You Can't Dance with Architecture. But Still...

Today was proofing day at East Village Magazine, meaning that I showed up at 4:30-ish to read my column (copied below) on the table at Gary's cluttered office on Second Street. And to make my little edits. I found only one thing I wanted; I wanted the word "interesting" italicized. Gary says he CAN do anything I request. Whether he WILL is another matter. I love the scraggly-bearded Rip Van Winkle of East Village, who sleeps on a desk in the back of his store-front and for 35 years has been working 14-hour days, seven days a week to get his little paragon of community journalism out.

As I've noted many times before, one feature of proofing day is that Gary sets out a bottle of Bushmills, along with my proof and a pen, and a chipped cup. He knows I like a finger or two when I'm editing. It is one of the high points of my month. We sit there and argue over writing and I drink a couple of fingers and ask him to pour just another finger or so, and we talk about stuff that we both remember. No matter how depressed I am in the morning, by the time I've had a couple of slugs of Irish and an hour or so of conversation with my friend Gary, I feel better about life. Tonight it had to do with John's Mini-Mart, a stop-and-rob that used to sell beer and lottery tickets and bad junk food next to the EVM office. It was torn down and leveled years ago, and now there's just some desultory grass there. But when I lived in my first Flint digs, a walkup on Avon Street right across the street from Gary's family homestead, John's "mini-rip" was a big neighborhood hangout. John, a broad-bellied white-haired con man, used to be a friend of mine, and I'd go over there a lot to buy beer, cheap wine, boxes of mac and cheese, and lottery tickets.

Tonight I told Gary my old house on Seventh Street is vacant. It makes me sad: I lived there for 15 years with my first husband, a wonderful poet and the man with whom I once thought I would live forever. I once thought we would be literary lights and thrive and prosper. For a time, it came true. But something went wrong. We disappointed each other. Booze came between us like a rude mistress, not to mention that when it came down to it there were lots of ways in which we struggled to connect. There is no way to write about this without being overcome by melancholy, by the lingering grief that comes with a relationship that went awry.

But that house...I loved that house. Everything I feel about that house has to do with my first husband, and my hopes for a life of poetry, and a deeply embedded love of romance.

I told Gary I'd just discovered the house was vacant -- a victim of what's going on in this town and has been going on everywhere in the country lately. After my first husband and I divorced he sold the place, capitalizing luckily on a decent market just before the bubble burst. I was happy for him -- I had abandoned my claim to the house out of the guilt of my escape. But the new owners eventually foreclosed. For the first time in its 92-year history, the house is empty.

Gary always says "you can't dance with architecture," meaning, I guess, that some kinds of art defy analysis. He's probably said that to me about two dozen times. I always nod and agree, though half the time I don't know what the hell this actually means. I just googled it again, and it looks like Martin Mull might have said something like that back in the '80s...but actually I think it goes back to about 1918. Gary probably knows and will tell me eventually.

Anyway, even though Gary says you can't dance with architecture, I am very susceptible to buildings. That place at 942 E. Seventh Street is in my heart, in my memory, in my soul -- whatever that is. It hurts me that it's vacant. As Neil Young said in "Helpless," it feels like "All my Changes were there." I'm going to take a break now to think this through more, and then I'll come back to it.

...So, after I left EVM I turned onto Second Street, and then onto Crapo, and then to Court, where I had my turn signal on to turn left to go to the house I live in now, in the nicely manicured and upper-class neighborhood known as "The College/Cultural Neighborhood." We have a big sign and everything announcing this. But when I got down to the light at Crapo and Court, I looked in my rear view mirror to see if anybody was behind me. There wasn't. So I turned right instead, going up the hill to the light at Court and Avon, and turned left. I turned left off of Court at that light for 15 years -- it was so habitual that for about three years after I left I used to turn left there without even thinking about it, coming and going for other reasons. My body and brain thought I still lived in my old neighborhood years after I left. I would go down Avon to Seventh and turn left again. My old house was the last one on the right at the dead end of Seventh. There is a brick gate into a mansion at the dead end. My old house is a solid gray stucco place on the right, NOT a mansion but a lovely, solid square place. An immense maple still arches over the front yard -- a tree I'd written poems about for years, a tree that turns gold every fall and used to send brilliant light for a week or so every October into the second floor master bedroom where my first husband and I slept together for years. This is all I can say now. The memory of that tree, that brilliance, that bedroom where we cleaved and cleaved, is all I can handle at the moment. I have to take another break.

So...I went down to the dead end of Seventh and pulled into the driveway, on the first night after the time changed and it was already dark. The maple tree was leafless, and a three-quarter moon overhead glinted silver into the yard I'd spent many years in.

In a way, it's a gift that the place is deserted. Now I can stop and be there. I used to go by there from time to time, usually when I'd had a drink or two, and sneak a look, but it always felt a bit invasive. Were the new people happy there, where my own life as a poet had flowered? Where my life as a wife had foundered? The place always looked nice. But now there is a sign on the mailbox that says, "Vacant. No Mail" and a paper on the door that says it's managed now by a "Five Brothers" company in another county. I know that because I parked my car in the driveway and audaciously walked up the walk and climbed up the three steps to the front door. After staring at the depressing signs, I turned around and sat on the top step of the porch. I spent many hours on that front porch. Here is a poem I wrote on that front porch once:

Smoking on the Porch, Winter Night

I want just this moment of flagrance.

Breath mingling with smoke, smoke with

breath, no difference. I am on fire and

the sweet air snuffs me. I am beeswax

stolen from church. Leave me alone.

It takes eight minutes to smoke each one.

All eight stretch to my fingers’ tips.

I lift up, up to the relief

of oaks and that recumbent moon. Who

is that woman smoking on the porch?

She is a timer for a small death.

She chugs knifey air like whiskey

to compose herself. She solicits

the blues. She gets itchy waiting, wrapped

in smoke and her good black wool.

Okay, I've reached another moment where I have to stop writing. More later.

