The other day I stopped on my bike ride to buy a loaf of bread. I was having a serious carb deficit, and with the long hill still ahead, thought I’d add an oatmeal cookie to the order.

“That’ll be…eight dollars,” the clerk said.

On the very short list of Things I Will Not Miss About Ann Arbor, that tops the list — eight bucks for a loaf of bread and a cookie. So many of the other things I was warned about have not only not been a problem, they make me question the perception of the warners.

Here’s the gist: “Oh, man, you’re not going to believe that place. Buncha liberal busybodies in your business all the time. The P.C. capital of the universe.”

True, for every “God bless and support our troops” sign you see in Fort Wayne, you see an “Another family for peace” sign here. But no busybody of any political stripe has been in my business at all, nor in any business I’ve been able to observe. You can still smoke in restaurants. Rampaging gangs of lesbians do not enforce no-leg-shaving laws. I’m sure the city council is capable of passing resolutions declaring the city a nuclear-free zone, but so what? Nearly 20 years of life in the Fort has inured me to city-council silliness. And if you see an excess of Honda Accords with bumper stickers reading “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention,” it’s balanced by the years in Indiana reading about someone’s cold, dead fingers being pried off a gun.

Yin, yang, blah blah blah. Anyway, it’s time to move.

The truck arrives in the morning and everything goes out the door shortly thereafter. We’ll be out of touch for a few days. Check back…Monday, maybe? When we’ll be back in the land of cheap bread. Dammit.

OK, so it’s self-indulgent. But when someone writes about what it’s like to be a columnist, I can identify.

Here’s something I never said to my mother when she asked, “What happened at school today?”

The conflict managers put on a show called, “American Conflict.”

Apparently it was a spoof on “American Idol.” The person with the best conflict resolution won a million bucks. (Just in case you ever find yourself in a contest like this, the winning suggestion was: “I think you should work it out.”)

Actually, there are lots of things in school today that weren’t there when I was a kid, by cracky. Here we are in the final week of class, and learning has basically stopped. The special sections — art, music, etc. — have been given over to the video, and we’re into a round of parties, celebrations and hoppin’ throwdowns.

Who decided children would learn more if they attended school for 180 days? Oh, right — legislators.

Otherwise, a hot day. Turned on the A/C, packed boxes, negotiated voice mail. Discovered I couldn’t get my old phone number back, after a mere 10 months — it’s been reassigned already. In the middle of it all, I took a bike ride. Even in the heat, the hill homestretch is now merely a nuisance, a sign that all that cottage cheese on my thighs is merely camouflage for legs of steel and wire. I can now officially kick a man to death. Don’t tempt me.

You know, I haven’t said much about Ronald Reagan. What’s the point? He had his charms and sterling qualities and was loved by millions — let them have their week. I may spend it quietly contemplating how a man whose family was a dysfunctional train wreck came to be known as an advocate for family values, how a guy who never went to church is remembered as a great Christian president, and all the rest of it. But I think we rounded a curve today, and are officially in Princess Dianaland. Behold, the prose of presidential daughter Patti Davis, who built a writing career out of first hating her parents and then being all reconciled ‘n’ stuff. She was not so upset by her father’s death that she couldn’t manage to scratch out a few lines for the chronicler of our times, People:

And as Nancy Reagan publicly showed her heartbreak, details of her final private moment with the love of her life were revealed last night as one of deep sorrow and miraculous surprise.

“At the last moment when his breathing told us this was it, he opened his eyes and looked straight at my mother. Eyes that had not opened for days did, and they weren’t chalky or vague,” Davis recalls. “They were clear and blue and full of life. If a death can be lovely, his was.”

Glad to know you got a paycheck out of it, Patti.

I’ll stop now. You all carry on.

…here’s Retrocrush’s 50 Coolest Song Parts. Song parts? Sure. You know, like the fast part of Ike and Tina Turner’s “Proud Mary” (No. 23) or the harmonica solo in the Romantics’ “What I Like About You” (No. 46). I’ve a big quibble with their No. 1, but I expect everyone’s got their own opinion.

Discuss.

When you’re a newspaper columnist you get calls from people like this all the time. They ring you up and give you their pitch: “Hi, I’m walking/running/riding my bicycle across the country this summer, to work out my midlife crisis/raise breast-cancer awareness/attend my high-school reunion. I’ll be in your circulation area tomorrow, and if you’d like to write a story about me, well, that’d be swell.”

