This Is The Paradise

Here's another section from my memoir in progress, Second Day Reported. Thanks for all the comments and e-mails about the various sections. I have written lots of parts for the first time on this blog so thanks for being patient with any repetition. Thanks for reading!

I had never been to Michigan until my U-Haul pulled up to my new home, an upper flat on Courville, the eastside of Detroit. My then-boyfriend had lived there for six weeks before my arrival without furniture or anything except a few postcards he'd placed artfully on the fireplace mantle, a young Truman Capote, a young Allen Ginsberg. Our landlords who lived in the flat below us told my boyfriend that the neighborhood was integrated. What we did not understand is that we would be the ones integrating it. While he spent the days working at an upscale prep school ten minutes away, I spent the early days staring out the window onto the street. A crack house sat on the corner and the main three guys who sat on the stoop each had a pitbull friend. The pitbulls ran the streets with and without their owners and nobody messed with anyone. Next door a man who looked like Nat King Cole on a three day bender often went on rampages against his daughter, rampages that ended with him choking her and yelling, Bitch, this is your last chance. Our landlords had hung up a sign in our backyard that said, This is the paradise. Strangely enough, both seemed to apply to me.

Michelle's Spell of the Day
"Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours." C. S. Lewis

Cocktail Hour

Benedictions and Maledictions
Happy Wednesday!