Tag Archives: Detroit

Did you hear? Did you see? Did you discuss?

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So this thing happened in the airspace over my city. Yet, I was blissfully ignorant of it for most of the day it happened.

I saw a quick headline online that said something about a problem on a flight.

It was Christmas Day. I had Christmas stuff to do. I have two children. We had to get on the rain-slicked roads to grandmother’s house in mid-state Michigan. Even over dinner that evening, the conversation barely touched upon the disaster averted. We were too busy debating political correctness at the holidays, Obama’s first year in office, and if striped cats are gassier than solid-colored ones.

By orvalrochefort via Creative Commons

It was not until our long, dark, rainy drive home that we switched on the radio and learned this airplane thing was more like a failed suicide bombing and it was here in Detroit. The next day at my mother’s house we talked at length about cheery things like if the plane exploded in the air, how big an area would the fallout cover? What was the typical incoming flight path of a Northwest/Delta plane? Are there parts of the area that are under flight paths more than others? We realized that no matter where it happened, if it had happened, it would have affected someone we know.

Beyond the bounds of family walls, I’ve heard squat. I mean the news media is squeezing every drop out of the story. But around town, the one that was in the would-be bull’s eye, as far as I can tell, not so much. I asked friends who traveled by air over the holiday if the incident affected their psyches or boarding experiences. Not much, they said. However, they traveled domestically. I didn’t talk to anyone who traveled overseas.

Huh.

This thing. It didn’t happen as planned. If I understand the story correctly, by the description of things, it wouldn’t have happened even if passengers hadn’t intervened. The guy didn’t have his chemicals mixed properly or something. He didn’t have all the details straight. Thank god. Most likely he terrorized his man parts. Oh, he did terrorize some of the passengers. I cannot minimize that nor will I make light of it.

Two things come to mind in the wake of this:

First, Jeez, can we ever get a break here? Must every bad story, losing sports team, failing industry, worst educational system, all emanate from the Mitten State and specifically from the base of the thumb of the Mitten? I know the situation was random, that it was not specifically designed to make Detroit look bad. One populated American city is as good a target as the next if you are the enemy and on a mission, right? Still, I had a Rodney Dangerfield moment in which I bemoaned “Why can’t we get any respect around here?”

Second, news about heightened security and full body scans horrify me. Are you among those who think nothing of it? Or, are you like me and shudder at the thought of some Dwight Schrute type sweating and giggling as he scans your bits and parts in search of weapons and hidden contraband?

Via NBC.com

I’m still creeped out about the jaw X-ray my dentist gave me a while back to “hang onto, please.” No further explanation. I took it home and looked it over and felt kinda itchy and twitchy afterward. Don’t count me among those who find skulls and internal organs and neural pathways to be interesting viewing.

via FOX News

However, we are a nation of entrepreneurs and mavericky rogues or is it roguish mavericks? I wonder how soon before an independent contractor sets up shop at the airport to sell copies of your scan as a vacation souvenir? You know how you can ride a roller coaster or go whitewater rafting and at the end there’s a booth with a picture of you all bug-eyed, mouth agape and you wonder where in the heck the camera was and then you pay $25 so you can have it as a memory of your experience?

Who doesn’t want a key chain or a framed collage of the family body scans from the Christmas 2009 holiday vacation?

While I love to travel and I’ve never had any fears of flying, I have come to detest airport security. My worst experiences were traveling both into China and around China. Aside from the trashing of my luggage and the suitcase searches were the confiscation of things that were in compliance with the posted guidelines. As baggage screeners dangled my stuff over the trash can, I’d point to the signs at the gate illustrating the 3-oz containers in small Ziploc Baggies and then wince as my Baggie was tossed into a trash bin anyway.  ”You cannot have” was the only explanation. I seethed as I had to continuously shrug out of both a backpack and a baby carrier and unload my purse. Apparently baby wearers with backpacks are No. 1 on the suspicious list.

Since then I clench up like a sissy boy in prison every time I approach security. Give me turbulence and crazy takeoffs. I can handle that. But don’t come at me with the latex gloves, Dwight.

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What is, what isn't and what might have been

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Chicago

A whirlwind trip to Chicago, the last season of an HBO series, and the death of a contemporary all have me thinking about impermanence.

