A Confluence of Perfection

Hello all! I hope everyone had a wonderful weekend. I had one of those weekends that, despite the bad news and regionally difficult times, was one of those perfect weekends that both confirms my commitment to the state and reminds me of why I use some portion of my time writing on this website trying to convince people that we are worth saving. In this instance, the reminder is again based on the people who largely define my love of the state and my hope that these people will continue to be able to make their lives here.

On Friday evening, my sister flew in from Minnesota for a wedding I attended with her on Friday night for a good friend from college. My sister currently lives in Minnesota with her husband and they both work at the Mayo Clinic, so it is always a joy whenever we can manage to schedule some time to spend with them either here or in Minnesota. My brother also recently started his career as a consultant requiring a large amount of travel, but he too was home on Friday. On that night, my brother, sister, and I all shared a house with my parents and while it was crowded, everything seemed just about right with the world.

As I usually spend most of my weekends, I spent most of Saturday and Sunday morning with my beautiful fiancee, we made dinner together and watched some of the Olympics, and nothing else really mattered beyond being together.

Sunday morning, my siblings, parents, grandma, and uncle got together for a buffet-style brunch for eating in mass quantity and talking at an above average volume level to ensure my grandma could hear our words. Those kinds of meals are always the best because everyone becomes accustomed to the loud volume and even the most pleasant conversations consist of people yelling at each other.

Sunday afternoon, we had our annual Block Party where all the good people of my block pull chairs together into a circle, bring their potluck contributions, throw water balloons, and catch up on all the parts of their lives that are not necessarily easy to share with your neighbors while taking out the trash or cutting the front lawn. It is difficult to explain why this can be so much fun, but all of these people are tied together by sharing a small piece of the earth and working to make it presentable. At the end of the night, the weather turned absolutely perfect and I took a sunset run as the sky transitioned from brilliant orange to red to purple to gray to blue.

I dream of weekends like this for the rest of my life with my family, friends, neighbors, and eventual children, and this is only possible if there is profitable work to be had, strong schools to attend, and a consistent belief that the future can and will be better than the present. I genuinely believe that we can and will develop into a stronger state, and that I will perpetually share weekends like this with all of my Michigan brethren. The hardest part for us, but the one that we can most directly affect, is to believe and promote that the future holds unlimited promise and we are united in our effort to get there.