I can now, with complete confidence, tell the world I’ve been to Toledo. The one in Ohio, that is. As we crossed the Michigan-Ohio border late on Saturday morning, and the signs for Toledo were abundant, Lilly asked me about the name. It sounded familar, she said. I said it was the same as the city in Spain, except for pronunciation.
Ah, she answered with sudden recognition. We studied about places in Spain in Spanish class, and that was one of them, she said. Why is this town named after that one? Was there some connection?
None that I knew about, I answered. Someone in the settlement’s early days thought it would be a good name, and it stuck. There are North American towns with even less connection to their name-givers, such as every Canton. (According to the Canton, Ill. C of C, for instance, “the city was founded by Isaac Swan in 1825, he named it thus, from a notion he entertained that its location was the antipodes of Canton, China.”)
On Friday morning, Lilly and I set out for Ann Arbor, Mich. She’s entertaining the notion of applying to the University of Michigan, so we both thought this would a good thing to do. Since Ann Arbor is roughly five hours’ drive from metro Chicago, if traffic isn’t too bad, there and back on the same day wasn’t a reasonable option.
So we timed the drive to get a look at campus and environs on Friday afternoon, both on foot and in the car. The central campus is large and pleasantly collegiate. Sidewalks and green grass repose under mature trees in full summer green, and among buildings mostly dating from before modernism. Ivy on some of the walls inspired a discussion about just exactly what people talk about when they talk about the Ivy League. Any school can grow ivy, I told Lilly, but only a few are in the Ivy League (most of which I could name, but not all). Yet there are plenty of other schools just as good as the Ivies.
The campus wasn’t overly crowded, it being summer, but it was well enough populated. I’d been there before, but it was more than 10 years ago, maybe as long ago as 1999, to attend a real estate conference that the university holds every fall. I went at least twice, but digging through my papers to figure out just when is more trouble that I care to take.
One on of those visits, I got a good look at campus, including the of U-M Museum of Art, which had the virtue of being open and being free. Nice collection, too, as I dimly recall. I’ve read that the museum’s expanded significantly in more recent years. We arrived too late to see that or the intriguing-sounding Kelsey Museum of Archaeology, the Stearns Collection of Musical Instruments (which has the first commercial Moog synthesizer, among other things), or the Matthaei Botanical Gardens. Actually we were too tired for that last one, open till sunset, which is quite late this time of the year in the western part of the Eastern Time Zone.
What’s Toledo got to do with this? Toledo’s only a short drive south of Ann Arbor, and I determined that it was barely out of our way in returning home. So as trip organizer, I tacked on a few hours in Toledo on Saturday. Why did I want to go? It’s a distinctive place I’d never been — not counting driving by a few times — yet not really that far away. That’s almost all the encouragement I needed, since that’s the way I think. Also, I’d read that the Toledo Museum of Art is first-rate. And so it is, accessible for a nominal fee: $5 to park. Otherwise, no admission. Behemoth art museums in certain larger cities could learn a thing or two from that.