As my husband and I strolled the busy streets of downtown Chicago last week, we noted the similarities between The Windy City and The Motor City. If you are from Detroit, you might agree. I don’t think residents of Chicagoland, however, would appreciate the comparison. In an up-close kind of way, the older architecture, some of the street names, the climate and geography all are similar enough to make us dream a little dream: We imagine that our home city has maintained the world-class status it held in the early 20th century, that it has continued to grow and prosper, compounding its assets rather than imploding into the decaying husk it is today. Things like this article and the reports from the “D Shack” seem edgy at best, as if journalists have been embedded in a war zone, and as the butt of a joke at worst. As much as I get angry about outside depictions of this area, a daily drive through it all only serves as a grim reminder of what is, what isn’t, and what might have been.

A day after our return to Day-Twah we attend a memorial service for a business associate of my husband. As we stand in the shadowy art gallery watching a still-photo montage of the guy’s life projected onto a wall, with tracks from the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” filling the painful gaps in conversation, I realize the obvious: This is all we have. This moment. This now, with its gnawing desires to be somewhere in the future or its aches for what’s left in the past.  I watch the images loop endlessly as the deceased progresses from a pink-faced teen with a mullet hanging out with his buddies in their suburban neighborhood to a grown man with the responsibilities of a wife and two children. Unlike life, the slide show allows us to rewind time and start again. For a brief moment, we can trick ourselves into forgetting that death is why he is a two-dimensional image on a wall, that maybe he’s in the audience laughing and weeping with the rest of the group. I see the grieving cling to what cannot be held in hand; in a defining moment death bounces what is into what is not. All that remains is what might have been.

Our thoughts shift to a friend we lost to suicide a few years back. He was an avid fan of  HBO’s “Six Feet Under.” We never watched it during its original run, but have been working our way through all five seasons on DVD. We are a half dozen episodes away from the finale.  I have grown so attached to this show, to these characters, that I agonize over the fact that it will end. We’ve decided not to rush through to the final episode, but rather we’ll watch a few each week and let the story marinate. We watch the show with added interest, knowing our friend often discussed the characters and plot lines with us, even though we were clueless at the time. Now, we look for clues in a show that suggests a thousand different ways to die. We now understand what attracted him to the characters and story lines. We hope we don’t see the way in which he chose to end his life at 40.

In his death and in the closing of this show I realize I cannot get all the answers.  I cannot make something go beyond its expiration date. Maybe I’m more Detroit than Chicago, not fully realized yet, but with some seeds of hope for bigger and better things.   Like the real Detroit, the one a visitor or embedded reporter may not know, everything has some element worth knowing, some reason to stick around to make what might have been or what is not into something that is.

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Detroit/credit umich.edu


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Call it what you will

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detour

Some call it the Nightmare Ride.

Some call it the White Trash Parade.

The official name is the Woodward Dream Cruise.

Call it what you will.

I have a love-hate relationship with the Dream Cruise, billed as the largest one-day auto event in the world.

It’s big. It’s more than a one-day event. If you happen to live near it, you know. It starts when July bleeds into August and continues to build momentum until the big day: the third Saturday in August. If you live near it, you either book a vacation, host a Dream Cruise party, or bar the doors and settle in with a stack of movies and a stock of alcohol.

If you live near Woodward, you have two choices: accept the fact that a trip to the market will take double the time or drive to a market in another town, taking the long way around. As the days grow closer to the event, the roads are so jammed that traffic comes to a standstill. The summer soundtrack adds a few guest performers: revving engines, roaring exhaust systems and squealing tires. This is the not-so-fun side of it.

The area transforms itself to accommodate the car lovers, who come from down the street or across the country to park their lawn chairs at the curb and settle in for an extended viewing. There are drink stands and T-shirt booths. Cities along the route take advantage of the event and offer Dream Cruise parties and festivals. Some businesses lease their parking lots to radio stations and other promoters for classic car shows and oldies-music parties. One nearby town set up a drive-in movie theater and showed Abbot and Costello reels. This is the festive, fun side of it.

The party girl in me enjoys the lively atmosphere, the excuse to get out and have fun. The grumpy side of me just wants to move about my neighborhood without all this hoopla. The nostalgic side of me can’t help getting excited when I spot a mint-condition Ford Mustang Mach 1 from the mid-70s, or a late ’60s Plymouth Barracuda fastback or one of those slick, black “gangster” rides from the 1930s with gleaming chrome pipes.

Call it what you will. It’s a dream to ride down memory lane. It’s a tribute to the glory days of the automobile and Detroit. It’s a flashback to the days when no one thought twice about  burning gas for hours in their father’s Oldsmobile or a Little Deuce Coupe. It’s a nightmare if you get tangled in the traffic on your way to the pharmacy or stuck next to the Right to Life “Truth Truck” with your children in the back seat. (Warning: link images are upsetting.)