Give This Old Woman Some Air

Make way, step aside, back up, get the smelling salts…and give this poor woman some air. This poor…old woman.

Yes, your friendly neighborhood writer is feeling a bit weak in the knees right now, a bit dizzy and faint. I might need to plunk down, right here on the floor, among you.

Here’s why: as of Nov. 14, I qualify for Social Security.

So I’m officially elderly. I’ve seen it coming. I’ve been spurning invites from the AARP for ten years and even though I’ve been ripping up the packets and stuffing them into the trash, the calendar is winning. As I wrote last month, my arches have collapsed and my bunions have set up their own rogue government. My grey hair insistently pushes out the “Red-brown #6” judiciously administered by Esteeve, my Pico Rivera stylist. My neck rivals Nora Ephron’s. I’ve got age spots and a menagerie of bumps and flaps suggesting my skin has been on the planet too long. My tri-focals keep getting thicker, prosthetics for myopia, presbyopia and some other –opia I can never remember. And while I’m at “remember,” what was it I was going to say next? I forget. Has anybody seen my cell phone?

I’m not just old enough to be my students’ mother, but now their grandmother. My allusions to Talking Heads and Twin Peaks, to name just two items from my moldy pop culture baggage, are so unknown to my students I feel like a lumbering brontosaurus.

What has been occurring to me about old age, though, is not so much how my body is falling apart, but how my dreams are faring.

The other day I was recalling the first time I traveled overseas. It was 1974 when I flew alone into Athens, Greece, where I arrived in the middle of a coup. I holed up taking bubble baths in an overpriced hotel until things calmed down and I could proceed to the Parthenon and Delphi and eventually Crete. It was exhilarating.

I was driven back then by a focused dream: to get out of Ohio, to get out of my ordinary life, to flex my choices, to be interesting as I thought of it back then. That energy propelled me through many more adventures: Peace Corps, marriage, more education, many jobs, a lot of writing good and bad.

Perhaps it’s part of the inevitable course of things: my dreams have changed. Now, some mornings I’m just satisfied with waking up. My dream is to sleep with my husband every night and go out for breakfast at Westside Diner. I could give up traveling tomorrow and never miss another TSA frisking, another roller bag. I have enough stories. I have enough material.

Now, I realize, my dreams have to do with my “village,” my neighbors. My dreams have to do with being in a community that is humane, safe, and manageable. I’ve given 30 years of my life to Flint and I have never been more anxious about its survival, as homicides pile up, break-ins plague even my own street, and the city seems unable to stop a spreading failure of the basic human services we need to live peaceable and sustainable lives together.

I see my young neighbors, beloved additions to my recent existence, struggling with life – raising their children, making sense of their careers, making ends meet. I see their exhaustion and worry. I see my students pulsing with the restless energy I once had, and I want them, like me, to have the chance to fly off to Greece if the impulse propels them and have the satisfactions I once enjoyed. I fear that the world is tightening up for them, the country miserly, crimped and divided. I want a better dream for them.

I’ll wrap this up with an actual dream. One night recently I woke up from a deep sleep, finding myself tightly tucked into a fetal position. My husband was in LA and I had a pronounced sense of solitude, not quite loneliness because I was enjoying the warmth of the bedspread and a nest of cushy pillows I’d assembled around myself in the scary darkest hours. As I unfolded my legs and stretched onto my back, the blankets warm under my chin, I savored the reassuring slats of morning light tipping over the rooftops and venerable silver maples of Maxine and brightening the blinds. I love my street, I thought. About Maxine, I’m a conservative: I want it to stay the same forever -- lovely, neighborly and green.

Suddenly I remembered a dream I’d just been having: I was in my apartment – one of those dream creations that bore no relation to my actual house. I had bought a new bed. It was big and lavish, with an ornately curved brass headboard. But where would I put it? Suddenly I realized my digs had a room I’d never noticed – a room I didn’t know was there. When I discovered it, open and empty and with a glowing hardwood floor, light streaming through big windows, delight and relief washed over me. I went and got my husband. Look, Ted, we’ve got another room!

So, my subconscious seems to be saying, there’s some leeway here somewhere, and when the door opens, it’s going to be good, even for an old lady eligible for Social Security.

But I no longer think that room is only for me. It has to have room for everybody. What we put inside should help us build a smarter, more compassionate life.

Oh, there’s my cell phone on the counter where I left it. Can somebody help me find my glasses? Once they show up, I’ll plunge right in to filling that new room. Here’s the thing: making that dream come true might turn out to be a job for the whole village.

I Couldn't Kill the Spider: Remembering 9/11

Oh my, it's been months since I've been here -- I've neglected poor Macy Swain and her electronic life. Well, here I am, slipping back into the blog life, and the occasion is remembering 9/11. This is also available on eastvillagemagazine.org.

I couldn’t kill the spider.

It was pea-sized and black and crawling over the black and white tiles of my Sylvester Manor apartment. I’m not afraid of spiders but I’d never been above smashing them to pieces.

This time was different. It was Sept. 13, 2001, and that week there had been just too much death.

Instead of crushing it, I got the creature to crawl onto the towel, and I gently carted it down the hall and jostled it into the bushes on Court Street. I freed it with aggressive determination: I wanted nothing to do with any killing.

I don’t know why that spider is the image that comes most readily to mind when I think about ten years ago.

Maybe it’s because the other, less metaphorical memories are too hard to take,

That spring and summer I had created my own debacles. In April I sat up in bed in the middle of the night and told my husband of 15 years “I think I’m moving out.” In May a truck from Red’s pulled noisily into our driveway and took half our stuff; my stuff.

That night, shocked and prickly with hope, I sat at the window in Apartment 104 and poured myself a glass of white wine to go with the Cornish game hen I’d baked in my little oven, dinner just for one.

I’d deliberately decided against cable, and throughout those summer months, which I remember as so hot the strongest smell in my rooms was the acrid bubbling asphalt of Wallenberg Drive, I watched movie after rented movie.

