Posts Tagged ‘Detroit’

Photo by Kaiton via Creative Commons

Three simple suggestions:

Trust in yourself.

You have all the tools you need to handle everything life sends your way.

Clear away the clutter in your life.

Three suggestions offered gently and pragmatically by Geri Larkin, author and Zen Buddhist teacher.

Recently I had the pleasure of meeting and hearing a talk by Larkin. She is the founder of Still Point Zen Buddhist Temple in the heart of Detroit. She also has written at least seven inspirational books. She is also indirectly responsible for guiding me away from becoming a raving lunatic or a raging alcoholic or both. She couldn’t take credit. She doesn’t even know. But it’s true.

Larkin left Detroit five years ago and now lives a quieter  life in Oregon. She returned in May to help Still Point celebrate its 10th anniversary.  In telling her story to those gathered, she pointed out that — surprise — nothing turned out as she had planned. Larkin once lived a life of privilege. She once was a highly successful, albeit stressed to the limit, mover and shaker in corporate America. She had it all. Or, did she? A search for stress relief led her to the path that ultimately changed her life.

Trust in yourself.

She told those of us gathered that one of her goals in Michigan was to build a beautiful retreat center. She envisioned something serene and inviting tucked away on the Lake Michigan shoreline. Despite numerous efforts to get her plan going, bureaucracy and karma got in the way. Instead, all her money spent, she found herself standing in front of a Victorian-era duplex in the inner city of Detroit. Hardly an enticing destination.

You have all the tools you need.

Turns out, the old building was not what she envisioned, but it was where she needed to do her work. During her tenure, Larkin and temple members transformed the building and grounds into a center of peace and learning. Today, the temple stands as a quiet refuge in a noisy, troubled city.

Clear away the clutter in your life.

Larkin suggested that we just might be happier with less rather than more. She challenged us to clean house, literally and spiritually. She asked us to be less attached to our “stuff” and more generous with the world.

After reading about Still Point, her students, and the many visitors to the temple, I had to see for myself if the in-the-flesh Larkin would radiate as much energy  and wisdom as her prose does on the page. Oh, yes she does. Larkin has an energy about her, an optimism tempered with realism, that makes you believe anything is possible. She’s all at once funny, witty, self-deprecating and tough as nails. She doesn’t even want you to take her word for it. She offers suggestions but asks that you see for yourself. If it doesn’t work, find something else that does.

Although she swears she gets crabby like the rest of us, has her bad hair days, I see a woman who strives to live each moment as if it  were a slice of the sweetest, richest piece of chocolate cake ever baked.

She likes her chocolate.

Check out The Chocolate Cake Sutra: Ingredients for a Sweet Life or many of Larkin's other books on Amazon.com.

Speaking of cleaning and simplifying, Hand Wash Cold by Karen Maezen Miller is on my must-read list for the summer. I have yet to get my hands on a copy, although I've read excerpts online.

Gran Torino opens inside a shadowy church. It’s the kind of place inspired by the soaring gothic cathedrals of Europe. It has vaulted ceilings, niches, an endless symmetry of archways, and stained glass windows depicting scenes of sainthood and martyrdom. Inside, every tentative footstep or stray whisper bounces off the high ceilings and amplifies to a thunder-clap of Catholic guilt.

Well, that’s how it was for me anyhow. I know that church. The one in which Clint Eastwood’s character stands next to his wife’s casket as he scowls at his family.

Photo via Movie-locations.com

Fifteen years ago I was the one sitting on those punishing wooden pews, alongside my family, facing my father’s casket.

I haven’t been back to the church of my baptism, of my youth, of my own departure from my family’s faith since that sweltering August morning in 1995. So it came as a shock to rent this movie, which I knew was made in Detroit, and to see this opening scene, which brought forth a strong physical memory of that day.

This movie robbed me of a good night’s sleep. I didn’t even think I’d like it.

“Mom, did you see ‘Gran Torino’ when it came out?” I blurt over the phone the next day.

“Oh, it was violent.”

“Yeah. Do you remember the funeral scene? At your church? Wasn’t that weird?”

“I don’t know about weird,” she says.

“Well, you know, dad’s funeral. It was eerie to see it replayed in a movie.”

“It wasn’t his funeral.”

“I know, but still …”

“Oh,” she says, her voice trailing off. Conversation over.

