals-by-airport are no longer fun, not even the beer part; I only go where there’s beaches. For this book, I worked from maps and Google, and any geographical mistakes emerge out of that practice. Is the cathedral three hundred yards from the courthouse in Wichita? Hmm, seems about right, and that’s good enough for me on this. On the other hand, I finally got Bob’s wife’s name correct. It’s Julie, right? I’ve called her Jen more than once, but I’m pretty sure Jen was Bud Pewtie’s wife in Dirty White Boys. For some reason, this mistake seemed to trigger certain Amazon reviewers into psychotic episodes. Folks, calm down, have a drink, hug someone soft. It’ll be all right. As for the shooting, my account of the difficulties of hitting at over a mile is more or less accurate (snipers have done it at least eight times). I have simplified, because it is so arcane it would put all but the most dedicated in a coma. I have also been quite accurate about the ballistics app FirstShot, because I made it up and can make it do anything I want. The other shot, the three hundred, benefits from the wisdom of Craig Boddington, the great hunter and writer, who looked it over and sent me a detailed email, from which I have borrowed much. Naturally, any errors are mine, not Craig’s. I met Craig when shooting something (on film!) for another boon companion, Michael Bane, and his Outdoor Channel Gun Stories crew. For some reason, he finds it amusing when I start jabbering away and likes to turn the camera on. Don’t ask me why. On the same trip, I also met the great firearms historian and all-around movie guy (he knows more than I do) Garry James, who has become

I don’t take kindly to any of you shanty boys touching me,” she said. “So unless I give you permission, from now on, you’d best keep your hands off me.” With the last word, she lifted her boot and brought the heel down on Jimmy’s toes. She ground it hard. Like most of the other shanty boys, at the end of a day out in the snow, he’d taken off his wet boots and layers of damp wool socks to let them dry overnight before donning them again for the next day’s work. Jimmy cursed, but before he could move, she brought her boot down on his other foot with a smack that rivaled a gun crack. This time he howled. And with an angry curse, he shoved her hard, sending her sprawling forward. She flailed her arms in a futile effort to steady herself and instead found herself falling against Connell McCormick. His arms encircled her, but the momentum of her body caused him to lose his balance. He stumbled backward. “Whoa! Hold steady!” Her skirt and legs tangled with his, and they careened toward the rows of dirty damp socks hanging in front of the fireplace. The makeshift clotheslines caught them and for a moment slowed their tumble. But against their full weight, the ropes jerked loose from the nails holding them to the beams. In an instant, Lily found herself falling. She twisted and turned among the clotheslines but realized that her thrashing was only lassoing her against Connell. In the downward tumble, Connell slammed into a chair near the fireplace. Amidst the tangle of limbs and ropes, she was helpless to do anything but drop into his lap. With a thud, she landed against him. Several socks hung from his head and covered his face. Dirty socks covered her shoulders and head too. Their stale rotten stench swarmed around her. And for a moment she was conscious only of the fact that she was near to gagging from the odor. She tried to lift a hand to move the sock hanging over one of her eyes but found that her arms were pinned to her sides. She tilted her head and then blew sideways at the crusty, yellowed linen. But it wouldn’t budge. Again she shook her head—this time more emphatically. Still the offending article wouldn’t fall away. Through the wig of socks covering Connell’s head, she could see one of his eyes peeking at her, watching her antics. The corner of his lips twitched with the hint of a smile. She could only imagine what she looked like. If it was anything like him, she must look comical. As he cocked his head and blew at one of his socks, she couldn’t keep from smiling at the picture they both made, helplessly drenched in dirty socks, trying to remove them with nothing but their breath. “Welcome to Harrison.” His grin broke free. “You know how to make a girl feel right at home.” She wanted to laugh. But as he straightened himself in the chair, she became at once conscious of the fact that she was sitting directly in his lap and that the other men in the room were hooting and calling out over her intimate predicament. She scrambled to move off him. But the ropes had tangled them together, and her efforts only caused her to fall against him again. She was not normally a blushing woman, but the growing indecency of her situation was enough to chase away any humor she may have found in the situation and make a chaste woman like herself squirm with embarrassment. “I’d appreciate your help,” she said, struggling again to pull her arms free of the rope. “Or do all you oafs make a sport of manhandling women?” “All you oafs?” His grin widened. “Are you insinuating that I’m an oaf?” “What in the hairy hound is going on here?” She jumped at the boom of Oren’s voice and the slam of the door. The room turned quiet enough to hear the click-click of Oren pulling down the lever of his rifle. She glanced over her shoulder to the older man, to the fierceness of his drawn eyebrows and the deadly anger in his eyes as he took in her predicament.

mine or Billy’s?” Slowly turning the pages of the old album, they poured over grainy gray pictures and reminisced about long-ago Christmases, birthdays, and vacations they’d taken on the shores of Lake Michigan. Margie found the activity soothing, and she said, “Wade loved his grandpa’s cabin. He was always relaxed there. It was where he wrote some of his best love songs.” Barbara said, “I remember falling asleep in

She half-remembered a summer's night in Michigan when she was a girl. She had feared she would fall into the sky. "Oh, it's not just us. This is a... cooperative project ofmany galaxies. That's what we mainly do--engineering.

