D-Week 5: Prim and Proper, Steel and Copper

Oh, what's new, you ask? Freckles and highlights in my hair! Because I've been working in the sun a lot (and there is plenty of sun here), I have new freckles on my face and hands, and my hair is getting a bit lighter. I have a new freckle on my finger, too! Once when I was little, I got a new freckle on my hand and I thought it was a tick so I scrubbed it really hard and kept scratching at it until I realized I was just kissed by the sun.

Anyway, life has been more exciting than freckles and hair but typing it just doesn't do it justice. Perhaps it is best described by the moments I look around at my surroundings and the people around me and the things Jen and I are doing and just smile in perfect contentment. I love my life here. It's right. Jen and I are having the best summer ever I would say. We continue to be the dog, and since our commitment to Detroit is only a summer we don't have too much responsibility so we are mostly free to just have fun. We don't have much money so we don't go out so much and mostly live like Grandmothers, going to bed at about 10pm and waking up at about 6am. But we have done some cool stuff.

This past Saturday was the 50th anniversary of the March to Freedom in Detroit. MJK Jr. lead that march and delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech here before he marched in Washington a few months later. We participated in the 50th anniversary march on Saturday, and it was so great. I don't have many words to describe it. It is much better and deeper than "great", but how can you describe marching to freedom in a blog? I will say that the Four Tops did the National Anthem and we are not positive but pretty sure that Rev Al Sharpton was MC'ing the event. Can't get much cooler than that!

Sunday we did our usual Remedial Soccer league thing. We meet so many great people there, and it is the funniest thing to play remedially, but probably more fun to watch. Lots of people fall when they kick the ball, or they prance instead of dribble. It's real skill. We were invited to a fiesta with the Detroit City Futbol League which is a step up (like, big step up) from the Detroit Remedial Futbol League. There was Romanian moonshine, sausage (side note: no one does sausage like NOLA street venders. I miss home!), lentil salad (yum), great tunes, and extremely sexist Jamaicans that kept saying "prim and proper, steel and copper", all in the back yard of a really nice house in Historic Corktown. And, we were invited back for a birthday party. Huzzah! It's good to be the dog!

This weekend was Allied Media Conference in Detroit. The discussions and workshops were too expensive and heady for us to afford and understand ("Fractals and Sacred: Identifying patterns of being and inter-being in our cosmos and recreating them in our communities." Um....), but we did score tickets to Complex Movement, which was not a concert like I kept saying, but an interactive performance where the audience is in a pod and we participate in a scenario where a town decides whether to reform or revolt over the government's management over the regulated food supply. Fun. But again, pretty heady for me. My brain aint that big.

Because I don't do words well, pictures!

March to Freedom on Woodward Ave heading into city

50 years ago

Marching into the city on Woodward

Freedom songs

 

The famous Fox Theater

Beez in the Trap: bee maintenance at Earthworks Farm

 

Community Garden and the back of my home

Detroit River chillin

Ah. Ren Cen.

   

Playing in the dirt, playing in the dirt...we like to we like to

D-Week 4: Being the Dog

Jen and I live a pretty duplicitous life. Let this weekend be an example. I'll start on Saturday. In the morning we worked on a farm weeding and planting, biking through the East Side passing abandoned houses and boarded up schools. We came home, showered, gussied ourselves up, and then headed to Grosse Ile to go sailing with family friends. This was my first time sailing. We were on the water for 3 hours, hitting a high speed of 7 knots (I think that's only moderately impressive?). It was so relaxing being on Lake Eerie with friends, no cares in the world. We headed back in and they took us out to dinner at the Yacht Club. Afterwards we went to see another friend's son play at a local restaurant on Grosse Ile where we met up with his family and their friends. We sang Hey Jude around the piano and drank our fill of red wine that was poured into our glasses for us by our enthusiastic host. They kept the party going after the show by going to their friend's house right on the Detroit River and drinking more wine on his private dock. It was like we were in the Great Gatsby where Jen and I played Nick surrounded by all these Gatsby characters keeping up their social lives by burning the candle at both ends. It's hard to imagine just a few hours prior we were sitting in the dirt getting sun burnt while we cleaned carrot beds.

Friday, Jen and I took off "work" (i.e. decided not to do anything which has no affect on anyone at all) and went to Ann Arbor where University of Michigan is located. Through Jen's family on Grosse Ile, we got connected with the registrar of the University, Paul, and got a tour of the campus and the city. It was a really beautiful, comfortable place, and reminded me a ton of Charlottesville - typical college town with lots of wealth and not so much diversity. Not my kind of place, but beautiful in its own right. Paul took us out to lunch at Cafe Felix. After he finished his afternoon meetings, we met him and his buddies (also middled-aged men) at a microbrew and drank and played fussball. All the while, Paul explained his youth antics and encouraged us to be reckless while we're young (clearly we are one step ahead of him), and always trust that the money will come eventually.

