"There are more than 400 liquor stores in Detroit. But if you want to buy food, good luck. In the entire 140 square miles of the city, there are no Krogers, no Safeways, only eight supermarkets, and they’re discount stores."  ---Chris Hansen, Dateline NBC, April 20, 2010.

This post is part of my ongoing response to lazy journalists like Mr. Hansen who love to echo silly hyperbole because it's so shocking (whether or not it's actually true). This is just a humble post about how we manage not to starve to death here in the city of Detroit despite a lack of national chains. "But where do you shop?!" is a question I get all the time when people find out we're raising a family in Detroit. It's a question I remember asking myself back in the late 90s when I first started coming here to visit a house full of artists, musicians, and urban gardeners that my friend knew well. I remembered mentioning some hand-wringing magazine article I'd read about "food deserts." But of course what I really wondered was, How far do you have to drive to get to the Kroger? This presumes, of course, that national chains are the best place to buy groceries. Over the last few years I've learned that's not at all true, and sometimes it's a good thing that Detroit doesn't have any large chain supermarkets. Honey Bee Market La Colmena is a good example why.

A few days after we moved into our current house, some kindly neighbors brought over a 64 oz container of fresh salsa and bag of house-made tortilla chips from Honey Bee Market La Colmena. From the first bite, we were hooked. I sat down the other day with Ken Koehler and his wife Tammy Alfaro-Koehler outside their Detroit grocery store, and they cracked open a tub of the same fresh salsa and a bag of their chips while we chatted about the history of the store. It felt just right.

 [This is a long post with a lot of photos, so click to continue reading on a separate page]

Has it really been three years since the last time I pottytrained a kid using inappropriate pictures of beloved characters pooping? My artistic abilities almost certainly peaked in the seventh grade, but it seems that has not stopped me from sharing them with you once again:

1. A Robot
2. A Unicorn
3. Caillou
4. A Zombie
5. Wendell
6. Frankenstein
7. Muno (from Yo Gabba Gabba)
8. A pheasant
9. Mickey (from Maurice Sendak's In the Night Kitchen)
10. A Mummy

 

As I approach that difficult time in every man's life after he's extended a liberal arts education into some expensive yet practical professional degree, worked for a few years in said profession to pay off the debt, quit abruptly, and spent almost half a decade taking care of two small children, I'm realizing it won't be long before both kids will be off at school and I'll soon have to figure out what I'm going to do with the rest of my life. It's like that day in college that I finally recognized no one was ever going to pay me for bad translations of ancient Greek histories. If we had an extra bedroom I might be able to convince my wife to fill it and grant me a reprieve from re-entering the real world, but sadly there's no room at the inn and granting a lazy man clemency from labor is apparently not a good enough reason to force a hardworking woman to go through it again.

So, as long as this lasts I swear I'm going to enjoy it. The day camp we've sent the girl to the last two summers isn't operating this year, so I get her every day all summer and the truth is I couldn't be happier about that. She starts kindergarten in the fall and I'm going to miss that kid like you wouldn't believe. Right now I look forward to the two days a week she's not in play school, so we can leave the city and go on the adventures we plan for those days. My son and I can still have adventures, true, but he has so much more fun when his sister is with him. The days loom when we'll lose her to teachers, to her friends and Justin Bieber or brooding pubescent vampires and all the other things we won't understand. What I love about being with my kids at this age is how nonresistant they are to whatever it is the people around them find exciting. Bertrand Russell famously said that "fear is exceedingly infectious; children catch it from their elders" but I've been thrilled to see how equally infectious excitement has been between me and my kids.  

* * * * *

Of course, the girl has already learned to manipulate that excitement into more toys. Her recent obsession with all things ancient Egypt somehow resulted in me ordering just about every Egyptian-themed toy available on the market, and even making a few that weren't. If she's this clever when she's nineteen, she's going to tell me she met a nice "archaeology major" and she's thinking about switching herself but needs some cash to go to Rome so they can excavate some late emperor's villa in the Sabine countryside and I'll be fumbling for my check book before she even finishes her sentence. For now, we read books about archaeology and ancient Egypt and talk and talk and talk about it. All winter, this was fueled by frequent visits to the small Egyptian collection at the Detroit Institute of Arts.