Brandon envisioned a world in which the loser of the Michigan–OSU game could find redemption. That’s not how it works. That’s not how any of this works. You lose the game, you fume for 364 days until you have an opportunity to right the wrongs. This is not a carnival fun ride. It’s college fucking football.

Contrary to the rumor mill, which often depicted Sarah Harbaugh as some kind of Las Vegas model attracted to Jim’s money and fame, who refused to leave California for Michigan, the former Sarah Feuerborn (pronounced “Fear-Born”) is not from Las Vegas, but Kansas City, the youngest of 11 children, whose father was an accountant at General Motors. She earned her degree in education from the University of Missouri, then moved to Las Vegas because teaching jobs were easier to get there.

In fact, the top 11 games of total offense for any player at any position in Michigan history are all held by either Denard Robinson or Devin Gardner—best friends who lived together for three years. “I think we represented 1428 Brookfield Drive pretty well!

Goss, his wrestling coach, and other experts came up with sensible reforms to end the long-standing practice of extreme weight cutting, then told the Big Ten and the NCAA that Michigan would only wrestle under those rules, and would only wrestle against other teams that abided by them, too. Such a stand might have gotten another program blackballed from the wrestling community. But when it came from the Michigan athletic director, it proved to be the lever needed to reform the sport at every level, with the Big Ten adopting Michigan’s reforms, followed by the NCAA, and the high schools—a sequence of events that Yost, Crisler, or Canham would have readily recognized as Michigan’s influence at its best. Those rules are still in effect today.

Arguably the nation’s greatest public university and its greatest college football program can both be found on the same campus in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Michigan students, lettermen, alumni, faculty, and fans take a great deal of pride in that unique combination—and they watch the source of their pride very closely. They believe it’s not just Michigan’s victories that matter—on and off the field—but the values behind them that are so important, values that place a premium on community, achievement, and integrity. When they feel those values are threatened, they rise to defend them.

Even the shift to presidents nationwide had its downsides. “The problem is,” Canham said, “they confused presidential control for presidential management. What would a bureaucrat know about that?

You have to do everything you possibly can to develop your middle tier of talent. It’s your job, as the leader, to make those people do more than they thought they could—maybe more than you thought they could—and put them in the best possible position to help the team.

January and February are long months in Michigan. The days are often cloud-filled and dark, and night falls in the early afternoon. My grampa used to always say it took a certain type of person to weather winter in Northern Michigan. Yes, one had to love the snow and cold, the dry skin, a running red nose and the warmth of a wood fire, and, yes, one had to be hearty of soul, but—more than anything—one had to be ever patient and hopeful.

Aa . . . Aabitaa-dibikad apii Aabaabiigindizoying Aazhigijishinoying Aawendamang Aanzinaagodizoyang. Ah . . . At midnight We unwind We fall back And recognize Our revolution.

In the following years, Andrew remained at his father’s side, assisting in the farm work and livestock breeding and continuing his experiments with ostensibly labor-saving agricultural contraptions. That phase of his life came to an end with the close of the century. In 1898, the sixty-five-year-old Philip took his third wife, a widow named Frances Murphy Wilder, twenty-five years his junior. Not long afterward, Andrew left home. Despite the best efforts of researchers, little is known about the next eight years of Andrew Kehoe’s life. Census records show that, in 1900, he lived in a boardinghouse in Ann Arbor and worked as a “dairyman.”17 At some point—at least according to his claims—he enrolled at the Michigan State Agricultural College in East Lansing. Founded in 1855 as the nation’s first educational institution devoted to “instruction and practice in agriculture, horticulture and the sciences directly bearing upon successful farming,” the college (which later evolved into Michigan State University) gradually expanded its curriculum to include training in mechanical, civil, and electrical engineering, Kehoe’s alleged major.18 Sometime during this period, he evidently made his way to Iowa and found work as a lineman, stringing electrical wire. He also seems to have spent time in St. Louis, attending an electrical school while employed as an electrician for the city park.19 Family members would later report that, while residing in Missouri, he suffered a serious head injury: “a severe fall” that left him “semi-conscious for nearly two months.”20

Rather than erect a building from scratch, town officials decided that they would save money if they renovated and expanded an existing school. The school they selected was centrally located in the village and had been constructed in 1873 out of bricks supplied by the Bath brick factory. Work began in the fall of 1921 on what would eventually be hailed as “the grandest building ever constructed in the township” and “one of the most modern schools in Mid-Michigan.”11