Paul also told us one of the most helpful and important anecdotes I've ever heard: the dog and the wolf. Dogs were once wolves, but they set themselves apart by being domesticated. Wolves are smarter - they can hunt, work in packs, survive winters, raise their young, protect the pack, and so on. But dogs have it better off - they have their meals given to them every day, they lay down on couches and chase squirrels in the back yard, they are adored and loved by everyone who sees them. So even though wolves are the more capable of the two, the dogs saw that being friendly to humans would work to their advantage and now they are living the life. I look at my life and see what our friendliness has achieved us - sailing, free lunches and dinners, wine freely flowing in our glasses. We have learned the art of being the dog.

Besides our bougie weekend, this week was pretty standard. I am really falling in love with Earthworks farm which is where I have decided to dedicate my Wed-Fri mornings and afternoons. The people are so earnest and I really want to learn how to farm, plus we sometimes get free veggies and they have their dollar menu on Thursdays where you can even use EBT, very valuable things when you're not making money for 3 whole months. Jen and I also started playing in an amateur soccer league on Sundays and that was hilarious, and we are making more friends with them. More friends = more better. I had a minor scare where I thought I ran out of money and would have to go back to NOLA early, but thankfully I found some more money and am going to get through the summer, I am hoping. Paul's lesson on money was very well timed apparently.

There is no telling why Blogger sometimes rotates pictures and sometimes doesn't, so I'm sorry for the 90deg inaccuracy...not my fault. Nothing ever is.

Microbrews and NOLA's own chips!

Summerfest at Ann Arbor

Family sailing

Endless wine

Hey Jude

The beautiful Michigan Central Station by sunset

Dollar Menu at the farm

Cloud watching in our backyard

D-Week 2&3: Lessons From Detroit

These past two weeks have been so great! My awesome friend Taya visited me, we met in NOLA in February but she is from Milwaukee which is oddly only 6 hrs from here. Then my dear friend Alyssa visited us for a week. Taya and Lys followed me around to all my volunteer endeavors - soup kitchens, urban farms, bakery run by ex-convicts, Habitat for Humanity, Hostel laundry, and gardening in our own back yard! This is the exciting life I live. And after two weeks of aggressive volunteering, I have not much to report about the actual volunteering. I feel like I am in a constant state of observation. There is so much to take in here, and I really am having trouble drawing any conclusions about myself or Detroit, and I frankly  have no desire to. I'd rather conclude when my time in Detroit concludes two months from now.

But what I do know, is that Detroit is so super awesome fantastic. I can't really explain sufficiently how similar D is to NOLA. It's kind of insane. I ate beignets and drank chicory coffee this weekend, and when I drive to the East Side of the D I feel like I'm in NOLA east, except there are fewer Saints players living there. There's more blight, and the blight has been blighted for longer than NOLA's blight. People living in houses that look like they are half demolished, there is plywood over the windows. But, as dead as people consider Detroit to be, it's very much alive and on it's way up from what I see. There are so many initiatives to meet the needs of people, and lots of development in certain areas. BUT there are still lots of needs and areas (the East Side) that are just devastated and depressed. Jen is doing research to figure out why there are over 40,000 homes without running water in the city - a public health disaster. The functional illiteracy rate is almost 50%. So the city is sort of unlike any other. I really can't explain the personality of the city, and being here only 3 weeks has made me consider the comparison between NOLA and D and why cities that are so similar feel so different. It also makes me question the state of NOLA's recovery - NOLA "feels" more recovered but how much of that is just experiencing the positive vibe of the city and its people and how much is actual recovery? Detroit has also made me consider my own presumptions and value of people's backgrounds and how "hard" their life has been, where they are from, their job, etc. Like NOLA, D seems pretty divided on racial lines, and also on socio-economic lines. So what can the solution be to get the entire city out of debt and moving forward? Jen's nun said it best: there are so many people to help, so what can you do? You start with the person in front of you. Oh, the life lessons from Detroit.

Anyway, on to something more concrete: pictures!

Historic Corktown neighborhood. The houses sort of look like NOLA except NOLA is better :-/

View of Detroit from Renaissance Center

Eastern Market

Beignets in Detroit is a yummy thing.

Sassy

Michigan Central Station. It has been deserted since 1988 but waning since after WWII. I can see it from my window.

Watching the Redwings game at a bar down the street. We lost to Chicago in OT

Renaissance Center from below. Very impressive!

Sliders and $3 cocktails!

The view on a beautiful Saturday from the porch outside our room.