I had a new man already who flew in from time to time from Los Angeles. His arrivals were intense – we had loved each other for 25 years, never knowing where the other was – and it was jarring to reclaim our ardor. Daily weeping for my failed past life was a matter of course. I was 51 years old and starting over. It seemed impossible, unadvisable, audacious and naïve.

The last weekend of August my Ohio sister was in a serious auto accident. In the middle of a Labor Day party, I got a call that she was in the hospital and I needed to get there. I shot down to Barberton, where I found her dog, an expensive pure-bred beagle, untended and hungry in the house. She’d peed and pooped anywhere she liked for at least a week. I tried to make sense, yet again, of my sister’s complicated life.

The dog had an open abscess and I got her to the vet. I tried to clean up the house. Outraged at my sister and ashamed of it, I declared I was taking the dog back to Flint. On September 9, I put her in my car and drove back along Interstate 80, stopping every 50 miles to let her pee…she was wild and untrained and made the trip interminable.

My friends Bob and Philip agreed to take her, but when I got her there, she ran away, Bob chasing her up Ridgelawn yelling and yelling. He caught her but it was clear she would never be a lovely pet.

And then it was September 11. That morning I drove to Okemos to see my therapist, full of grief and guilt and anger – about my sister, again, about the debris of my life. On the way back I heard it – after tiring of the orderliness of Mozart’s 12 versions of Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star, I switched to NPR, where Bob Edwards was announcing that the second tower had just collapsed.

It was a different world from that moment on, was it not? I drove straight to UM – Flint and called my new man. Then I went in to my husband’s office and we hugged, along with everybody else – the electricity of the tragedy overwhelming us and making me wonder if all could be forgiven, reset.

I went to VG’s and bought whiskey, cigarettes, Hershey bars and canned fruit cocktail.

That night, I went to my old house, where my not-yet-ex-husband made comfort food, linguine with marinara sauce, and with four other souls we obsessively watched CNN. There was pot and I smoked it, but it didn’t work – leaving me only more heavily disconsolate.

I’ve often thought that if I’d ever gone to bed with my husband again it would have been that night. But when we hugged goodbye and the question hung in the air, the shock and neediness between us was intolerably raw. I rushed back to Apartment 104.

The dog didn’t work out either. Bob and Philip said they couldn’t handle her. Philip and I took her to the Humane Society on Dort, where she failed her personality test by lunging at an assistant. My husband, who always loved beagles, took her as a stopgap, but she wouldn’t stop barking all night, and he sent me one angry, accusatory email after another. We finally gave her to a student we both knew who had a farm, and the dog roamed freely for three more years before dying a reasonably merciful natural death.

Without cable, I rented The Sopranos, which I’d never seen, and watched every episode, one after the other for three days straight. The opening shot of Tony Soprano chawing that cigar, the Twin Towers in the background,seemed cruelly right, lacerating me with bad news. They’re gone, they’re gone, they’re gone. My marriage was gone, my old life was gone, the world as we knew it was gone.

Life did go on, of course. I found hope in love, and now that LA guy is my second husband. We bought a house on Maxine. I bought a big stone Buddha for the back yard and stones and candles for the windowsills. I wrote a novel, and now I even have a new job. Just like everybody else, I’ve gone on with my life, because that’s what humans do. In fact, recently realizing I’ve been in Flint a full 30 years, I realized with a start that despite all the ups and downs, I am – shhh, don’t tell anybody! – happy here.

I still think about that spider, though – how for that one moment, that one week, we were all aflood with compassion. I wish it could last. I wish – and hope – as human history rolls out beyond us -- that it is the impulse toward love that survives our primal bloody urges. Frankly, at best I think it’s a fifty-fifty chance. Absurdly, illogically, nonetheless, I’m banking on the love.

Remembering Hazel Dickens at Flint

Here's my new column for East Village Magazine:

This week I remembered a thrilling Flint moment.

It was March 22, 1990, and in the UM-Flint Theater, bluegrass singer Hazel Dickens stood in a spotlight on the stage and sang her powerhouse elegy Black Lung a capella. Her four-man backup band waited, reverently idle, behind her. Sitting alertly in about the tenth row, nervous because I had been in charge of getting her there, I felt the hairs stand up on the back of my neck as her haunting plaint echoed out:

"Black lung, black lung, you're just biding your time
Soon all this suffering I'll leave behind.
But I can't help but wonder what God had in mind
To send such a devil to claim this soul of mine..."

It was a hell of a show.

And when Dickens died recently at 75 of pneumonia in her adopted hometown of Baltimore, I felt as if something essential, someone passionately essential, had left us.

Her visit was part of how I came to a deeper, more vivid understanding about the significance of the country's labor struggles and history — particularly in my own adopted hometown, gritty old Flint.

I wanted to remember all the details of her Flint visit.

Dickens' appearance was part of UM-Flint's Women's History Month. In only my third year at UM-Flint, I was the coordinator of what was then called the Adult Resource and Women's Center. We invited Dickens, along with the amazing Bernice Johnson Reagon of Sweet Honey and the Rock, to perform.

As I recall it, there was one long set by each of these astonishing singers.

Our funding for that event came from the Ruth Mott Fund. We were very grateful for it, including the Ruth Mott Fund's last minute willingness to pay for Dicken's superb backup band. Two of them were Barry Mitterhoff on mandolin and Tony Trischka on banjo, and I think the other two were Dudley Connell and Ronnie Simpkins.

(Thanks to Paul Gifford, UM-Flint Library archivist, for helping me recoup some of these details.)

I remember a buzz in the hall as Ruth Mott, 89, appeared and was ushered into a seat in the front row.

Dickens, a West Virginia native then 55 and a longtime advocate for the rights of the working man and woman, requested just one thing on her few off hours in Flint.

She wanted to see the site of the Sit Down Strike.

I drove her to what was left of Fisher Body Plant 1, and pulled the car over just in front of the historical plaque that never seems like enough of a tribute to what happened there.

She asked for a moment.

