The Grad School Diaries: The Pie-Hole Principle

The weather is still miserable this morning, as the planet gradually makes its way toward summer and the long Michigan winter drags by, but neither of us cares. We’re on our way to our new regular breakfast spot: The Grand Traverse Pie Company, at Grand River and Haggadorn in East Lansing. Despite the name, the restaurant also offers other kinds of food, including a number of breakfast items. We like it because the food is excellent, prices are good, the location is campus-adjacent, and the people who work there are nice. I can also report that the dining area is clean, comfortable and well-lit, and the atmosphere suits us very well during those intervals when we’re trying to get ready for another day of work, school, teaching, and other career-oriented madness. The fact that it’s the first place we went in East Lansing is just a coincidence…

In July of 2008 we left Los Angeles and drove from California to Michigan, arriving in East Lansing around lunchtime on the 10th. To some people it might all have seemed routine, but we were coming home to a place we had never been before, and knew only from pictures and streaming Web videos. After exiting from the Interstate and driving around two sides of the MSU campus we eventually found ourselves at the small strip mall that houses the Pie Company. We decided to stop and try the place, since it met our two primary requirements for road food: it was clean, and we could keep an eye on our car (and its vast load of luggage and other belongings) from our table. Little did we know that this would be the start of a business relationship that would become a regular part of our work day, make us regulars on the local scene, and replace the bakery café where we had started many of our mornings back in L.A.…

Anyone meeting us first thing in the morning would probably assume that my wife and I have been together since High School, and these days they’d probably assume that we’ve been living in the area for years and purchasing out breakfast at the Pie Company since the place first opened. Only a very acute observer would realize that this is a new passage in our lives; that we came together by pure chance at a time in our lives when neither of us really believed we would ever have such happiness, and that we arrived in Central Michigan by an even greater chance. The difference of a few seconds or bytes one way or another, and I might never have cracked into the top levels of the GMAT; a single bad answer or committee member’s whim and I might not have been accepted by MSU; if the events of my life to date hadn’t all lined up just right we might not have had the resources to take a chance on graduate school at this time of our lives; if my wife or I had made our choices based on logic rather than emotion, we might not have ended up together at all…

When I think about how completely insane a chance I’m taking, and all of the dozens (if not thousands) of things that will have to break just right for me to pull this off, I can’t help thinking that my entire life to this point has been one long case of beating the odds. Had anything not broken just right in my past, I probably wouldn’t be sitting here in this really nice bakery café having breakfast with the most wonderful woman I have ever known, waiting for the sun to rise and the world to warm up and the bagels to toast. I don’t know where fortune will take me next; I don’t really know if there will be a new breakfast spot waiting for me four years hence, let alone a new job, a new challenge and a new home. But when I look across the table, I have to say that so far I’m coming out ahead. Deal the cards, and let’s play another hand…