I spent a day last week with a writer from Time Magazine showing him around Detroit. He was here to do a story about ways this city might reinvent itself, so a few days before he arrived I put together a tour of the city with that in mind. I was kind of nervous---this was Time Magazine, after all: the storied weekly of Henry Luce and James Agee and the "person of the year." I know no one really reads it anymore unless they're waiting for a root canal or a colonoscopy, but still: Time Magazine. It's a big deal. So I met the writer outside my wife's office and welcomed him into my filthy car. He was surprisingly young and all I could think when I shook his hand was, "Dude, you were born in the EIGHTIES weren't you?" He was only in town for a few hours and the mayor had just stood him up, so I had the enormous responsibility of trying to explain this insanely complicated city before he jetted back to Park Slope. This is how the mainstream media works, I guess: to write a story on the 11th-largest city in the nation they parachute in a guy who's never been there before for a few hours WITHOUT A CAR and let some carpetbagging hipster douchebag show him around town. What pertains to laws and sausages, it seems, applies also to Time Magazine articles when it comes to seeing how they're made.

To be fair, the writer was incredibly aware of how unfair this situation was. He was bright and fully engaged and fascinated by everything I showed him. I can only hope the time I spent with him will make the story something more than if he had been stuck walking around downtown trying to make sense of a 138.8-square-mile city from a few square blocks of vacant storefronts, abandoned skyscrapers, and a Hard Rock Cafe. As I drove him around town telling him all my favorite anecdotes ("That's where my kid and I got attacked by wild dogs!", "I was surrounded by wild dogs there once, too!", "Some wild dogs killed a homeless guy in that alley!") and spelling out my thoughts about why things here are the way they are, he was all, "You know, I appreciate all this information, but I have maybe 1,000 words if I'm lucky. . ." I told him I didn't expect him to write about everything I was showing him; you can't fit a dissertation on the side of a coffee mug. It can be such a challenge to capture the truth of a place; I have been hacking away at it on this blog for years because if there's anything I've learned from reading the great writers, it's that if you can capture the truth of any place you can reach the truth of every place. And if I was successful in showing this guy that Detroit does have some hope of reinventing itself, then maybe there is hope for every other place in these dark times.

But asking me to show you around Detroit is sort of like asking a devout Mormon to show you around Las Vegas: you're not going to see what the convention bureau or the city boosters would prefer. I wanted him to see up close all the different ways Detroiters have reacted to the issues of deteriorating housing stock, lost neighborhoods, drugs, loss of community, crime, abandonment, and abundant green space. I took him to the Heidelberg Project, of course, and then showed him smaller neighborhood projects like the Powerhouse I wrote about a couple weeks ago.

These are people, I told the reporter, who could live anywhere in the world, but they've chosen to settle here and become a part of this community and garden and farm and live a kind of life that would be almost impossible in any other major city. I drove him down the main commercial drag of the old Polish neighborhood that now looks like it never recovered from a nuclear blast. I showed him the operating automobile plant that years ago required a vibrant part of the old Polish neighborhood to be torn down, but also explained that the Chevy Volt---the plug-in electric car that represents much of Detroit's future---would be built there. And then, about a mile away, I showed him the neighborhood that surrounds Jane Cooper School:

This spot marks the far western edge of Georgia Street, one of the most devastated and forlorn parts of the city. I wanted to show him how the city might tear out the infrastructure and let huge tracts of the city return to nature, as other shrinking cities (such as Youngstown, Ohio) have done. I took him into the school and I could tell he had never seen anything like that before. "This is about as bad as it gets," I said, driving a mile or so to the far eastern end of Georgia Street, past shabby houses alone in their blocks and forlorn-looking storefront churches, heading to another community garden.

I heard about this garden from a friend who'd read about it on a local internet message board. She sent me the garden's blog and I arranged to meet the guy behind it that afternoon. When we arrived we found a block that looked like nothing else we'd seen all day: three vacant lots had been transformed into a well-kept garden, and at the center was a huge white movie screen with a motley collection of chairs facing it. Across the street was another vacant lot and the beginning of a small fruit orchard. Waiting for us was Mark Covington, the neighborhood hero who started all this:

He was one of the coolest people I've ever met. Last year, after the 37-year-old Detroiter lost his job cleaning massive oil tanks down in Toledo he noticed the trash-strewn vacant lot a few doors down from the house where he lives with his mother and grandmother and decided to clean it up and turn it into a garden. After negotiating the necessary permits, he recruited some neighborhood kids and even started receiving all kinds of help from people throughout metro Detroit who learned about his project through an online message board. Within a matter of months the garden was flourishing, as were his plans to do more. He started movie nights for kids and movie nights for adults. He gave away school supplies. It was the sort of outreach that patchouli-soaked non-profits requiring boards and grants and employees hope to accomplish, but this was just a guy, his best friend, a few people from the neighborhood, and a bunch of people he met on the internet. For one dollar they bought an abandoned corner store with an attached house that they plan to turn into a community center for the kids and a general store for the neighborhood that sells healthy food to supplement the free produce they get from the garden (they still need to pay a few thousand dollars in back taxes to get the property). "We were sitting here in the garden on the first of the month," he said, "And that path heads right through here towards the only grocery store over a mile away. Who were all these people walking over there at all hours of the day and night? That's when we came up with the idea to open a store here in the neighborhood." As we stood around listening to Mr. Covington, people from the neighborhood walking past greeted him warmly. "I remember when I was a kid this was a real community," he said. "We're bringing that back."