Monarch butterflies born in the fall are different than all the other monarchs. They are a super generation. They can live up to eight months as they travel from Canada all the way down to our forest. Then, after waiting out winter here, they’ll head up to warmer places like Louisiana and breed. Their children will live for only six weeks. It can take five generations of their children, who live so much shorter lives, to get back to Canada. Then those born at the beginning of fall, they become the super ones again. Then those ones begin the great journey. They can fly from Michigan all the way here, to Zitácuaro.” As we

In Domestic Manners, Fanny Trollope gave an exaggerated account of a cheesy stunt: sending derelict boats over the falls to see how they would fare. She put the number of vessels sacrificed at three, but in fact there had been only one, the Michigan, cruelly loaded with circus animals. The Michigan disappointed an estimated ten thousand spectators by breaking up before it reached the falls, with some of the animals swimming safely to shore.

By the fall of 2021, schools across the country had lost a staggering number of teachers, paraeducators, substitutes, bus drivers, and other staff who quit, retired early, got sick, or died because of the pandemic. In September 2021, 30,000 public school teachers gave notice. Florida had 67% more teacher vacancies than the previous year. California's largest school district had five times the number of teacher vacancies as in prior years; Fort Worth, Texas, was close behind with four and a half times the number of vacancies. A small Michigan district lost a quarter of its teaching staff, while statewide there was a 44% increase in midyear teacher retirements. Lacking enough staff to operate, some schools across the country temporarily closed; hired students to serve lunch during school hours; grouped classes together in the cafeteria, where building services workers or untrained parent volunteers supervised hundreds of students; and/or asked the National Guard to fill in as bus drivers and substitute teachers.

Even if you fall flat on your face, know that you're moving in the right direction.

Custer, dressed in an almost comical black velvet uniform of his own design that featured gaudy coils of gold lace, galloped to the head of the First Michigan and assumed command. Well ahead of his troops, with his sword raised, he turned toward his men and shouted, “Come on, you Wolverines!” With Custer in the lead, the Michiganders started out at a trot but were soon galloping, “every man yelling like a demon.” When Custer’s and Stuart’s forces collided on what is now called East Cavalry Field, the sound reminded one of the participants of the thunderous crash of a giant falling tree. “Many of

Even the southeast side of Grand Rapids must bow to the beauty of a Michigan fall.

A major portion of the cost of defense against foreign aggression in a laissez-faire society would be borne originally by business and industry, as owners of industrial plants obviously have a much greater investment to defend than do owners of little houses in suburbia. If there were any real threat of aggression by a foreign power, businessmen would all be strongly motivated to buy insurance against that aggression, for the same reason that they buy fire insurance, even though they could save money in the short run by not doing so. An interesting result of this fact is that the cost of defense would ultimately tend to be spread among the whole population, since defense costs, along with overhead and other such costs, would have to be included in the prices paid for goods by consumers. So, the concern that “free riders” might get along without paying for their own defense by parasitically depending on the defenses paid for by their neighbors is groundless. It is based on a misconception of how the free-market system would operate. The role of business and industry as major consumers of foreign-aggression insurance would operate to unify the free area in the face of any aggression. An auto plant in Michigan, for example, might well have a vital source of raw materials in Montana, a parts plant in Ontario, a branch plant in California, warehouses in Texas, and outlets all over North America. Every one of these facilities is important to some degree to the management of that Michigan factory, so it will want to have them defended, each to the extent of its importance. Add to this the concern of the owners and managers of these facilities for their own businesses and for all the other businesses on which they, in turn, depend, and a vast, multiple network of interlocking defense systems emerges. The involvement of the insurance companies, with their diversified financial holdings and their far-flung markets would immeasurably strengthen this defensive network. Such a multiple network of interlocking defense systems is a far cry from the common but erroneous picture of small cities, businesses, and individuals, unprotected by a government, falling one by one before an advancing enemy horde.

..technologies are being created to help us beat jet lag. Researchers at the University of Michigan are developing an app called Entrain, which uses sophisticated math and data analysis to tell users how and when to utilize light to more quickly shift their sleep cycle in a new location. And then there is Re-Timer, an eyeglasses-like piece of headwear that can be used not just by travelers but also by shift workers who need to make regular adjustments to their circadian rhythm, especially in the winter. Worn over the eyes, it exposes the wearer to a simulation of outdoor light, which, when used in the morning, can help reset our body clock so that we can fall asleep at the right bedtime.

To use a sports analogy, Putin’s attitude through the fall of 2015 was much like that of a University of Michigan football fan on a weekend the Wolverines don’t have a game—cheering for whoever was playing Ohio State.