A different trip begins as life moves on

Rick Freeman

Freeman of the Press

There's a reason you sleep through the transition from drunk to hungover. It hurts. You've probably done it before. Now imagine that you're making that transition in a coach-class seat at 7:30 in the morning. It's snowing in April, and your plane has paused on the runway for a coat of deicing fluid. The pilot is telling you, for some reason, what the fluid smells like, and the thought of honey-scented deicer is more than your stomach can handle on this particular Sunday morning. So you lock yourself in the forward lavatory, and heave away.

"Ding!" Welcome aboard. This is the real world - a rough transition from a state of bliss to a sober, serious reality.

I spent last weekend searching for a new home, in a town I'd never before seen. Don't get me wrong - it's a great place. I'm even lucky enough to have some of my best friends in the world as neighbors (just around the corner.) But if I thought my trip from new home to old was tough on a 757, the return trip - for keeps - will be even rougher.

I'm leaving a place that has shaped who I am. I'm not the same person I was when I came here. I found friends, a career and things I never even knew I wanted to find. Now this idyllic world of greasy food, cheap beer and 35,000 people in my age demographic is slipping into my memory. What was once everyday life is about to become a story told and re-told.

Life is going on.

Whenever I come back into the Daily, I feel out of place now. I'm a ghost here. People don't notice my presence unless they want to. Used to be, I walked in, and people were asking things of me before I had my coat off.

Now, I can watch the early-evening hubbub as a fly on the wall. It's sad, in a way. I used to matter here. Everything we used to do was driven by a pure desire to produce the best journalism we could and by the grand passions of youth. And when I say that, I don't just mean everything we did in here. We took it home with us during the few hours we spent at home. We socialized together. Friends who knew us before the Daily became frustrated. We struggled to tell them stories, because they didn't know the characters, didn't know a cutline from a deadline.

We had our lives consumed by an old brick building we came to love.

Now, we miss it. We call ourselves Daily Ghosts. But we don't haunt this place so much as it haunts us. We know that our lives will never again be this way. In some ways, they might be better, but in many they will not. Never again will we be so filled with such a sense of meaning, of doing something that really mattered that we are willing to sacrifice our friends, credit rating, health, money and social lives for something.

John Updike once wrote that Ted Williams radiated the hard blue glow of high purpose. The Kid had nothing on this place. The light bulb in the tower of the Daily (Go ahead and look sometime) is just a symbol of it.

Even in the past few months of my exile from here, whenever I get within sight of Maynard Street, I make sure to look for the green bulb glinting behind the windowpanes. One of my next glimpses will be my last. My new life begins 535 miles away - too far to see, but not too far to remember.

As soon as I made it home from Metro, I curled up and slept for seven hours. When I awoke, Vijay Singh had won the Masters, the sun was starting to disappear behind the trees on the west side of town, and best of all, I was back in Ann Arbor.

My journey of headaches and heaving seemed like a distant nightmare. But dimly, I was aware: I'm on borrowed time here. My time as a ghost is forever, but my time as an Ann Arbor resident (it even says so on my drivers' license now) is measured in days. You can count them on one hand right now.

Soon, sooner than I care to, I begin the awkward coupling of my new life to my old one. It won't be smooth, it won't be fun, it might even require some de-icing.

But my last trip, though it cost me my lunch and some dignity, was worth it. This one might be too. It just won't be the same.

- This is Rick Freeman's final column for the Daily. He would like to point out that this might just have been the best time of his life. E-mail him at rickfree@umich.edu.