We got out of the car. She read the plaque and then looked up at the building, gazing at its rows of windows where workers hung on, during weeks of drama in the national spotlight, from Dec. 30, 1936 to Feb. 11, 1937. The outcome was earth shattering — a one-page memo recognizing the UAW as the bargaining agent for the General Motors employees.

I suddenly realized Dickens was crying. She stayed there for a while and then got back into the car. She was quiet the rest of the way back to her hotel.

Her heartfelt respect for Flint's history and struggles powerfully affected me — and I have never forgotten it.

As the readers of this column know well by now, my relationship with Flint has always been charged with ambivalence, and I well know I am not the only one.

Part of that, obviously, is Flint's complicated labor history. Through my years here I have gradually learned what this means.

When I came here I knew nothing about labor history, even less about Flint's role in it. I had never heard of the Sit Down Strike.

But by 1998, eight years after Hazel Dickens' visit, during UAW strike against General Motors that started here in Flint, my sense of this town's difficulties had taken an elegiac turn.

In a commentary broadcast back then on Michigan Radio, I said: "There's an old French custom. When a loved one dies, friends stand at the grave, shouting curses at the corpse. That's sometimes how it feels to live in Flint."

But in that commentary I described how I finally found myself on the workers' side.

Later, I helped advocate for and organize the Lecturer Employees Union for nontenure track faculty at UM-Flint.

Flint has indelibly marked me.

There are some things that should not be forgotten. Here we are in another moment when the country seems to be turning its back on its labor history — the significance of the labor movement shaped with raucous and audacious energy partly by the working men and women of Flint. It seems like a long time since those workers' hopes and idealistic aspirations forced the Boss Man to recognize them.

Many things improved for workers after the Sit Down Strike. But things are worse now for the working man and woman than in 1990, when Hazel Dickens came to Flint. She knew justice requires continual vigilance and tending, and had continued faithfully to sing and advocate for workers right up to her death.

Another stanza of Black Lung goes like this:

“He went to the bossman but he closed the door/Oh, it seems you’re not wanted when you’re sick and you’re poor/Your not even covered in the medical plan/ and your life depends on the favors of man.”

Hazel Dickens told it like it was — in the minefields of West Virginia and right here on the stage of UM-Flint. The truths her mountain voice sang out so gorgeously are needed today more than ever.

We will miss her.

Freedom

I woke up this Easter Sunday irritated by academia. I'm thinking specifically about how part of the reaction to my quest to get a shot at a tenure track job last year turned toward ridicule: some of my esteemed colleagues ridiculed me for my column in East Village Magazine, a 35-year-old "neighborhood newsletter" for which I've been providing back-page prose for four years. How embarrassingly naive and parochial of me to assert that my writing for EVM was something to be proud of, something to offer up to my colleagues as evidence of my value for their precious position. How bush-league of me to point out that EVM has more readers than most literary magazines -- though my readers, who've been avid and attentive, have far less lofty pedigrees than academia demands. How incompletely professionalized and myopically amateur I was, to ask the publisher of EVM, Gary Custer, to write me letter of recommendation. My friends have endured my ruminations on this matter repeatedly over the last year, and contrary to what some of them think, I don't particularly care, nor did I take my stab at tenure naively. It was aggressive, at heart, and I'm not very surprised about the results. As I recently told the ultimately successful candidate for the position, I tried to push my colleagues into acting like another species, as if a giraffe could be an octopus.

Also, I am long in the tooth. Ted and I heard the phrase on NPR this morning, and Ted said it refers to old lions, whose teeth lengthen with the years. I am then a toothy old lioness, crabby and demanding and still periodically driven by hopes new and old. I'm not a writer for the young; my concerns are neither glamorous nor hip. I'm dreading getting old and I'm preternaturally observant of my body's varied declines. I like knowing something about my community from 30 years of it. I enjoy thinking about things that happened at the halfway point of the last century. I'm doing more remembering past adventures than generating new ones.

I've occasionally thought that my indirections and inward-looking observations make ripe fruit for parody. I could parody my writing myself, before some young wag beats me to it. Not that there are many young wags left in Flint who'd notice.

Anyway, this is a long introduction to savoring my freedom. For about the 45th time, I'm embarking on writing my next column, and it strikes me that I really am free to write whatever I want. What does it matter? There is nothing to stop me from being whoever I am on the page, and today this carbonating freedom pleases me immensely. We're making mimosas later, using our new juicer. The finches are gold again; maybe we can sit out on the porch. I wonder where the day will take me.

Equity Isn't Everything: On Daffodils, Cardinals, Bankers and the Ongoing Pleasures of Owning a Home

From my March column for East Village Magazine.

I’m sitting at my kitchen table irrationally exuberant about the morning’s sunlight. I think the word is basking. It’s been a long dark winter already, with more to go.

It’s mid-February as I write this and yesterday, in the lengthening daylight happily remaining when I got home from work, after three or four days of promiscuous melting, spears of daffodils appeared from under the disappearing foot of snow at the side of the house.

When did that happen? When did they decide to start their lovely engines while the rest of us crabbed and scratched and fidgeted in February crankiness?

And briefly, startlingly, I find myself saying as I take it in, “This is mine.” I have always needed something to call “my own,” not for the heft of consumption but for the details. This is the poet’s life -- the same redwood fence every morning, with its criss-cross top and gradual seasoning to gray, the same green bird feeder swaying slightly in the breeze, the same mulberry tree, with that particular bend of its burly five-part trunk, the same red cardinals supplying flashes of color.

Of course, nothing stays the same. The sky changes, the trees slough off dead branches after midnight gusts and ice storms, the birds mate and pass on their territory to the fledglings, the roof tiles crack and curl. That’s the beauty of it – those changes, the way my back yard looks different every single day. In fact, that’s part of what I see as “mine.” I get to watch it all.

When my husband and I were looking for a house to buy in 2003, it was a day like this – late winter, bright 43^rd parallel sunshine, not a bud yet on the trees but something about spring suggestive in the air. We stepped out onto the flagstone back porch and took in gulps of the place, surveying the yard. Just as we did so, a big male cardinal swooped overhead and landed in the little maple tree. It belted out that chip-chip cardinal sound and the female fluttered onto another branch. He fed her a seed.