Sometimes you do it, sometimes you don’t, but if you don’t, chances are some other poor sap on the city desk will get stuck with it. Editors love people who do this, God knows why. Occasionally they’ll have a decent story to tell, but most of them say the same things: Wow, people sure are nice. A lady invited me into her house and gave me a piece of pie! This really is a good country after all.

(Disclaimer: Occasionally people bring a different approach to the gimmick. Figures these guys are Chicagoans.)

The guy in this story is a columnist himself, so he knows the game at something of a meta level — he’s not only giving interviews along the way, he’s writing columns about it, which are appearing in some great newspapers I’m sure you’ve all heard of, like the Bradford Era (“Your Dependable News Medium”), the Titusville Herald (“First Daily Newspaper in the Pennsylvania Oil Region”), and the Chronicle, an Independent Newspaper Since 1877. You can follow the links and read them yourself, if you want. Having scanned a few, I can give you the gist: There’s a different America out there away from the hustle and bustle of the city, a place where whittling strangers call out, “Come and set a spell,” and you know what? Small towns are really different, too. People know your name in the supermarket, and that’s worth something. And that brings us back to where America is today. Something’s gained from a modern world with so many choices – but something’s lost, too. Tell it, my brother.

It so happens I have a different reaction to most small towns. I drive through a few dying farm hamlets between Fort Wayne and Columbus, and it never fails to push a little oxygen over the dying coals of my religion: Thank you, God, for not making me live here, and also for not making me grow up here. My idea of hell is having everyone in the supermarket know my name, and while I don’t mind setting a spell, I’d rather not do it with someone who’s whittling. (Mixing a blender full of daiquiris, now, that’s different.)

So it doesn’t surprise me that these stories are an easier sell in Titusville and Fort Wayne than they might be in, say, Chicago. The dwindling numbers of Americans left in tiny towns like to flatter themselves as much as New Yorkers. I only wish we could come up with something more profound than this: Prices are also cheaper, in some cases, he says, inexplicably cheaper. In a Coke machine in these parts, prices are about 50 cents. On the East Coast, a Coke will cost $1.25 to $1.50. It baffles him.

Cletus, I hear tell that in New York City, you can pay twelve dollars for a cheeseburger.

If it’s the second week in June it’s the final days of school — finally. And that means it’s time for Kate to give her teacher a thank-you note and for us to pull up stakes.

Many of you have written to ask what’s next post-Fellowship, and my answer has been: Answer cloudy, try again later. That’s still the answer, but for the purposes of keeping body and soul together, it looks like I’ll be going back to my old newspaper, although I won’t be writing a column or anything else. I’ll be coming to work at oh-dark-don’t-remind-me as a desk editor.

I only mention this because this week kicks off MoveFest ’04, when my priorities turn from scanning news sources for amusing bonbons to present to you, dear reader, to fighting with utilities and truck-rental companies in voice-mail hell.

I’ll still be around, and posting, and available. But it might be a bit light, punctuated by 4,000-word rants about so-called customer service.

If you get bogged down in the spinach of Reagan tributes, try a little buttercream with this NYT trend story on the latest obsession among the betrothed: The truly over-the-top wedding. Sample passage:

Although some degree of perfectionism is present in every blusher-length veil and ribbon garland – in every hand-lettered invitation, silver cake knife and, lately, every chocolate fountain that a bride feels she must have – this perfectionism, wedding professionals say, has ballooned into an obsession.

One California bride, on a quest to be size 8 by her wedding day, had her jaws wired shut for two months. “She could only eat through a straw,” said Monique Lhuillier, a Los Angeles bridal designer who made the woman’s dress. And more of her customers, Ms. Lhuillier said, are buying two gowns – a traditional style to please their mothers for the ceremony and a second, trendier model to wear during the reception.

I was amazed at the nice throwdown Alan and I were able to put on for a budget of around $5,000. Granted, that was 11 years ago and the dress was polyester, but I discovered the two keys to a truly exceptional wedding, which I will share with you now, and save you $95,000 or so:

1) Open bar is worth whatever you pay, and;
2) The guest list is everything.

And that is all.

When does a person begin to die? The Bob Dylan definition works as well as any: “He not busy being born is busy dying.” (Maybe I’ve finally found my vanity license plate: BZBNGBRN.) But after watching both my parents die in the last three years, I’d say the real turn toward home starts when you’re no longer in control of your own forward movement. If you’re able to push yourself in a wheelchair, you’re still swinging. But once you’ve become cargo for someone else to move from place to place, I’d say your quality of life has dipped into the red zone. My mother, who had Parkinson’s and eventually died of pancreatic cancer (officially, anyway), was more or less inert for the last seven years of her life. She never complained about this, but once she reached the point where it was difficult to hold her head up and she could no longer feed herself, I started actively hoping for this cup to pass. I didn’t wish her dead, but I wished her something better, and there just wasn’t any alternative. My dad was pretty shaky at the end, too, but the fact he went from ambulatory-with-cane to his funeral mass in just under two weeks? This was a blessing.

