I want to tell you about my trip with Elizabeth to visit the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design (MIAD, pronounced MY-add), but I just wrote a huge long email to my parents about it, and I don’t feel like typing it out again; so I am going to cut-and-paste (and I will try to shorten it) and edit it a little so it makes sense as a post. Which I don’t usually do, so you may notice my tone seems Off; it’s because I was talking to my parents rather than to you!—but also to you, because as I was writing the email I started thinking I would probably use it as a blog post.

It was, overall, a very good trip.

I will start with the very worst thing, to get it out of the way, and then I will talk about everything else as a palate cleanser. The worst thing was that Elizabeth left her backpack, which contained her laptop, her driver’s license, her debit card, a fair chunk of cash she estimates at $35 so I’m guessing it was at least double that (i.e., I think she would want to downplay how much it was), her earbuds, etc., plus the backpack itself which was a relatively recent (this school year) expensive ($50, and that was on a good sale) purchase, on a bus; and, even though we discovered the loss within an hour, and even though it is HIGHLY UNLIKELY that the “leaving behind of backpack” would combine in a single hour on a particular bus with a representative of “the tiny percentage of the population who would steal a backpack rather than turn it in,” we did in fact hit those odds, and her backpack and her possessions are gone. When we arrived at our motel on Friday afternoon, instead of being able to relax into it after a day well spent on successfully figuring out the buses and a successful visit to an art museum and successfully figuring out more buses and successfully figuring out how to get our motel so we could relax and eat candy and watch TV, we instead had JUST discovered the loss of the backpack, and so spent a big chunk of time in high distress, making phone calls and freezing the debit card and making lists of what she could remember was in the backpack and trying to figure out for the bus company which bus we’d been on (we got a time-stamp off a photo we’d taken right before boarding the bus). We still had hope that we would find the backpack the next day, even though that involved a complicated maneuver (the administrative offices were closed for the weekend, so the only way to check was to go in person, by bus, to a particular central administrative bus location) but we felt we could figure that out in heroic necessity—but we did accomplish that complicated figuring-out, and we were not rewarded for our efforts, and the station attendant agreed with us in a VERY Wisconsin/midwestern way that we could count on this meaning the backpack had been stolen.

We are using a lot of Coping Thoughts. My primary Coping Thought is the one about how if a problem can be solved affordably with money, it is not a real problem. That is: no one was hurt, no one died, nothing permanent has happened; and by throwing money in various directions, we can fix most of this. The money is painful, but it is doable. If during our trip to Milwaukee, Elizabeth or I had been hit by a bus and permanently injured, THAT would be a real problem. Instead, we just need to send money and time and effort in the directions of a bank and a backpack company and a laptop company and the DMV and etc., and then it will be basically Fixed. But so far I am still waking up in the wee hours of each morning and thinking “WHY!! didn’t I check around us when we left the bus???” and “WHY!!! didn’t SHE remember her backpack???” and “HOW!!! did we manage to encounter the tiny-percentage-chance of a thief??” and so forth. And I keep thinking “BUT MAYBE we will still find it???” and then realizing no: if it were going to be found unstolen, it would have happened at the end of the bus day when the bus was being cleaned; and that was what we were checking when we went in person to the central bus station the next day. The clerk even went out to the cleaning station for us, just to make sure it hadn’t been put aside by a driver who then forgot to bring it to lost-and-found, and it had not been. The backpack and its contents are GONE. And the lucky, lucky, lucky thing is that Elizabeth had the presence of mind to cancel her debit card immediately, before anything happened with that.

Let’s move on.

