Mile 17573: When I studied at Michigan State University, I studied in the library. Archives Bookshop and Grand River Coffee. East Lansing

I always connect the Archives Bookshop to the Curious Bookstore across Grand River from the student union. I connected these two rare and used bookstores to the wonderful new edition bookstore at the base of M.A.C. Called Jocundrys, it hired poets for staff and kept coffee hot and ready in a corner called Poet's Corner. The corner had a antique wood table with an good writing surface and a window facing west for the evening sunlight and people watching on Michigan Agricultural College avenue, abbreviated M.A.C. I drank the coffee as if it were the Pierian Spring and began a lifetime habit of keeping journals. None of which are now extant from that period. Maybe that is a blessing. I rarely interfered with the men and women who searched the collection of chapbooks, collected poems and magazines. They were real poets I exclaimed inside the silence of my mind. Some I knew by name or face. Some were my teachers. Some were impossibly beautiful. Here I read Diane Wakoski and Donald Hall without paying for the books or taking them home. I made sure my hands were clean and I didn't bend the pages or damage spines. I did begin the habit of buying books for myself here, but inexpensive paperbacks of Thomas McGuane or Raymond Carver.

I read online most of my text now and I write in the few bookstores I find open. However, I search every place I live for a place as inspirational as Poet's Corner at the now defunct Jocundrys. I often find an adequate match, more often than not. I see this as progress.

My acquaintance the playwright Julie Crosby had a flat above the Campbell Smoke Shop, across the street. We went about the town a few times but I was no match for what I perceived to be her sophistication. She waited tables at the Kellogg Center and I washed the dishes from the dining room  and the banquet halls. She was a playwright from Midland after all. I attended an opening of her play in Erickson Kiva and then we all repaired to the Small Planet to drink Champagne. Not sparkling. Champagne. On someone elses tab. Her on again off again boyfriend, from Midland too, had provided the play's music on a multitude of Jazz instruments, sax, keyboards, drum set. I had a discussion with him once to which he reported to Julie when she arrived, "he's been busy." I remember only one line from the play. "Suckers swim on the surface." I have steadfastly tried to not swim on the surface. Sometimes, I am not strong enough to dive.