It’s good. It’s bad. I’m glad it’s over.

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Blogger meet-up in the D

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detroit

Most of my readers are not from Detroit.

They’re from Russia. They’re robots. They leave me long, detailed comments about things like Viagra and practices that are illegal in this country. Their comments often don’t correspond with what I’ve posted, but that’s OK. They love me.

But a few readers are real people and they live in nice places with beaches or mountains or other panoramic views. They’ve not once mentioned erectile dysfunction to me in a comment. These real people living by these nice views also have blogger get-togethers on occasion, which I’ve always envied. I wondered: Could we have one here in the D?

I’m not sure how to arrange a Spam party. Do you actually serve slices of SPAM? And, is sharing drinks with robots considered infidelity?

Thanks to Twitter, which is a nice little bird and not a robot, I don’t have to worry any more. I’ve connected with some real people here in Detroit. One thing led to another and now we have our first official blogger meet-up in July.

Ours will be a small affair. Just a handful of us willing to meet on a weeknight, have a drink or two and chat.

Knowing me, I’ll want to ask a lot of questions. I’ll want to take pictures.And I’ll want to write about it. Chances are, they will do the same. 

I’m sure the robots will have something to say about it, too.

Assembly Line update

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stickerfx

After 288 hours of nonstop music, there’s a new sound at A.J.’s Music Cafe in my little town: Silence.

Owner A.J. O’Neil declared the marathon over at 5 p.m. April 1.  The attempt for a Guinness World Record for nonstop music concert by various artists began on March 20. The videotaped footage of the event has been sent to Guinness for adjudication.

It would be nice to see the little independent cafe and all 300 participants who took to the stage (some during the middle of the night while the rest of us were sleeping) in support of the American auto industry, American-made products and supporting local business earn a world record title. If for some reason they do not qualify, it was a wonderful opportunity to connect with friends and neighbors. The event still found success in raising awareness and boosting spirits. If nothing else, perhaps one more person took a moment to think twice about how he or she spends an increasingly precious resource: money.

Good luck, folks.

 

Pack of fear

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feral

A lunch date with a friend almost ended with the usual routine: the hug, the I’ll-call-you-soon, and the parting of ways to our respective cars. But my friend hesitated and stopped me from leaving. She confessed that she didn’t want  to go to the underground parking garage alone. Would I accompany her in exchange for a ride to my car?

I agreed to be her escort. Together we descended the crumbling steps and dodged water droplets leaking from rusted pipes to find her car in this shadowy dungeon. A place where Freddy Krueger and rats the size of small dogs were certain to roam.
As I wondered how she managed to get herself down here at all, she asked me if I had any fears or phobias.
I told her I don’t like spiders, but thought I might add underground parking garages to the list.

mean
But today I encountered my No. 1 fear, one I had forgotten: 
Packs of feral dogs.
I was circling a block in a not-so-nice neighborhood (think abandoned houses stripped of siding and roofing, junked cars on lawns, groups of  shady characters huddled in alleys) looking for a potential preschool  for my daughter. My nerves were on high-alert. I was wondering if I had the wrong street. Why would a preschool be in this godforsaken place? Then three dark and dirty dogs darted into the street. I slammed on the brakes and  pulled to the curb.

I grabbed my cell phone. I watched the dogs run a zigzag course around the school playground. I saw a teen girl walking on the sidewalk about 500 feet away. She stopped and stared, too. I wanted to make sure there wasn’t an owner nearby, maybe just letting his pets run on the playground. But I already knew these lean and mean canines weren’t pets, or hadn’t been for a long time.

Nope. They were feral. I knew it by the  look in their eyes. I knew it by the way they ran. They were street dogs. I punched in the number to the local police department. I saw the girl on the sidewalk slowly walk  back to her house.

A bored dispatcher answered and took my message. I wasn’t too confident he’d patch through my request. Knowing these dogs were on the prowl and deciding that I’d never send my 3-year-old to school in such a neighborhood,  I tossed the brochure onto the car seat and drove away.

But I couldn’t get the image of those dogs out of my head. 

Feral dog packs are a huge problem in Detroit. We live one-half mile from the border.  In my mother’s neighborhood, which borders Detroit on the east end, wildife officials recently  confirmed the existence of an established coyote population.