I took it as an omen, and we bought the place.

Cardinals mate for life and live up to 15 years – meaning, if you read my January column, that their broods all through these years have probably been more cooperative than the less monogamous species. Since Ted and I bought the house as an act of commitment to what we hoped would be a lifelong love, it all seemed right. It’s very possible the fat male cardinal I saw on the feeder this morning is the same one that convinced us to sign all those reams of nerve-wracking agreements seven years ago.

That’s the way I decide to do things sometimes. Obviously, owning a house in Flint or anywhere!) is counterintuitive these days, as my California brother often warns me. But even with our house now “worth half of what we paid for it,” and the mortgage amount slightly “underwater,” when we recently refinanced, this house offers comfort, solace even, through every season, through storm, heat, ice, even in the face of last year’s arsons, the copper bandits, the homicides, the city’s deficits and struggling mayor. I don’t care. I love the place. It has good light, wood floors, crown molding, Faience tile in the upstairs shower, and the solid, square, no-nonsense rooms that go with its colonial bones.

I enjoy my “investment” – ah, sweet anachronistic notion – every day. I can’t say the same for any of my other “investments,” which appear in abstract quarterly statements as rows of san serif numerals under columns like “Value one year ago,” “value one month ago,” “current value.” Spare me that agitating obsession.

Value is a relative concept. On credit reports, mortgage applications and tax forms it’s a banker’s word, determined by the hard and unimaginative contours of lucre, by a bunch of philistines who couldn’t care less about my cardinals.

While as a homeowner I’m clearly part of the mortgage world, shelling out my monthly payments gives me some rights to hang on to my own notion of worth – so to speak. I have the illusion of exclusivity, a sensory claim on a little patch of ground and the upright architecture of a satisfying shelter.

I couldn’t have it without bankers, of course, but I didn’t want to say that here. I want to pretend I’m above all that, or outside it all, warmly cohabiting with the other lucky denizens of Maxine.

In fact, we’ve just decided to buy again. We successfully bid on a short sale across the street, and this time, it’s to keep the neighborhood together. We love the little family renting there and didn’t like the thought of their potential uprooting.

My brother shook his head when I told him, but after I explained everything, he came around.

“Sometimes the counterintuitive moves are the right ones after all,” he said.

I’m glad he sees it my way. Exploring that house, I haven’t yet spied an auspicious cardinal – just worrisome wiring, 1930s asbestos, and a hole in the garage roof. But unlike the boring numbers on my TIAA-CREF report, these are provocations for the spirit, as satisfying in their concrete meaning for my life in the neighborhood as the sunlight on the windowsill.

For more from East Village Magazine, go here.

Pursuing a Happy Darkness

Here's my new column for East Village Magazine (eastvillagemagazine.org), the result of an evolving experience of confronting, accepting and sometimes even loving darkness.

Lately I’ve been renegotiating with the dark.

Darkness gets a bad rap, including in my own mind. Each year I dread the coming on of longer nights, culminating in the anachronistic switch to Daylight Savings Time. By then, it’s dark when I leave for work in the morning and dark when I get home. This long winter darkness is so claustrophobic for me, so depressing, that anticipating it is almost as bad as actually putting up with it.

The literal darkness of winter merges, of course, with metaphorical darkness – that “dark night of the soul” that 16^th Century mystic Saint John of the Cross first defined. Some of the hardest, most fearful moments of my life have coalesced at roughly 4 a.m., when the world seems most terrifying, most unpromising, most dark.

I know of course that darkness harbors danger. Evil hides in unlit corners, as our faithful neighborhood watch teams rightly point out. It’s not just nocturnal critters like possums, raccoons and bats showing up, rattling our nerves and trash cans. There are human critters all too ready to capitalize on the dark, stalkers and thieves and pyromaniacs, sneaking around with their badass intentions where we can’t quite see them.

But it’s not really the dark’s fault. Back in the day we feminists used to parade around once a year or so on “Take Back the Night” marches, including several through downtown Flint, and though our efforts only seemed to apply when there were a dozen of us or more, it did feel good to shout out that the night belongs to everybody. At the heart of that movement was a call for safety. For me, there also was a less strident song – that there’s something beautiful about the night, something primally necessary to reclaim.

We spend half our lives in darkness. Life is short -- why should I squander half of it in a state of fear and resistance? Wouldn’t it seem that nature’s effect on humans, the yin and yang of day and night, might have an up side? Why should daylight get all the good press?

Could there, in short, be such a thing as happy darkness?

This question bubbled up over friendship – a friendship built on walks and a restless baby. My neighbor Vickie figured out a stroller ride calmed newborn Frannie, and asked if I’d like to come along. We’d meet after dinner and, with a baby buggy between us, explore many streets in the neighborhood. As Frannie gaped and cooed at passing details, Vickie and I talked about everything, including the languorous sun drooping behind the silver maples of Maxine, Beard, Woodside, Lynwood, Calumet, Blanchard, Kensington. We went wherever we felt like going.

Eventually Frannie learned to go to sleep without her daily wheeling, but thanks to her daddy holding down the fort, her mom and I kept walking.

As the days shortened, we found ourselves starting out in dusk, each night noting decreasing minutes of light. When finally our whole walk was in the dark, I thought we couldn’t keep it up.

There are all kinds of logical arguments, after all, for not going out after dark. It flies in the face of everything we’ve been taught as women. We’ve been marooned in fear. But we enjoyed our nightly strolls so much we didn’t want to stop. So we didn’t. We take sensible precautions, but we’ve found it quite possible to feel at home, in the neighborhood that is our home, even after dark.

Spending three or four hours a week meandering into the night like we own it has been exhilarating and liberating. It is a luxury. It’s an antidote for claustrophobia. It’s a guarantee, almost always, of a better night’s sleep.