We were stymied by the bus system. I had thought it would not be too difficult, but I had not realized we would need either exact change or a bus card or an app, so there was some scrambling. Partly we managed the situation because of the famous midwest attitude: each bus driver we encountered seemed fully prepared to delay the bus for as long as it took to explain to us what we should do. I was reminded of an inexplicable-yet-somehow-still-relatable meme I once saw, which said something along the lines of how people in the northeast/south/whatever were nice but not kind, and people in the midwest were kind but not nice. Each bus driver was non-smiling, direct, kind of short/barky with us—and yet, each one looked at us directly as people, assessed our situation, and genuinely tried to help us to the best of their abilities. One driver told us not to pay her, because she couldn’t give us a transfer if we were paying cash; she then drew our attention to the stop at which we should get off, and tried her best to explain to us how to achieve the next bus (we were unable to manage it, but that was not her fault). Another driver told us we should acquire a certain app on our phones; we had strong doubts, but it turned out that was the absolute best way to do everything. Another driver, when Elizabeth could not get her phone to pull up the ticket we’d paid for, just waved her onto the bus. This level of competence and care is the main of many reasons why, when the relevant bus drivers said the backpack was not on their buses, and when the station attendant left for more than ten minutes to check to make sure the backpack was not in the wash-house, we believed that the backpack was Truly Gone. Each time I am lying awake wondering if we should call back AGAIN, I think of this: if it were on the bus, it would have ended up with a driver, or at the wash-house; it did not end up with a driver or at the wash house; therefore it is GONE. I see I am talking about it again, rather than palate-cleansing. But my assumption is that your minds too will be spinning with possibilities where the backpack might yet be found, or where maybe if we just call one more time….

We really did feel TRIUMPHANT, figuring out the buses on this trip. At first it felt insurmountable—and it was SO COLD there, and WINDY, and we were STRANDED right off the bat, dropped off in the middle of Milwaukee by one bus and unable to figure out how to find our next bus. But we used Google Maps and we DID find the Milwaukee Art Museum, and it was about half a mile away from where we were, so we just walked. We were nearly numb by the time we go there, but we DID get there. And then we got to the point of Emergency Hunger/Thirst while there, and so we spent I am not kidding $35 on two servings of mac-and-cheese and a coffee at the museum cafe we had trouble finding and had to ask TWICE in order to find it, but we DID do that and it WAS the only right thing to do, because then we had to retrace our steps more than half a mile in the freezing cold and find our bus stop to the motel, which we DID DO, and which we COULD NOT HAVE DONE if not fortified. I consider the $35 to have been a co-pay for a medical treatment. (We don’t travel much, and I have made a mental note: we need to eat BEFORE we are hungry, because once we are hungry we can’t figure it out and can’t cope. I can Coping Thought one “medical co-pay” meal, but not more than that.)

It was when we got back to our motel that we realized we were missing the backpack, and I will just skip over those hours of stress and phone calls and so on.

The next day was by all measures a resounding success. We started at the wrong bus stop; we eventually realized that, and used the app to find the correct bus stop. We then realized we were half an hour early, and would die of exposure before the bus arrived. We went back to our motel room and warmed up. We set out again, for the correct bus stop at the correct time. We felt grateful for my anxiously over-abundant time-padding: we got on the correct bus at the correct time, and even with our false-start delays we still got to MIAD with plenty of time to spare. We browsed around the college neighborhood until our extremities were in danger. We went in, and signed in at a table with multiple sign-in people—and, when Elizabeth said her name, someone at the other end of the table overheard and called out “Elizabeth!! Hi!!! I’m your admissions counselor!! Come talk to me afterward if you have any questions!”

After checking in, we went downstairs and there was a nice muffins-and-coffee breakfast, which we consumed gratefully: being cold and figuring out buses apparently burns a lot of energy. Then there was the session, and we learned a lot about the school, and it all sounded good to me: there was lots of emphasis on preparing art students for Actual Paying Jobs, and I felt I was becoming sold on the idea of an art school, or at least THIS art school. Then there was a tour that turned out to be self-guided, which was disappointing to hear, since we have learned from experience that self-guided tours are almost worthless. But this one turned out to be fine, because the entire college (exclusive of dorms) is in one large building, and we were allowed to go pretty much everywhere—unlike other self-guided tours where we have looked at the outsides of buildings. I let Elizabeth lead the way through the place, and she seemed to me to be rather intense/researchy about it. We spent HOURS there. I played a lot of Pokemon Go, caught so many pokemon, spun so many pokestops.