Your mileage may vary. I’m just thinking out loud here.

In the newspaper business, when a prominent person develops a bad cough, so to speak, we prepare an obituary. Some people are so prominent we have one in the drawer from the get-go; President Clinton’s is waiting in a file somewhere at the New York Times, and President Reagan’s was, too. But Reagan’s has been regularly polished for at least a decade. The reaper-is-nigh advisories have been going out for years, only to be waved off later. This was a very, very long decline. Even when my mom’s body had utterly failed her, her mind remained sharp. Reagan’s family lost both years ago.

So, for his family, I have all the sympathy in the world. I’m glad it’s over for them. I know exactly how they feel.

As for Reagan Himself, let’s leave that for another day, or the comments. OK, one quick note: This was the headline on my News/Free Press today:

REAGAN DIES, BROUGHT HOPE BACK TO AMERICA.

Oh, that liberal media.

I sent Alex this review of Tony Hendra’s new book, “Father Joe,” a memoir of Hendra’s spiritual mentor, a Benedictine monk. It is, by all accounts, the story of a decades-long friendship with a man whose vision of God matched this description: His God is ”gentle, generous, endlessly creative, musical, artistic, an engineer and architect of genius, a ‘he’ who felt his joy and your joy deeply, who could be hurt just as deeply but would never give up on you.”

Alex replied: As a gay man — and one who was raised without religion, one who has experienced persecution by the pious and become quite embittered — there’s part of me that wants to throw rejection back in their faces. And yet sometimes I feel as if I’m cheating myself out of experiencing spirituality. … I wish there’d been a Father Joe to talk to me when I was seventeen instead of a high-priced shrink when I was thirty-four.

There’s one take. Then this morning, I read this column, jeering at Catholic cardinals for disapproving of the Iraq war, and came across a remarkable passage: I am a Catholic convert, baptized 15 years ago this Sunday. Growing up seeing the greeting-card Jesus � a hapless-looking, bearded man in pyjamas � I didn’t “get” Christianity. What changed everything was the day I saw a 16th- century painting of Jesus after his resurrection. He had just blasted his way out of his own tomb. He extended his pierced hand to Abraham, to rescue him and the other patriarchs from Limbo and bring them home to heaven. This Jesus was forceful, businesslike and respectful � like . . . well, like a Marine.

(“Blasted” — I like that. Christ as munitions expert!)

They say you catch more flies with honey than vinegar, but obviously steroids work pretty well — on New York Post columnists, anyway.

Last night at Border’s I saw an interesting book I probably should have bought, rather than pushing it to the after-the-move list: What’s the Matter with Kansas?”

In asking �what�s the matter with Kansas?� � how a place famous for its radicalism became one of the most conservative states in the union � Thomas Frank, a native Kansan and onetime Republican, seeks to answer some broader American riddles: Why do so many of us vote against our economic interests? Where�s the outrage at corporate manipulators? And whatever happened to middle-American progressivism? The questions are urgent as well as provocative. Frank answers them by examining pop conservatism � the bestsellers, the radio talk shows, the vicious political combat � and showing how our long culture wars have left us with an electorate far more concerned with their leaders� �values� and down-home qualities than with their stands on hard questions of policy.

A brilliant analysis � and funny to boot � What�s the Matter with Kansas? presents a critical assessment of who we are, while telling a remarkable story of how a group of frat boys, lawyers, and CEOs came to convince a nation that they spoke on behalf of the People.

It’s the last part that got me, especially when I read some excerpts from the Enron tapes, made by some of the company’s energy traders. On behalf of the People, ahem:

During California’s rolling blackouts, when streets were lit only by head lights and families were trapped in elevators, Enron Energy traders laughed, reports CBS News Correspondent Vince Gonzales.

And when describing his reaction when a business owner complained about high energy prices, another trader is heard on tape saying, “I just looked at him. I said, ‘Move.’ (laughter) The guy was like horrified. I go, ‘Look, don’t take it the wrong way. Move. It isn’t getting fixed anytime soon.”

Keep in mind, one of the good guys in the Enron scandal? The whistle-blower? She was working on a project to give Enron control of virtually all the potable water up for grabs in the world. Water. Imagine what jokes they could make about that.