If you put Mr. Covington in a designer suit, from a block away you might mistake his silhouette for that of our former mayor, but make no mistake: in his blue jeans and work gloves he has proven himself to be everything that man was not. His selflessness is evident above all else. Where the former mayor exploited racial and regional divisions, Mr. Covington has exploited our common humanity and inspired black and white people from other neighborhoods and even the suburbs to come help reestablish some hope in this tiny sliver of Detroit.

The Time Reporter didn't get to meet our current mayor but I'm so glad I was able to introduce him to this unemployed man who---in a perfect world---would be the kind of person who leads us. The reporter asked, "Obviously Detroit is going through a lot of hard times right now, how do you see the city reinventing itself?"

Mr. Covington thought for a moment, shrugged, and pointed to the vacant lots he'd turned into gardens that feed the bodies and souls of his neighborhood. "This," he said. "On every vacant lot."

* * * * *

When we got back into the car, the reporter and I were speechless, having traveled from one end of Georgia Street to find Mark Covington at the other, to go from the worst kind of despair to the most inspiring kind of hope in just a short few blocks. "To be honest," he says, "Most of the people I interview are assholes. I don't get many interviews like that."

I had to pick up the kids at my wife's office and said to my daughter, "Say hi to Alex, he writes for TIME MAGAZINE" as though this was something that should have impressed her. She might have done something other than glare at him suspiciously if I had lied and said that he was in charge of feeding Muno on the set of Yo Gabba Gabba ("What's Foofa like in real life?"). Together we visited a school for pregnant teens that houses a working farm and my daughter pitched a fit because she couldn't see the pony. Driving away, I pointed at a nearby daycare center surrounded by barbed wire and covered with misshapen folk art depictions of Dora the Explorer and Mickey Mouse and said, "See that? THAT's where I'm going to send you all day if you keep this up." This is how we roll in Detroit, Time Magazine.

Thinking goats were as good as ponies, I drove straight to my friend's neighbors' goat farm just a few blocks from the casino with LED-light display that resembles Biff's from Back to the Future 2. In the shadow of that building the goats that weren't bashing their brains out totally came up to say hi.

"The casinos are part of how the mayor's office will tell you we are reinventing this city, but these goats are a lot more important," I said while getting my own kids out of the car. A homeless man pushing a baby stroller full of sheet metal ductwork walked down the middle of the road. "It's an interesting place," I said to the reporter here to write a story about it. "That's why we live here."

After we dropped the grateful reporter off at a cab stand and watched him get whisked back to the airport before we could even merge back into traffic, I said to my daughter in the back seat, "I saw a beautiful garden today, Juney. When the weather gets a little nicer, we're going to spend some time over there planting stuff, okay?"

"Okay pops," she said, and we drove home.

I have just left Juniper screaming for me in a room somewhere. Today is her second day of preschool. After I spend a few minutes in the classroom trying to get her to calm down to a point where she could say something without all the mottled cheeks and snot bubbles and tears and tears and tears, I make my final, confident, I'm-so-proud-of-you goodbye, and one of her classmates says to me, "Where are you going?" and the waterworks start all over again. Her teacher shoos me away and intercepts a screaming Juniper, picking up the tangle of kicking legs and arms reaching for me and I rush out into the hallway, shutting the door behind me and standing against it with the relief of a horror movie heroine after a narrow escape, and as I stop to breathe the entire school echoes with her hollering. Dada. I want my dada. Dada don't leave me. Dada don't go outside. Hold me and keep me nice and safe. Dada hold me and keep me nice and safe. And then it's just screaming. Gargoyles up twenty stories all around downtown Detroit crane their necks away from it; stained-glass windows collapse in deadly, saintly shards; birds are rousted from their nests on Belle Isle, as far south as Canada, and Ohio; Aretha Franklin hears the High C and snaps a Z.