When I lived in that neighborhood,  my best friend and I came upon a pack of five or six dogs.We were about 15 years old and walking after dark. The pack trotted down the center of the street. They picked up our scent and bolted to the sidewalk straight toward us. We ran, making it to my friend’s front lawn. She was pinned by the biggest of the pack. We both screamed. Her brother threw open the door. Flipped on the porch light. The dogs scattered.

We got away without a scratch. But we never liked to walk alone after dark again. And those dogs, they still roam.

They are everywhere.

 

Day of art and beauty

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sculpture

Exterior sculpture behind DIA

After almost two months of non-stop snow and extreme cold, we had a respite. The temperatures warmed to an unbelievable 50 degrees on Sunday, which melted most of the snow.
When Mother Nature peels back her heavy blanket, she reveals many forgotten things:  the dull hues of a sleeping earth, Halloween candy wrappers, and the hope of spring.
These spring teases lure most of us outdoors like cats to catnip. We cannot resist the urge to feel sunshine on our faces and solid earth under our feet. After all, it could be 10 degrees and snowing tomorrow.

I left the house early and headed into the city center to visit some favorite places. I left my coat and gloves in the car. I walked an extra block because the sky broadcast a blinding blue, birds sang in their treetop roosts (a sound I haven’t heard in months) and my spirits hovered somewhere between birds and sky.

Following some quiet time I met a friend at the Detroit Institute of Arts, a place I have not visited in a few years. Its interior space has been reinvented to better display some new things as well as many of the old treasures.
As I strolled the galleries, looking at artifacts, an Egyptian mummy, works of the masters, modern art and photography, I had flashbacks to younger versions of me visiting this place. Each visit brings with it a new perspective and experience. As a child, the place seemed huge and overwhelming (and maybe a little boring) to me. As a college student, I enjoyed contemplating the works of art for hours, having pseudo-intellectual discussions with my classmates.
I’ve had dates there, family visits and meetups with friends. There’s always something new to discover, like finding a Georgia O’Keeffe painting I didn’t know was there:

georgia

Stables, 1932

 

 
And mirrors on strings cascading from a vaulted ceiling:

mirrors1

White bear, white bear, what do you see?

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sleeper

Like bears holed up in their dens for too long, we jumped at last week’s unusual day of sunshine and ambled outdoors to stretch our limbs. We dressed in many layers and headed to our favorite winter destination to walk off a few calories: The Detroit Zoo.

Within that destination is a favorite place: The Arctic Ring of Life, a simulated polar habitat that is home to arctic foxes, polar bears and seals. The animals here come to life in the colder months. This past December was one of our coldest, snowiest and iciest in nearly a decade. During our visit, the bears were practically dancing on their simulated polar ice cap.

One of the best features of this exhibit is the underwater viewing tunnel. I love how the shafts of sunlight shimmer through the blue water. I love how on one side of the tunnel, seals swoop and twirl in the current like flocks of birds while the hulking polar bears bounce like astronauts doing the moonwalk on the other. (The seals and bears do not intermingle, for obvious, food-chain related reasons.)

In this scene below, a bear sits with its back to the many human visitors watching from the tunnel. Within seconds, the bear plunges under the surface and swims directly toward Girl from the East. For a heartbeat, they are nose-to-nose at the glass. Girl then lets out a little shriek and jumps into my arms. The bear then paddles upward and stands atop the glass tube, looking down at us, swiping its massive paws at a seemingly unreachable human snack buffet.

The guy next to us shoots a question out the room: “Hey! What if that glass broke? We’d all be lunch!”

Nice observation to make in a room full of preschoolers. Even if we were all thinking the same thought.

bearvsgirl
floaton
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grumpy

Y'all come back now

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Not the Rocky Mountains

Not the Rocky Mountains

 

My brother, who has the pleasure of living in the Rocky Mountains, came home for Thanksgiving. It’s been a while since he lived here full-time. I’ve never lived anywhere but here. I’ve visited a lot  of places, most nicer. Some make me miss home.

I guess out West we here in the “flyover zone” are referred to as the flatlanders. I’ve had a few cowboys call me that. I thought it was a nod to the topography. Maybe it’s more of a veiled reference to the fact that we are apparently flatlining.

He, who hails from the land of eternal sunshine of the spotless mind, observes about life here:

It is cold.

It is dark and dreary.

No human forms can be found anywhere.

It is depressing.

To him I say: Isn’t that why you left? We all want to leave. It is dark and dreary. It’s December. Depressing? Not always. Lately, yes. Don’t even turn on the TV, radio or log on to the Internet. Just do what the rest of us do, hide behind a good micro brew, or a decent vintage, or just go to bed with a bag of chips, strew crumbs all over the sheets and pull the covers up over your head.