The college is small, and it is art-only. Those are two things Elizabeth said she did not want. After the info session and tour, and then our afternoon intensive bus tour of Milwaukee (not yet described), I thought she must be reconsidering. But no: this visit confirmed for her that she wants a university-that-includes-an-art-college, NOT just-an-art-college. She says if she later changes her mind and wants an only-art school, she would want MIAD, and she can definitely see living in Milwaukee.

Happily, MIAD fed us lunch before we left, because then we had to figure out how to get a bus from MIAD to the bus station that had the weekend lost-and-found, and then figure out how to get from there back to our motel. We accomplished both of those things. The bus station attendant was the same non-smiling, kind-of-abrupt type, who then turned out to be someone who went allllll the extra miles to try to find the backpack, and seemed genuinely and still-not-smiling-ly invested in finding it, and genuinely sorry not to have found it. She also looked basically exactly like the entire Wisconsin branch of my family: stout and shortish, fair and rosy, short hair, glasses, no make-up. When I asked if in her experience there was any hope after this point of the backpack turning up, she made exactly the face that means no it was stolen, with exactly the words that don’t say no but mean no, which I can’t exactly remember, but were clear at the time, accompanied by an obvious display of sympathy and regret and wishing the world were not the way that it is.

From there we managed to get back to our motel, and by this time we were feeling pretty pleased with ourselves for ticking every task off our list, and also on the verge of utter collapse. We sat in our motel, eating candy and watching TV and recharging. After a couple of hours, at about 4:00, Elizabeth said she wished we had something else to do. I said yes but that there was nothing I could think of, especially with the sun going down soon. Then I said well…we still had our day-passes for the bus, and we could…just ride the bus. She said yes and stood up and got her coat. So we rode the bus, continuing to feel pretty pleased with ourselves for learning even as much as we had learned. Elizabeth was looking intently out the window at Milwaukee, really seeming to evaluate it, as she had on previous bus rides.

Milwaukee made a very good impression on both of us. It was similar to the big city near us, sort of, but all the manageable/good parts, none of the bad/oppressive parts. During the MIAD info session, they mentioned something about Milwaukee having the DENSITY of Chicago, but SMALLER, and that seems just about right. We heard ONE siren the entire time we were there, as opposed to our nearby city’s constant wails. There was no barf on the sidewalks, unlike our nearby city. There was a drunk guy at a bus stop, but he was benevolent. There were a lot of charming buildings. There was public transportation that seemed like it would be really good if you lived there instead of just being a dim visitor who didn’t know east from west. It felt like a city, but a MANAGEABLE/LIVABLE city. And there was a LOT of art: murals and sculptures and studios and etc.

At some point the bus was feeling kind of crowded and the sun was going down, and Elizabeth said we should get off and head back the other way, so we did—except first, right at the place we got off was a Penzeys Spices store, the spices of the revolution, which I started ordering online from in, oh, 2016 or 2017. So we went in and I bought a bunch of spices. THEN we headed back. We got back after dark, which I’d said I wanted to avoid—except the bus stop was right at our motel’s parking lot, so that was okay; and meanwhile we got to see Milwaukee At Night, and a very pretty sunset.

Back comfy and safe in our motel, we ordered delivery pizza/dessert and watched soothing programs on TV: the one where the guy deals with dog problems that are always owner problems; the one where a realtor and a designer compete to get a couple to either stay in their existing home or move to a new home; the one where some guy? is just inexplicably living on a big property? with a bunch of rescue animals? and, like, taking off his shirt pretty often?

Anyway, good trip. We are still waiting for the backpack stress to fade, but I feel that it will, and already it is less.