In this moment, all anger and frustration and that unfathomable parental longing to do what feels right even when it will only cause further harm, I bang the back of my head against the door and then scoot away in fear that Juniper might know it's me there, I'm just twisting the knife in deeper and deeper by being there, mere feet away, while she feels so abandoned and so alone. And then I'm crying too, and I'm angry while I'm crying, because she's made me so utterly helpless. Other teachers find me with mottled cheeks standing against the lockers and they say, "You must be the father of the screaming child," and I say, "That's right," with a mixture of shame and pride, shame that I'm crying and shame that I've coddled her and shame that she's not quiet and accepting of her fate like the other kids; and there is also pride, this strange defensive pride I can't explain, a mixture of "how dare someone else have any negative opinion about my kid, she's perfect just like she is," and the sick, selfish pride of being loved and needed so badly that she can hardly tolerate life without me, and perhaps also some pride in the knowledge that this is how I was, how I've always been, a pride at how she cries just like me, her face twisting up while she chokes on words just like I always did whenever I had to part with someone I loved for some reason I didn't understand, a pride that she is turning out to be just like me.

Anger and concern and frustration and helplessness and shame and a curious pride, all this in me as I grip the steering wheel and drive away. I remember some trite condolence: "It's harder on the parent than the kid." Of course she will be okay when I get back there. Of course she will hardly notice I've returned. This cleaving of apronstrings is necessary. This unwelcome helplessness, just another curse of parenthood. This was the first of many such partings, of a lifetime of parting. If I'm lucky, it may never be too easy for her.

Juniper can spend hours looking at pictures of herself from when she was a baby, and this inevitably launches her into a series of regressive behaviors that result in me taking care of a six-month-old again, swaddled and googooing and gagaing in her old boppy. The other day she asked me to take her to the dollar store next to the wig shop so she could buy a pacifier with the quarters and nickels she'd scrounged from beneath the couch cushions. A resourceful one, this child. I took her over there, but only because I've been meaning to buy her one of those toddler-sized doo rags they sell at the wig shop. She asked to ride in the bjorn, but I just ignored her. I do have some limits, you see.

Juniper never took a liking to the pacifier back when it would have been really useful to cork all that hollering, but after we walked out of that dollar store with a 3-pack of pacifiers, I didn't have to listen to her asking me if kangaroos have shadows or why the dead squirrel had no eyes for at least twenty minutes. It made me wish I'd followed through with those fantasies of duct taping a nuk in her mouth back when she was a baby. Eventually she took her new pacifier out and said, "Swaddle me, dada."

Back in her early days, I was always the designated swaddler. I was good at it, like those ladies with the hair nets in the taquerias who roll burritos so tight that when you stick your fork in them black bean juice squirts in your eye. Still, it's no easy task to swaddle a 30-month old wearing shoes. The other day we went for a jog and she refused to sit in the jogging stroller unless swaddled. After the swaddle, I couldn't get the restraining straps over her shoulders, so I just used the chest strap to keep her in nice and tight. It must have looked like I was taking the world's smallest psychotic cannibal out for fresh air in her little chariot. A couple days later she wouldn't leave the house unless swaddled, but I had to play fetch with the dog, so I swaddled her up and brought her over to the park and just sort of propped her up against a tree. I put the pacifier in her mouth and occasionally asked if the little baby was doing okay [she'd nod] and she was perfectly content. It strikes me as somewhat disingenuous that her fantasy of infancy is this pantomime of quiet, reflective observation, whereas the reality of her infancy was anything but.

All of this comes with a balance of big-girlhood, of course: two inches of height in the last two months, several consecutive diaper-free months, underdogs on the big girl swings, and the ability to tear my heart to shreds with a few icy words. "I don't like you anymore, dada," she said to me the other day. Then, later: "Dada, stop singing. You are not a good singer."

And of course, there is also whining. Sometimes it seems like one of us must have dropped her at around 28 months and she just got stuck in the whining position. I also don't understand why everything has to be said at the same level of heightened volume, as if I'm not submitting to her will because I'm some foreign tourist who doesn't understand her, so everything needs to be shouted for clarity's sake.

There are things I love about her growing older, like the conversations we have and how she can reveal all the trippy shit going on inside her head. Oh, and how she can walk by herself now. That rules. But when we sit there with her old photo albums I do sometimes find myself wallowing in maudlin thought, seeing a photo of her as she looks in my memories of those days I would drop her off at daycare in the morning and couldn't even make it to the bathroom upstairs before I started sobbing. Wouldn't it be nice, I think, to go back and spend more time with her when she was that age? Then I slap myself across the cheek. Perhaps she gets her baseless fantasies of a quiet, reflective infancy from me. Those days weren't fun. They were loud as hell, and we were hardly sleeping.

Someday I'll probably look wistfully back upon these days, too, when Juniper the big girl always pretended to be Juniper the baby. I may be capitulating too much to her regressive demands, but when it comes down to it sometimes I'd rather deal with a 2.5-year old quietly acting like an imaginary infant than a 2.5-year old acting like a real 2.5-year old.