Oh, wait, maybe that’s the problem …

Sadly, there’s evidence to back his claims. First, there’s this bouquet of black roses delivered to our dying region.

Then,  a box of chocolates with a skull and crossbones on it, sent by Mr. Grim Reaper.

Seems like we’ve been in the spotlight a lot recently and our warts and chin hairs are not lookin’ pretty to the rest of the country. Not like the rest of the USA is shaving on a regular basis either.

I meet folks transplanted from all over the world who come here for automotive-related jobs. Many of my good friends were born not only away from this region but on a different continent. It’s all a matter of perspective. While some of them hail from beautiful places, those places lack something that we have here. Something they like about here.

Don’t ask me to produce a list of “things.” Those details vary from one person to the next. One woman likes the urban sprawl. She comes from a place where people are crushed together and space is too precious a resource. Another friend likes the grittiness, the diversity of race and culture. She comes from a very homogenous, orderly society. Homogenous can mean uneventful.

The worst offenders are those who leave and then return for a visit. I hate to say it but most who have left have no intention of returning. I have other relatives who sometimes only stay a night and then cut a hasty retreat to the airport. I know it’s nice where you live, but jeez …

All I can say is: If you hate it here, don’t come. We’ll just visit you in your nice place, sleep on your couch. If you left and are visiting, don’t rub our noses in the very obvious pile of poop on the ground. Buried somewhere in all this dirt is a diamond. 

I’ll take it with me when I go.

Obama, larger than life

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There are not many things that will motivate me to get up before sunrise, drive into the city and stand on line for more than two hours in the blistering heat. Especially not things that are a long shot.

But apparently this tall man whom I’ve never met, who wants to be our next president, has found a way to light a fire under my butt. So, Husband and I, in a moment of certain insanity, decided to attend the Labor Day rally in Detroit, featuring Democratic nominee Barack Obama.
We got up at 6 a.m. Took Girl from the East to grandma’s house and then paid exorbitant rates to park our car in the city. We raced to the riverfront on foot to find an already-long line that seemed to have no beginning and no end.
We found the beginning somewhere near the state line. As we attempted to gauge our progress in this line that wound around city blocks and twisted back onto itself so many times, we didn’t know if the people next to us were ahead of us or behind us. It was starting to feel like getting inside the plaza where Obama would speak would be a long shot.

Enter the bubble burster.
“You don’t have a yellow ticket? You not gettin’ in,” declared a somber woman in a baseball hat with some kind of unreadable badge around her neck. She seemed to take distinct pleasure in bursting balloons up and down the line.
Ticket?! Many of us were there based on an open e-vite from Mr. Obama himself. It clearly stated no tickets were needed. Later we learned the yellow tickets were given to all participants in the annual Labor Day Parade, who automatically earned line-jumping points for representing organized labor. Even later we learned that in order to get in to the rally, we should have been in line at 4:30 a.m. Oh, holy hell, no.
No matter. It was one of the biggest crowds we’d ever seen in Detroit. More than Thanksgiving Day. More than the Red Wings’ Stanley Cup parade. Geez, I guess we weren’t the only ones willing to sacrifice sleep for a chance to be a part of history. If nothing else, it was exciting to be a part of this wave, this movement, that was sweeping through this beaten-down town.

As always, I love to people watch. And this never-ending line offered a feast for the eyes. We saw a group of hung-over college girls who thought it was an underwear-optional rally. A little old lady wearing a large flowered hat, long flowing dress and leaning on an elegant cane. Lots of families with babies in tow. Lots of union workers. Lots of suburbanites with their Starbucks coffee cups. An older man stomping around on a walking cast. Religious zealots with loudspeakers. Drummers drumming incessantly. Black. White. Latino. Asian.

After waiting two hours and not even reaching the halfway point in the serprentine trail through the city, we received word: We didn’t make the cut. Surprisingly, the crowd simply turned on its heels and headed back to the waterfront. We positioned ourselves under the searing sun and in front of a large screen.
Oh, and there was Miss I-Told-You-So in her baseball cap and badge, shaking her self-righteous head at the foolish herd of sheep. 

Hope motivated us to continue to wait. As the crowd thickened. As personal space thinned. As deodorants failed. After what seemed like an eternity, Obama took the stage and the screen came to life.
His talk was short and sweet. His planned speech was cast aside to reflect on Hurricane Gustav and its victims, and the need for brother to look after brother here and around the nation. 

And then it was over.

Happy Labor Day, America. Good luck in November.