Am I just morbid? How could she NOT make the connection?

I felt bad then, digging up a long-buried memory. She goes there every Sunday. A decade and a half of memories have wiped away that morning awash in the blues, purples and reds of  filtered sunlight and propelled by thunderous organ hymns. That morning is the only recent memory I have of the place.

This movie stirred a long-buried pot of memories.

Walt Kowalski reminds me of my grandparents, who often spewed bigoted slurs and who were pulled kicking and screaming from their spotless Detroit homes long after the neighborhood deteriorated.

Kowalski’s disconnect from his children and their offspring also sounded familiar notes in my extended family.

There is a divide between the orderly grid of the old city center, the reach-across-the-driveway-to-knock-on-your -neighbor’s-window closeness, and the labyrinthine subdivisions of suburban McMansions. It goes beyond economics. I understand those neighborhoods. I cannot fathom the sterility of some suburbs.

As the mother of an Asian daughter, it pained me to see such hateful racism in this movie, although I’ve been watching the black/white one play out all my life. I’d almost forgotten the horror of what happened to  Vincent Chin. It saddened me at the time but not in the way it would today. I look into almond-shaped eyes and see family.

As a Detroiter who has dreamed of leaving this Rustbelt Utopia for years, Gran Torino made me realize that no matter where I bury new roots, I’ll have the grit of Detroit in my soul. No matter how free thinking I think I am, how open-minded, how much of a tabula rasa I think I can create for myself, after 45 years, some things are engrained.

Photo by MZ

Isn’t this a pretty picture?

I took it last week at Cranbrook, a little slice of heaven tucked away in a suburb of Detroit. You know Detroit, subject of network TV documentaries about things like industrial wastelands and economic war zones and cities of heartbreak and hope? The Cranbrook campus, which features a prestigious private school, science and art museums, and 40 acres of woods, fields and garden paths along a small lake and several streams, isn’t part of Detroit city proper. But Detroit is more than what is contained within its city limits. It is a sprawling region made up of a decaying center city as well as its myriad suburbs spread out along the Detroit River, adjacent Lake St. Clair ,and stretching north and west toward countless inland lakes, rivers and streams.

There are trees and parks and boulevards and other interesting things within Detroit city limits. But you won’t see them on a network TV show. What you get is what’s now being billed as “ruin porn.” You get images of despair and decay because that’s what people in California and New York and Florida and Texas think is Detroit. Why clear anything up for anyone outside of the “flyover zone?”

Photo by MZ

Look at this picture.

This is how Dateline NBC depicted Detroit in its Sunday feature. It’s not as warm and fuzzy as the first. The bare branches suggest death, decay and abandonment. I took this picture minutes before the image of the flowering tree at  Cranbrook gardens. This gnarled old-timer crouches over a lake within 1,000 feet of the happy pink lady.  Same place. Two different views.

See how easy it is in any given situation to play up the good or focus entirely on the bad? What’s apparently too difficult to do is to craft a report that shows the many layers of a complicated situation. It’s easier to show the same tired images of our abandoned train station, the bums in the gutter, the wayward youth, the noble poor woman feeding, clothing and housing  three babies on $200 a week, and, of course,  the crazy guy shooting and barbecuing raccoons in his yard.

I was disappointed that Dateline didn’t showcase a wider view of our region and include some images of Detroit’s many preserved neighborhoods and cultural treasures, of the many movers and shakers who work tirelessly to establish smart and innovative programs to reinvent this “city of heartbreak and hope.”

I’m not going to sugar coat things here. The reports themselves are not wrong. We have crime. We have corruption. We have massive urban decay. We have poverty and illiteracy and many other woes. We are the epicenter of the economic collapse. But, the Detroit area is so much more than the gnarled, half-dead tree and the crazy coon man.  There are still a few pink ladies twirling out in the open yet they remain invisible to the national media.

Here are a few responses to that show if you’d like to hear the rest of the story:

The mayor of Detroit responds.

Reaction by a former journalist who was interviewed for the story.

A Web site with some beautiful images of Detroit that you’ll never see on a network show about Detroit.

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.

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.

Detroit/credit umich.edu

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.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Detroit ‘Dream Cruise’ Reflects Tough Times (npr.org)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

Stables, 1932

 
And mirrors on strings cascading from a vaulted ceiling: