my wife and I have been to 2 of the finest restaurants in Detroit over the past few weeks. Here’s what I wrote to a foodie friend about one of them after a January 2 outing. I’ll post the other if Tim can find it on his server.

Hey Tim.  Happy New Year to you and Kathy.  Have you been to Republic Tavern in Detroit?  Kathy and I enjoyed another delightful 6-course tasting dinner with pairings there yesterday, a treat before Cirque de Soleil.  The restaurant – they’ve mostly dropped the “Tavern” part – is located on Grand River just off 75 41 minutes from our house in the imposing stone 1897 Grand Army of the Republic castle, taking up the first floor with a large open space featuring wood, brick, an old tin ceiling repurposed as a wall, exposed ductwork, big windows showing the Christmas lights of Beacon Park to the front and Cass & Adams with the backsides of Woodward’s Foxtown buildings to the back, with unisex bathrooms  decorated with postcards of old Detroit.  The food surpasses the architecture.  The chef follows the farm-to-table ethos, and the ingredients are cooked and sauced to unique exquisitiveness.  I’ve attached last night’s menu so you can see what we were sampling.  We started going there at Julia Welch’s recommendation, whose niece Sarah was executive chef when the restaurant won Eater Detroit’s 2015 Restaurant of the Year.  Sarah was fired 2 years later, went independent for a while, then opened up Marrow, a fun meaty place on Kercheval (also worth a trip) that the Freep called 2nd best new restaurant in Detroit last year.   Frankly, Republic hasn’t missed a beat in her absence.  Compared to Albena, this place is more traditional, warm and fulsome.  But you and Kathy would enjoy either place, just emerging a little more full from Republic.

Trying to load in the pdf of the menu I scanned in from this particular night failed, but you can look at a typical Republic menu at https://www.republictaverndetroit.com/menu/. The carrots never change. The link no longer works as the restaurant is tragically defunct, victim of COVID. Here’s a representative menu from its heyday.

I wrote this to share with a few friends late Thursday

Nice win by our Wolverines in a pretty thrilling double overtime contest against the Boilermakers of Purdue tonight.  Their big guy #50 Trevion Williams (from Henry Ford Academy in Detroit!), who replaced the very tall skinny but injured Haarms was a beast in the post, much more than our big guy Teske could handle.  He scored more points tonight than his whole team could muster against the Illini in their last game. But we really took it to ’em in the second OT.  Our foul shooting and some refs’ calls made it tighter than it should have been.  My old friend and mentor Chicago’s (and Illini) Bill Arnold says it was a character builder.  For those in the audience it’s an excuse to stay up late and continue drinking in an attempt to unwind from the tension of the game.  Go Blue!

For those of you who weren’t at Crisler, you also missed the hype video they play there before every game.  Here’s how we’re feeling about Michigan basketball these days:

https://youtube/jGWGcS9ZWPM

This is Michigan Basketball – YouTube youtu.be Hype Video played before each Michigan Basketball game at Crisler Center. Features Moritz Wagner, Juwan Howard, Jalen Rose, Tim Hardaway Jr.

Just learning this site. I wrote this when I first was presented with this space last night. But I don’t see it either side of “Goodbye Sam” . which is the first time I saw . page with a “Publish” button.

Just what the world needs: another boomer blogging from his Lay-Z-Boy. But here it comes, all the mundane stuff my email friends have already had too much of. Maybe if spread over a larger audience, the impact will be more tolerable. Thanks to the welcome advice of my dear recently departed friend Sam Rogers, there will be no politics here, or anything very serious at all for that matter. We are all in this life bumping into all sorts of things that annoy and amuse. Me too, and what those things do to me I promise to share with you. I retired as a doctor last June, and I know that the patient can often feel remarkably better after just telling his story to the doctor. Likewise, I see this whole blogging thing as therapeutic, unloading my tales of the day to gain the clarity that comes with telling them, and hoping someone out there might hear them. I’m very much looking forward to the enterprise, not just because I now have a URL to put on my new business cards.

I wrote this last Wednesday and sent it to a few mutual friends.

My friend Sam died Thursday.  We’d both gone to little Vicksburg High and big Michigan, he a year ahead of me, but we didn’t interact much beyond teams and organizations, until a few years back when we connected on Facebook.  We enjoyed each others’ posts enough to arrange a lunch in Santa Fe – Sam lived in nearby Los Alamos working at the National Lab – as Kathy and I passed through to see her brother Bob 3 Decembers ago en route to my sabbatical in San Diego.  We later saw Sam and his wife June at their nearby home then and twice again more: next spring at their new retirement home in the Rockies and finally in Santa Fe again last August.  Of course we kept up electronically, and from June’s text 2 weeks ago I learned Sam had been sick since September and was in ICU.  Monday June texted his doctors said there was no more they could do and she was putting him in hospice.  He died 3 days later at 5:30 in the morning, mountain time.   In pulling some pictures off Facebook to add to something I would distribute to mutual friends, I came across a 3 day old post from his best friend Gary, who spelled out that Sam had an auto-immune disease that had affected several of his organs, leaving him too sick to receive the liver transplant he needed.  So the bastard had one of my diseases!  And a rare one at that, based on my guess at his diagnosis.  Sam was always unique.  I had so looked forward to being his friend in these leisure years.  We complemented each other.  He was the smart, funny, collegial guy I’d always hoped to become, and I was the egghead classmate who’d made it in academia, a little, at our old alma mater.   I pray for his wife June, a strong funny woman in her own right, who was childless by Sam and now won’t get to dote on him in his old age like Kathy does with me.  There’s a big crowd out there shocked by Sam’s passing and missing him terribly, and I’m sure right there with them.  If you begin to notice my posts and writings are a little goofier and more mundane, that’s Sam whispering in my ear to lay off the serious stuff and write what people might actually care about and find entertaining.  Thanks Sam.  It was too damn short but I’ll never forget you.

Be yourself; Everyone else is already taken.

— Oscar Wilde.

This is the first post on my new blog. I’m just getting this new blog going, so stay tuned for more. Subscribe below to get notified when I post new updates.

This is an example post, originally published as part of Blogging University. Enroll in one of our ten programs, and start your blog right.

You’re going to publish a post today. Don’t worry about how your blog looks. Don’t worry if you haven’t given it a name yet, or you’re feeling overwhelmed. Just click the “New Post” button, and tell us why you’re here.

Why do this?

• Because it gives new readers context. What are you about? Why should they read your blog?
• Because it will help you focus you own ideas about your blog and what you’d like to do with it.

The post can be short or long, a personal intro to your life or a bloggy mission statement, a manifesto for the future or a simple outline of your the types of things you hope to publish.

To help you get started, here are a few questions:

• Why are you blogging publicly, rather than keeping a personal journal?
• What topics do you think you’ll write about?
• Who would you love to connect with via your blog?
• If you blog successfully throughout the next year, what would you hope to have accomplished?

You’re not locked into any of this; one of the wonderful things about blogs is how they constantly evolve as we learn, grow, and interact with one another — but it’s good to know where and why you started, and articulating your goals may just give you a few other post ideas.

Can’t think how to get started? Just write the first thing that pops into your head. Anne Lamott, author of a book on writing we love, says that you need to give yourself permission to write a “crappy first draft”. Anne makes a great point — just start writing, and worry about editing it later.

When you’re ready to publish, give your post three to five tags that describe your blog’s focus — writing, photography, fiction, parenting, food, cars, movies, sports, whatever. These tags will help others who care about your topics find you in the Reader. Make sure one of the tags is “zerotohero,” so other new bloggers can find you, too.