We know the collection at our museum so well now that for our weekly non-school-day adventures, we recently decided to hunt down every mummy within 200 miles and visit it. Eventually we'll make the trek to the Field Museum in Chicago to see its 23 mummies and full-size tomb, but I'll admit there's just something special about driving to a smaller city and visiting a local museum where the ragged mummy of some lesser priestess or servant is usually the highlight of the entire collection. There are always plenty of other treasured Egyptian artifacts that the smaller museum has obtained to supplement the mummy display. We like to pour over the details of the entire collection without being overwhelmed by it, and the rust-belt mummies we've hunted down have provided a lot of fun. 

The weirdest thing about our annual pilgrimage to the town where my wife grew up was the realization that we weren't just going back to make fun of the Dutch people (like we always used to); No, we were going back because we enjoy the festival. I mean, we had actually been looking forward to it this year. My wife spent a week curled over her sewing machine preparing the kids new outfits. Meanwhile, I scoured Dutch eBay for depression-era wooden clogs and traditional hats. After an unusually warm Spring, we worried out loud that most of the six million tulips would be long gone before we got there. Just a few years ago I secretly cheered for the teenagers who turned their passenger-side car doors into 35 MPH guillotines, lopping off the heads of an entire block of flowers, risking hefty fines and the clucking of the village elders. Now why did I ever think that was funny? I wondered this year, admiring a row of flaming Keizerskroons along Central Ave. These flowers are beautiful! Then one of the motor-coaches that takes tourists down the tulip lanes passed by, its windows filled with Wilford Brimley lookalikes sharing my affection for brightly-colored tunicate bulbs, and I sat back down on the davenport with an afghan draped over my lap, wondering whether there's a cheaper way to get testing supplies for my diabetus.

I suppose I would have been a bit more fired up if we'd made it to Holland a day earlier, when favorite son Erik Prince received a standing ovation at a sold-out Tulip Time luncheon. Prince's father started an auto parts supplier in Holland that made the lighted vanity mirrors in your mom's 1982 Pontiac Bonneville. The younger Prince started Blackwater, the company whose goons running amok in Iraq gave bloodthirsty mercenaries a bad name. With the fortune he inherited from Papa Vanity Mirrors and his own war profits, Prince has become important member of the secretive cabal of conservative Christian billionaires from Western Michigan who have their fingers on the strings of all the right political puppets. To have a divisive figure like Erik Prince greeted so warmly at Tulip Time says a lot about how deep the conservative roots of the community run, all the way back to those original Calvinist separatist founders who chose Holland, Michigan as the place where they could prosper far away from Jews, Papists, and Belgians. There is no doubt that this town is still full of their progeny, and the Tulip Time advertisers know who they're primarily marketing to:

But Holland is also a town where a lot of good manufacturing jobs were available over the past quarter century. The agricultural industry in the region long ago brought Hispanic immigration (now 22 percent of the population) but the factory jobs have brought all kinds of other people to Holland who want to do crazy things like spend the money they earn and drink alcohol occasionally, you know: people who don't just assume Erik Prince's vast wealth is a sign of God's love for him. With all these new factory workers, engineers, retirees, and others coming to this town, some of the Dutch people are even learning to lighten up. Last year an ancient blue law was repealed and stores and restaurants were allowed to sell and serve alcohol on Sunday for the first time in anyone's memory. Some stores are even open downtown on Sunday now. If this keeps up, by 2072 there will be a gay pride parade down Eighth Street. This is your future, Dutchies. If you don't like it, move to Drenthe.

(Drenthe, Michigan's civic motto: "No gay pride parades, ever")

[this is a long post with a lot of pictures, so I'm breaking it up. If you want to read the whole thing and see pictures of the kids in their Dutch outfits, click here]

So let me tell you about last week.