After dark, the neighborhood yields a remarkable glowing magic. This matters to my sense of our place, which so often saddens and worries me. At night the houses look calm and inviting, their rectangles and orderly panes of indoor light distinct and intriguing. We appreciate particular front porches, where porch lights frame interesting doors, brick steps, trellises, roof angles, and climbing ivy. We wouldn’t so much notice these in daylight, when many details blend together in equalizing swathes of sunbeams.

That is, we see things differently in different kinds of light. Part of the magic is it’s never really dark. Yet night light is different from the light of day: the variegated oranges, ochres and ambers of artificial light, the silvery moonlight through canopies of hardwoods – it’s elegant, nuanced, etched in mystery.

We pick blocks to stroll that have the best streetlights, and our progress from one cone of light to another is rhythmic and metered. Like a good poem, we move from dark to light to dark to light.

One night Vickie said when you walk the neighborhood after dark, it looks like every family is happy. The quality of inside light, enjoyed from our outsiders’ view, is serene. It’s possible to imagine that lovely light means lovely life – it’s possible to imagine, a cozy, hopeful visual illusion. When we walk by the lit-up houses, in other words, they make us happy. That’s a kind of truth, a trick of the darkness and the light we all provide to counter it.

Saint John of the Cross’s poem “Dark Night of the Soul” describes a journey of the soul from its bodily home to its union with God. It’s instructive that that trip of the spirit takes place at night. Saint John’s pilgrimage involves the “purification of the senses,” a step the darkness accommodates very well. We rest our bodies, at night, from the daylight stimulations of eyes and ears, the way in yoga class we sometimes roll soft eyewraps around our heads to give the brain a break. People need a rest from daylight. What we find at night can be a journey rich with gifts. Even in Flint, there can be a happy darkness.

Scrub Brush: "This is It"

Tools of Rage and Poetry, With Cat


A new era...is how it feels, continually adjusting to life events. I'm struggling in my own quotidian rhythms to embrace and accommodate to and balance among my particularities -- the personal wrestling of my individual circumstances -- and a concept of "greater good" -- the ways in which the community -- my community or communities -- and in fact the natural world go on with or without me. What is my role in this? How do I keep my individual body going, my mysterious individual consciousness, the consciousness that inhabits me and in which I am trapped for the duration -- as are we all, of course, humans moving around in these limited containers held together by our sturdy skins.

Saturday night's reading (see below) was a fine moment -- four readers, as it turned out, an audience of 50, double-digits of wine bottles, red and white, flowing along with the concertos of voice and word. Connections with my history; I was present at the opening of Buckham close to 30 years ago; I was present when Alan Ginsberg performed there; I have reviewed many art shows staged there; I have read there myself a number of times over the decades.

Waiting for people to show up the other night, I stood in the open window at the back wall and looked down at the Torch parking lot, the brick law offices, the southbound traffic on Beach Street; it was a mild lovely evening and downtown Flint smelled like a city, delicious, evocative -- a mix of asphalt and exhaust with a bit of stubborn spring green mixed in. Framed in the window, that swatch of Flint on a spring Saturday night seemed romantic and melancholy, my own history and desires and sadnesses inescapably in the air. I went to the gallery's bathroom where I've retreated for solitary earthy functions uncountable times during uncountable art openings. There's a full-length mirror in there, and I inevitably looked at myself, my whole self, before going back out into the world of the life I've made. Hmm: yes, that's me, I had to say. Still me. I recognized myself, still there. In that one specific moment. As Sheldon Kopp says in Item One of his Eschatological Laundry List: This Is It.

Before the reading I was in a foul and volatile mood. Trying to load paper into the empty printer, I couldn't get the packaging on the ream open and in a sudden fury, slammed the whole pack down onto the floor. Ripped off my glasses and threw them on the floor too, violently swearing. The symbolism isn't lost on me. Language, my beloved, trusted soul tool, so often resists. The world so often resists our words, or doesn't care. And what I see, sometimes clearly, the evidence of my senses, often leads to pain and disappointment.

So I abandoned the upstairs and, in the spirit of Gaston Bachelard, stomped down to the basement. To clean the cat litter. In the pungent cool darkness. Still in a fury. The place smelled so strongly of ammonia my eyes watered. Back from Pedro, we had somehow forgotten to check: forgotten our duty. Three litter boxes overflowing, the cats had peed on the concrete floor and pooped in cool corners. I took over the basement with dangerous energy. Ted came with me. That fact. The man who loves me: In the basement, holding the bag for cat shit, holding the dustpan for piles of scattered litter. I filled a bucket with bleach and water and got down on my knees, slopping the mix onto concrete; me in a teeshirt, old socks, raggedy shorts and rubber gloves, daring Ted to laugh at my flaggellating getup. He refrained. He simply held the bag. I scrubbed down the stink and my rage with an old scrub brush. I like that word "scrub brush." My scrub brush helped.

The basement smells clean now. The floor is soothing and cool and free of crud.

The eight poems I read Saturday night were, as my new literary pal Matt Falk said, a "set" encompassing a range of emotion. On the whole, indeed, I felt them as a sequence, a cri de coeur from my whole Flint life -- one poem I first drafted in the 80s, several others I wrote within the past few months. It felt good to cry them out, to declaim. I am at cusp these days and the act of witness, of saying my life, of working the sounds of my life -- all of it was gratifying. I slept well that night.

See, I am taking this as a serious occasion in my life, even though my current poetry manuscript has been rejected at least ten times since September. I am taking this as an act of scrubbing into my life, doing what I can do. On my knees in the cool basement, taking it in, taking it in, making my life whatever it will be.

Ink Takes a Village: and that village is FLINT

Nic Custer, Alan Matthews, Kelsey Ronan, Grayce Scholt, Jan Worth-Nelson

Join in to hear and see a dynamic lineup for a memorable night in Flint-Town -- the East Village Magazine writers.

Those of us who have lived here for years have powerful stories to tell. AND there will be wine from D'Vine Wines and hors d'oeuvres from Oliver T's. This is a literary event not to be missed.

