the Motor City, again
Somewhat to my surprise, I realized today that I’ve missed Detroit in more ways than I had imagined. Of course, the city is easier to love when it’s not covered in ice and dirty snow. And the thought that one needs one’s winter wardrobe through May remains a daunting fact of life here. Given that I’ve spent more of my life (13 years) here than anywhere else (second place, New Orleans, 9 years), I guess it’s good that I do have some pleasant associations with the place: the Middle Eastern neighborhoods of Dearborn (Cedarland takeout for dinner tonight), the industrial theme park that is the Ford Motor Company campus all along the Rouge, the enormous decaying (and reviving?) concrete forest of downtown, the setting sun igniting the Great West Window at the Cathedral.
John and I walked past our old apartment this afternoon. Odd to see new furniture through the windows and a satellite dish on the balcony. Odd to think about all the changes since we first moved in there in 1993, in the first months of the Clinton administration.
I guess I've been lucky in enjoying all the places I’ve lived (if not every apartment): there are still moments when I miss Chapel Hill or Los Angeles desperately. I think that the only place that I wouldn’t eagerly move back to is Slidell, although that was a good place for our teen-age years to unfold.
Detroit isn’t easy to love; that’s part of its character, I think. It has been difficult to live up to the grand civic plan of parks and avenues laid out like a pioneering District of Columbia out here in the Northwest Territory; the neo-classical geometry of angles and arcs articulating the vacated dreams at the foundations of the crumbling ruins that mark the cityscape. Pioneers, visionaries, tinkerers with machines, sports nuts - such is our heritage. Although I don’t strongly indentify with any of those groups, I have grown accustomed to their faces.
John and I walked past our old apartment this afternoon. Odd to see new furniture through the windows and a satellite dish on the balcony. Odd to think about all the changes since we first moved in there in 1993, in the first months of the Clinton administration.
I guess I've been lucky in enjoying all the places I’ve lived (if not every apartment): there are still moments when I miss Chapel Hill or Los Angeles desperately. I think that the only place that I wouldn’t eagerly move back to is Slidell, although that was a good place for our teen-age years to unfold.
Detroit isn’t easy to love; that’s part of its character, I think. It has been difficult to live up to the grand civic plan of parks and avenues laid out like a pioneering District of Columbia out here in the Northwest Territory; the neo-classical geometry of angles and arcs articulating the vacated dreams at the foundations of the crumbling ruins that mark the cityscape. Pioneers, visionaries, tinkerers with machines, sports nuts - such is our heritage. Although I don’t strongly indentify with any of those groups, I have grown accustomed to their faces.