On Monday I decided to clean out the car. Not ordinarily something I'd bother to tell you about, but it is relevant to something that happened the next day and the act of cleaning was pretty epic as far as acts in my life go these days. We have been operating for a number of years under the principle that the shittier we let our car get inside, the less likely it will be that anyone will ever want to steal it.  In addition to the sort of food mess and smell I've written about before, on this occasion there was so much dog hair caked to every surface it looked we'd paid for the deluxe Wampa-hide seat package. Last week the dog rolled around in something (hopefully not somebody) dead while we were hiking on Belle Isle and the stink of it filled the car on the way home and I was like, "Wow, that smell of death really covers up the fermenting Cheerio mash under the car seats!"

I spent more than two hours vacuuming the car out. We do not have a garage so I had to pester half our neighbors to borrow enough extension cords to get our vac to reach our parking spot. I even used a string of Christmas lights. It was very festive. When I finally picked up the kid from playschool that day she climbed into her (freshly laundered) car seat and asked, disgusted, "What happened to our car?" On the way home, I went through a car wash for the first time in years and quickly remembered why I hadn't: both children screamed like we were being slowly propelled through the digestive tract of a compact-sedan-eating squid. But the car looked nice for the first time in years.

The next morning my wife totaled it.

Now I don't believe in jinxes. But a week before I'd been grumbling about how our insurance rates hadn't decreased despite more than a decade without incident. This, combined with the overzealous cleaning and washing, seems to have tempted the fates to micromanage such a display of hubris. Of course, my first reaction was to feel incredibly lucky: both children had been in the car and nobody was hurt. Because we have only this one car, my wife had to call a neighbor to come pick up the kids and bring them to me. She had been so busy avoiding me by talking to the police, our insurer, and the rental car guy that I heard narration of the accident itself first from my children, ages five and two:

"There was a big crash and then there was lots of smoke."

"White smoke! Lotsa police guys!"

"Part of the car fell off."

"It was scary!"

"They took our car away on a truck. . ."

"A big truck!"

They continued to describe what sounded like the climactic scene of a Michael Bay film; all that was missing was our car turning into an intergalactic robot and destroying an entire SWAT team with a wrist-mounted particle blaster. It turns out my wife was parking and a valet whipped around a corner and tore off the fender, deploying the airbags and doing just enough damage to make repair costs exceed the 10-year-old vehicle's value. I called my dad, an auto-body repairman across the state, to complain about the cost of repairing a single fender. He replied, "Hey, we gotta eat too, just like lawyers." Touche.

* * * * *

My wife finally returned with a rented Chevy and a hangdog look. Inside the Chevy I detected the gossamer threads of old menthol smoke and found a hoary little Flamin' Hot Cheeto Puff in the cup holder. We spent the rest of the week going over our finances and preparing to drive the stinky Chevy to the 2010 Tulip Time Festival (more on that later this week). The moral of this story, if there even is one, is never clean anything. The guys at the junk yard won't even notice how you removed all the dog hairs from the seats with masking tape as they tear your car apart for spare parts.

 

A few days ago we went over to the Georgia Street Garden on the city's East Side and a really nice group of kids from that neighborhood came out and helped us make a few hundred seed bombs as part of a small project to beautify Detroit. On its surface, this neighborhood is pretty typical of the city. It isn't shockingly empty like some of the more dramatic areas nearby, but you'll find no shortage of burnt-out shells of houses, or vacant lots where houses once stood. But to focus on those would be to ignore the reality that this neighborhood is not abandoned. Plenty of good people live in this neighborhood; plenty of the houses are well-maintained with proud lawns by proud people. There is new infill housing. There are churches and schools. But the most striking thing about this neighborhood are the gardens. Over the three years I've been coming here, I've seen more and more gardens popping up, some well away from the central community garden started by neighborhood hero Mark Covington back in 2007-8 (I first wrote about him here). Smaller vacant lots are getting transformed into new gardens, and more backyards are being tilled this year than last. The rooster's cry vies with that of the alley pheasant.

