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I have several times been briefly in, near, or through the State of Michigan, U.S.A. Only briefly. Sometimes in automobiles, and twice, sleepily, on Greyhound buses. I could perhaps put my finger on Houghton on an unmarked map, but not Lansing, where I’ve never been but which I’ve heard about a lot, and not Grand Rapids nor Ann Arbor, which I have seen when I wasn’t sleepy. And maybe not even Detroit, which I think is down by the cuff of the mitten, and everybody should know where it is, but I am not sure.
There is one more Michigan place I don’t think I’ve been to, and whose location I’ve never really wondered about, a town I bet you probably have heard of, too, and whenever I happen to hear that city’s name, I think, every time, of a certain woman I never met, never saw or heard described, a woman whose voice never met my ears for real, not even in a recording or on the telephone. And yet, name that town right now and I will hear, plain as day, that woman’s voice, I will hear her little lament, the only words of hers ever reported to me, and those words on just one single trivial occasion, forty-some years back in my ever dimming past. It’s like a song stuck in my head, that woman’s imagined voice, singing the notes of the musical name of the Michigan town.
At the time of that trivial occasion, Vivian and I were living in Mililani. We got together one evening with friends, a haole couple from Ohio, who had been in Hawaii about a year. The husband was an Army captain assigned to Schofield Barracks, the wife a student, third-year law at UH. The wife mentioned to me and Viv that they had, the previous weekend, attended a first-birthday celebration in Nanakuli, where she, the haole lady, had met another wife, a woman who had grown up on Oahu, she, the other wife, said, but who had met and married an Air Force man from the Mainland and had spent a year with him at a little Air Force base in Michigan and had not long ago returned to the Islands. “Oh!” exclaimed the haole Ohio lady (or that’s what I’ve always understood her to have exclaimed). “That must have been interesting! Did you visit a lot of interesting places on the Mainland?”
And at this point (at this point in the Ohio lady’s story), I don’t remember exactly how the Ohio lady recited the Michigan lady’s reply, but in my mind, every time since, when I have ever heard the name of that Michigan city, I have heard the Michigan Air Force wife indignantly reply, “No, no, I nevah see nothing, one whole year on Mainland. He nevah take me nowhere! One whole year we stay in Michigan, on Air Force base one whole year, and my husban’ nevah one time even take me to da Kalama Zoo!”
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