The Dangerous, Beautiful, Murderous Streets of Detroit

When I was young girl, I'd watch my mother and her friends get ready for a night out, wearing jeans so tight that they would have to use wire hangers to zip them. This was the seventies, a time I still love, and sometimes they'd go out drinking and sometimes they'd do something strange, like go to a rattlesnake roundup or see the Amazing Kreskin. What I recall about these nights was the preparation, a few glasses of Wild Turkey and the subsequent haphazard application of mascara, gossip about who was in love and who wasn't (is there anything more important?), and a few tips about beauty, common wisdom about having to choose between your figure or your face at a certain point, meaning that if you kept your weight down, your face looked aged and if you didn't, well, you looked heavier than you had as a girl. I loved watching the women, loved thinking about love, and loved the idea of being out on the town at night. I knew I would grow up and leave my small town, go to live in a big city, and have adventures of my own.

And when I was my mother's age all those nights I had watched her, I did move to Detroit proper, renting an upper flat that eventually my landlords sold, forcing me to rent somewhere else. For years after moving that place on Courville, I had terrible dreams of being lost on the dangerous, beautiful, murderous streets of Detroit. No one knew me, and I could not find my way back to the old house, which had become an enchanted vista as is the way of fairy-tales. There was a sadness to these visions so deep that I could not shake it even after waking up. In those dreams, my face changed sometimes -- sometimes it was me as a young woman and then me substantially aged. The ghost of past and future, I suppose. My figure, though, always remained the same -- small and alone in the midst of all those looming buildings, unable to find the place I once called home and unable to give up looking. I realized it was the last place of my youth before anyone I loved deeply had died, before I had lost relationships that could not be replaced, where the days were splayed before me, like shimmering jewels, money before you spend it, all possibility, no regret.

Michelle's Spell of the Day

"There is an undercurrent, the real life, beneath all appearances everywhere." Robert Henri

Cocktail Hour

Drinking cake suggestion: Birthday cake! Like the kind Baby Grouchie's alter ego is eating in the last post.

Benedictions and Maledictions

Happy Thursday!