Here's the Thing

Art is not nice. This is a place to be angry. Tonight, while we were trying to have an "open mic" poetry reading at Churchhill's, a drunk guy barged in, loudly asking where was his "wagon." Then he slurringly demanded a cigarette from one of the young women there, who gave one to him, and then he begged money off of her, which she gave him. It was an annoying and frightening moment. After he finally left, having disrupted most of a performance by one of the hardy readers, a Flint cop showed up and sat down among us, in full uniform. It was reassuring, especially in these tight budget times. If cops are stretched thin in Flint, it was nice that one of them was devoted to us, the Saturday night poets of downtown.

And art is not nice. There are times when we need to be angry, rude, intrusive...noisy.

Charred Remains

Feeling somewhat violent myself, I took Ted on a small tour today of some of the burned out hulks. I wanted to capture one of the signs that said "Do Not Burn Down." Here is what we found:

Oak Street

Oak Street, next to the "Do Not Burn Down" house

W. Court Street

Stockton Street

MLive reports today there were nine more fires last night -- only one actually sounded like an "abandoned house" M.O., but that one actually had been on the city's demolition list. Having just come from a writing conference at L.C.C., my mind and heart are full of this material, and I feel myself drawn into these charred remains.

Wrath and Headstands for Surviving Life in Flint

Here's my April column for East Village Magazine. I'll be reading with Grayce Scholt and Kelsey Ronan at 7 p.m. Tuesday, April 13 at Flint's Longway Planetarium in the final "Poetry Under the Stars" reading, and then with four other EVM writers -- Grayce, Kelsey, Alan Mathews and Nic Custer -- at Buckham Gallery on Saturday night, May 22.

This morning, as an experiment, I said the word “wrath” out loud to my reflection in the bathroom mirror. It’s an interesting word. I noticed how in saying it, the mouth has to open, pushing out to the left and right, and the teeth show. “Wrath” on a face looks primitive and a bit scary.

And primitive, indeed, is the flavor of the arsonists who are torching houses in downtown Flint as I write this. And primitive indeed are the people yelling “baby killer” at Bart Stupak , and primitive indeed are those yelling “faggot” and “n***r” at supporters of the health care reform bill.

I’ve been considering anger a lot lately, having recently experienced a personal tsunami of this most fiery of the Seven Deadly Sins.

Lately, in a discussion about legalizing pot, Bill Maher said something like, “This is a tense world. It’s stressful to be alive. We need something to mellow us out once in awhile.”

Aside from Maher’s specific campaign, I found his comments touching and true. It’s tough being a human being. And the price of mounting tension seems to be wrath and more wrath, increasingly less modulated, increasingly mean.

I must admit that things don’t seem as clear-cut to me now as they once did.

Wrath, for instance, isn’t always purely primitive. There’s a mature kind of anger, the result of real injustice, that demands action, as in the abuse of children, women and animals, and the visceral energies of rage help us carry out what needs to be done, the way people in Carriage Town have united to try to stop the house-burnings.

For me, though, the hardest kind of anger to manage is the “helpless” kind, when I experience the results of something that seem outside of my control. A body in the throes of that kind of wrath, untended and misunderstood, causes so much havoc.
That’s how I’ve been feeling some of the time lately, and I have been exploring what to do. Obviously, some things that make me angry are so big that I don’t know where to start. But within the life of my individual body, I’m finding some intelligence, and a few surprises.

For example, almost every day since last fall, I’ve been standing on my head.

As often as possible, I roll out a blue mat, take off my rings, pile a soft pillow against the wall, cradle my head in my entwined fingers, and kick up my legs.

It’s part of my relatively new life as a yoga student, and I’m immensely grateful. Things look different when I’m upside down.
I’ve brought the headstand home from my yoga class at the UM – Flint, where with about ten other people I show up twice a week, seeking deep relaxation and meditation.

It starts at the moment of arrival, when we leave our shoes on a mat outside a nondescript door.

Inside, in a windowless room with bright murals of green trees, sky and water painted on the concrete block wall, it’s so quiet. And quieting. It’s a gentle and respectful group, everybody sensitive to others’ space as we adjust from whatever happened that day. Some people lie on their mats, legs up against the wall, eyes closed, arms relaxed at their sides. Others sit cross-legged, backs straight, breathing. When our teacher, Rachelle, comes in, we settle down, facing her as she begins in her melodic voice.

She says “sit tall,” suggesting that we unfocus our eyes, close our lids, and bring our palms together at our hearts. We inhale. We exhale. We chant slowly, beginning with a full-throated trio of “ommms.”

I love the chants. I don’t know what the words mean, and to be honest, I don’t always get them right, so I just mumble along. I’ve thought of asking Rachelle for translation. Since I’m a writer and college teacher, you’d think I’d need to know what everything means.

But yoga class is a place outside the analytic brain, and my body, which isn’t so much of an intellectual, gets what it needs. My body likes rhythms and the humming voices of others in the room, a lovely vibration, a loving energy.

Yoga is a Sanskrit word for “union” – combining breathing, stretching, balancing, and meditating as an integration of mind, body and spirit.

The poses are often hard and sometimes hurt. My hamstrings are a mess: tight and feisty. I get cramps. I fall over almost every time I try to do a shoulder stand. Rachelle says instead of calling it pain, we might say, “that’s interesting” and just keep breathing. She’s re-introduced me to my feet, their clever metatarsals and their horseshoe heels – all meant to anchor me solidly in the world.

Sometimes, at the end of the class when we lie recovering in the darkened room, I feel tears of relief well up.
It’s all quite un-Protestant, and I like that. In my anxiously fundamentalist childhood, the body was, of course, described as the “Temple of God,” but I didn’t get much help on how to make it so. The adults in my life were ill at ease with their own bodies, startled and discomfited when the body’s instincts – lust, let’s say, or especially wrath – outed them as actual humans, earthlings to the core.

To be human back then was to struggle with the body, an exhausting wrestling match with guilt, shame and defeat. To love the body, then, was to sin.