Still, despite the good that the gardens bring, it's a tough neighborhood, particularly at its edges. There's no getting around that fact. Like so many other neighborhoods in this city, the residents of the Georgia Street neighborhood must contend with the everyday realities that crushing poverty brings. I don't want to sugarcoat this post with any nonsense about how coming to this neighborhood for an afternoon and making wildflower seed bombs would do anything about the crime, or the lack of jobs and opportunities that these kids face. I didn't do this to "help" these kids; I really went there hoping they could help me and my children better understand the city we're living in, outside of the natural bubble we've created for ourselves downtown. I want to stress that I am not writing this today in search of any recognition for my humble efforts, but because I want you to see for yourselves how cool these kids are, and give you a vision of the city of Detroit as something more than ruins, prairies, and vine-covered houses. 

My daughter, a veteran of the seed bomb manufacturing process, stood by my side as I explained the basics. I could tell she was proud of already knowing what to do, and wanted to help show everyone the process. She's usually so shy, and I was pretty proud of her for jumping right in there among the big kids to get her hands dirty. 

I was hoping to make 1000 little seed bombs, but the kids developed their own technique of making bombs the size of baseballs filled and covered with native Michigan wildflower seeds. They were like neutron seed bombs. I also brought some peat cups to plant sunflower (and other) seeds in, with the idea that they could be stuffed in the cracks of broken porches or hulks of burned and abandoned homes. It didn't take long for the huge board we would use to dry the bombs to start filling up, or for my reserves of soil, peat, and clay to start running out (and I'd like to thank the anonymous Sweet Juniper reader who sent a $20 bill to Busy Bee Hardware to help fund this project). 

Once the board was full and the supplies were dwindling, the kids were ready to clean off their hands and get started learning how to work the cameras I brought for them. As I briefly mentioned in this post, I have been meaning to get some cameras in the hands of a few Detroit kids in order to document their own lives (I know this is hardly an original concept, but I wanted to do it my own way). I wanted to give the kids cameras with no strings attached, but still offer them my services to help them develop, digitally edit, and publish their work online and display their printed work. After writing about it, I received dozens of offers for working digital cameras and for a few days our mailbox was flooded with them. I received so many that I was able to take the money I had set aside for cameras and use it to buy extra digital media cards, film, batteries, and an identical carrying case for each kid. Thanks to all these generous Sweet Juniper readers, there were some really excited kids on Georgia Street that evening.  The kid in the middle of this picture, Benito, looked up at me and quietly said, "You mean, this camera is mine? Like, until I die?"

After the initial excitement wore off, the kids sat down with a book I'd made of many of the photos that I've taken in this city. It was pretty interesting for me, to suddenly see my photographs through their eyes. Occasionally Mark would point to something and tell them where in the city the subject was; when they saw this photo one of them said, "Hey, that's Tippy-Toe Ty! He's always asking for a dollar." When I admitted to giving him a few, the kid replied, "See, now that only encourages him." When Mark saw the first photo in this post he laughed, "I know that dog. My wife named him. Zeus." The things they knew about my own photos confirmed to me the reason I wanted to give them cameras. I hoped they would help them tell their own stories in a way I never could.

My wife finally swung by with a car full of pizzas, and when she got out she said one of the kids ran up to her and breathlessly reported, "We're getting our hands muddy on purpose! And some guy over there gave me a camera!" before running away. He didn't even know about the pizzas yet. The pizzas from Supino were a big hit among the seed bomb makers, and my son proved bold enough to get the first slice (even though he spent most of the evening hitting raised vegetable beds with sticks held in his muddy hands). Two-year olds. 

The Georgia Street Community Collective is so much more than a series of gardens that provide delicious and healthy food to the neighborhood every summer. The organization is essentially a counterattack against forces that have been besieging the neighborhood for decades. It shows how one good man in one neighborhood stood up to say "enough" only to discover how far from alone he actually was. The collective has made great strides in transforming an abandoned liquor store into a corner store for the neighborhood that will sell the sorts of things that the garden can't provide. Next door, the collective has secured and transformed an abandoned home it obtained for back taxes into a burgeoning community center. In these spaces, the community will continue to celebrate events like the annual Easter Egg Hunt, the school supplies giveaway (with free haircuts!), the reading and movie nights, the Super Bowl Party, holiday dinners, and all the other events that make this organization so inspiring. Eventually I hope to install some computers in the community center where the kids will be able to edit their own photos, but for now I'm just so excited to see how they document their summer in the garden and beyond.