It is a lifelong journey, of course, to learn another way – to know that loving one’s whole self is in fact a key to getting through this bumpy life. I am grateful for practices such as yoga which ground and soothe me, open me to others and help me face adversity. I am grateful to Rachelle and my gentle yoga classmates.

If I am to survive in this raggedy world, in short, I need to learn to unite my disparate parts. Among other gifts, that helps me with my wrath, which really serves a purpose. It is not in fact, a deadly sin, unless it curdles into something unexpressed, misdirected and stuck in fear. I’ve come to respect my wrath and even welcome its abundant energies.
So now, to the wall, to upend myself into love and energy once again.

Mother and the Farmers' Market

Here's my March East Village Magazine column. Whenever I'm going through periods where wrestling toward happiness becomes an issue, she comes to mind. Of course. It's all so primal.

Flint Farmers Market at harvest season, September, 2009

In the last few years of her life my mother ate almost nothing. She had had colon cancer and for a tortuous few months bore a colostomy bag. Then they unhooked it and reconnected her digestive tubes and she lived another couple of years. But food was a problem the rest of her life, and eating deteriorated into a thorny, bedeviling process, a lifelong pleasure lost .

But not before she left her mark on me. This is an essay about food. That is why it begins with Mom. Born exactly a hundred years ago this year, she grew up in a family that assumed itself upper middle-class -- white, Protestant -- morosely inhabiting a big, drafty Victorian house in Findlay, Ohio.

Their status wobbled in the difficult Twenties. My traveling evangelist grandpa, by some accounts a brilliant but erratic man, usually spent most of the take from his intineracy before he made it home to the Painted Lady on North Corey Street.

My grandmother took in roomers and fed her five kids Sunday night -- my mother remembered with a mix of melancholy and wounded nostalgia -- suppers of stale bread softened in warm milk, green onions poked in like swizzle sticks.

From then on, my mother cared deeply about making sure there was enough nutritious food on any table over which she presided. In college, she majored in that quaint, painfully proto-feminist curriculum, Home Economics. She could talk, not that anybody usually wanted to listen, about the chemistries of canning and rising bread dough.

In the Tara-like nursing home where she lived her last four years, she clung to some of her cherished food rituals. She held court at the head of the table in the dining room when we came to visit, folding and unfolding her cloth napkin and taking in tiny spoonfuls of creamed spinach, or pureed sweet potatoes, maybe a microgram of butterscotch pudding.

As always, she admonished her children, children’s children and various hangers-on to eat slowly, use our silverware properly, orchestrate reasonably small bites and chew discreetly with our mouths shut, one hand in the lap.

More important, even, we were supposed to converse. We were supposed to smile and be grateful, attentive to the sensory gifts of the table, and we were supposed to report on our lives and say interesting things. Nobody was excused before it was over. That concept -- children being cut loose for other, more entertaining activities -- struck her as uncalled for and indulgent. Everybody was required to stick it out for the whole shebang. That was The Way People Behaved.

She was a passionate gardener and food aesthete, often declaring upon hailing her guests to table with a little Chinese bell, that the meal was based on “good concomitants,” and pointing out her often ingenious selections of color and taste: sweet corn with Kentucky Wonder beans and pickled beets, eggplant with the carnelian tomatoes, the gooseberry with the rhubarb.

These days I think, what a waste, that her talents weren’t more noted and praised. She was an intelligent woman who never found an audience quite worthy of her devotions.

Yet I am healthier today, as my own old age sets in, because of my first 18 years, those daily “three squares,” of wonderful food she conscientiously and even joyfully provided.

And that leads me, all these decades later, to a sweet little miracle of downtown Flint, the Farmers Market.

This is what I'm talkin' about

Entering my sixties, it is more important than ever to me to find the corners of the world where I can be happy, where I can pursue the sanguine concept my mother never called “wellness,” where I can find both audience and stage for the goodness of life and share it with others.

And there is Dick Ramsdell, the market manager, up on a ladder in the middle of the big aisle, counting patrons. And there’s the Hills kid at the cheese counter, helping me decide between the English and French cheddar. He offers me an aromatic slice of the latest Stilton on a square of parchment and announces my favorite butter, wrapped in blue and white checked paper and tucked in a miniature straw basket, is in from Vermont.

And there are piles of glowing gold butternut squash and red potatoes, tangerines and pears, feasts of carrots, cauliflower and cabbage gathered by the Penziens and Coykendalls. And the fresh-cut chicken, whole roasters and Rubenesque ducks at Ron and Linda Howard’s stall.

At the bakery, Nancy & Costa Anagostopoulos bustle around behind glass-covered pastry cases. My nose flares at the fragrant yeastiness, and my husband buys his favorite lemon croissants.

At D’Vine Wines, I stock up on Leese-Fitch Cabernet and Protocolo, greeting Karen and Maria, and my husband picks up fresh milk in glass bottles. On the way back down the aisle, we buy hummus and tabbouli from David and Ani Jawhari, say hello to Todd the book guy, buy some Patty Warner cards, and pick up another pair of colorful hand-made socks from Soozie Q’s.

We culminate our Farmers Market visit by climbing the stairs to Steady Eddy’s, where Ted devours the BLT and I have the South of the Border omelet, mild.

I’m longtime buddies of Kim, Lisa and Chris, who serve me espresso in my favorite blue cup, and I am extravagantly smitten that “Daddy,” Lisa’s late father Mike Lord, overlooks the café’s goings on from a squat urn on a shelf behind the take-out counter.

My mother would approve of the Flint Farmers Market, where we take our time, selecting “good concomitants” for our week and chatting amiably at our Steady Eddy’s meals.

Like the spirit of the irrepressible Lord, a friend whose life I celebrate with every sip of thick espresso, my mother’s plucky ghost goes with me when I act in my own behalf, like when I linger contentedly over the good life of the Farmers Market.

“It’s about time to get happy,” I imagine her – or my dream mother -- saying. “Life is fleeting – savor it all.”