At the end of the day, I was so grateful to Mark and these kids for spending some time with my family on this somewhat silly, mostly-symbolic project, and also grateful to our friend Meghan as well as Mitch, Gina, and Eva from the Powerhouse Project for helping out. I don't know if the seed bombs will produce any flowers, but I think everybody had a good time (which is all I really wanted). And who knows; maybe some of these seeds will produce something after all.

 * * * * *

I'm still getting more cameras ready to give to a new batch of kids, and I hope to be able to share some of their work with you relatively soon. I do keep getting e-mails about more cameras and I think I'm all set for now. If you are interested in contributing something to the Georgia Street Community Collective, I'm going to be giving you a really unique opportunity to do so in a couple weeks. So stay tuned.

We left San Francisco when our daughter was one-and-a-half, but that was plenty of time to get a good sense of the playground culture prevalent among the city's doucheoisie parents (among whom I was certainly a member by default). Papa Wallet Chain or Middle-aged Fauxhawk Dad would tail his toddler named after a Russian novelist or minor Zoroastrian prophet (I know, I know: pot, kettle) around the playground, giving him maybe seven inches of freedom to prevent any fall to the lawyer-vetted recycled-rubber surface two feet below. There was always plenty of parental compunction over one child's unwillingness to share whatever gewgaw had attracted the attention of another (or anxiety over the second child's expressed desire to possess what wasn't his). Conversations ranged from the annoying ("Oh, our Lola just loves kimchi!") to the nauseating ("I'm pretty sure all the Burmese words little Friedrich is learning from the nanny will be a real advantage when he applies to graduate school.") It seemed that every child born to parents of such refined taste was destined for greatness, for here they were: far from the meatloaves and casseroles of the provinces, bilingual, already totally digging good music and cool clothes. . . They were living proof that their parents weren't quite. . .parents.

If you wanted to cause a commotion you could casually mention you weren't that stressed about the 2011 public school lottery. And if you wanted to cause a riot, you could light a cigarette upwind of the NPSI-certified teeter-totter.

When we moved to Detroit, I immediately noticed a curious difference in playground culture among fellow parents. In Detroit, most people didn't even bother getting out of their cars. They just pulled in, turned up the WJLB and let the kids go feral on the climbing structures and swings. I liked this because it meant I never had to engage anyone in small talk, and if I did it certainly wasn't going to be about the advantages of Chinese nannies over their Latina counterparts. But it meant now I was the guy following his kid around making sure she didn't fall.

The other day I took the kids to the biggest playground in the city and let them loose. After a while I glanced up and noticed that all of the eight other parents on the playground were dads. This is not altogether strange in a city where nearly half the working-age population is unemployed or underemployed. I put my book down and sat there admiring these other fathers playing with their kids, indulging myself in a bit of imagined solidarity. I imagined conversations we might have, although I was pretty sure no one wanted to hear me complain about how hard it is for me to get my kids to eat kale & quinoa salad. Like me, some of these guys had two kids with them. It isn't easy doing this no matter who you are. You've got to deal with their crap all day and then deal with all the people who think you should be doing something more. You've got to keep them fed and keep them safe and keep them happy. Look at what good dads these were, bringing their kids to the playground on a Friday morning, what hard work this is, what a deep responsibility.

Then I smelled the weed.

A dad about twenty paces to my right had just lit up a blunt. Normally when you see people smoking weed they're all parsimonious about that shit, doling out tiny little servings in pipes or furtively passing around those wet, limp little joints until some guy who smells like reggae pulls out a clip to smoke the roach. Yeah, this man didn't give any indication that he considered marijuana to be a scarce resource or something that really ought to be enjoyed in private. He ashed his blunt against the stairs of a slide and took a long hit while my son ran right past him and his own daughter ran towards him yelling to watch her do something or other. Alright, Deanna, he breathed without a cough or sputter. It was kind of awesome, but totally burned a hole and burst my sober reverie.

Sure: tough job, this. So tough one of your colleagues sees fit to light up an enormous blunt at 10:30 in the morning. I mean, couldn't he at least have waited until after he made lunch?