Driving with the windows open past the blinking yellow lights and 42-wheel tractor-trailers of Detroit’s morning rush hour, gaping at muscular stepped-back Art Deco skyscrapers decorated with multicolored brickwork and grandiose iconography (cadeuci, swastikas, treasure chests and shrieking cherubs) - and seriously bush-league graffiti - I hear a guy hollering out for the bus. Hold up for him, man – I bet it gets pretty lonely down here waiting for the next one to come.
It’s 9:14 AM in downtown Detroit.
A stinking homeless man brushes past me – six lanes of street and a sidewalk twenty feet wide, why are you so close to me? - mumbling, “Have a blessed one,” and the only reason I don’t snap back, “Have a pestilent one – you and your little god too!” (I'm also having trouble finding coffee) is because I’m pretty sure we’re headed for the same place. The public library.
Sure enough. The Skillman Branch of the DPL is high-ceilinged, built-in bookcased, under-librarianed and seemingly (but probably not) over-security-guarded, and they have hot and cold running wi-fi, electrical outlets, and excellent old-fashioned oak case tables and chairs. Their graphic novel collection, however, labeled “Manga,” is filed by title, and has color-coded age labels that are alarmingly inaccurate. Sure, Bone
is for everyone, but Emiko Superstar
is definitely Young Adult.
Back on the street, driving, 11 AM, I veer impulsively down a side street. Too late – aagh – One Way! I pull over and freeze, trying to figure out what to do, as a man on the sidewalk bats not even one eye. Slowly I realize that nobody’s coming, there are no other cars as far as the eye can see, and none on the cross street. People here make no-look mid-block U-turns like basketball stars showing off their passing, and they treat red lights with a nonchalance bordering on contempt.
Maybe, despite all indications to the contrary, they really do need to get somewhere in a hurry – there are clocks just above street level on the corners of half the buildings here, and half of those even work.
Once you get where you’re going in Detroit, everyone wants you to park. Parking is big here. Valet parking is offered in front of the merest deli and pharmacy, and giant signs and arrows advertise enormous garages and lots. Parking. Let me say this: parking is the last thing you have to worry about in Detroit. Hell yeah there’s parking – it’s a fucking steppe out here. Half the buildings are completely empty, a quarter have a wig shop at street level and are otherwise empty, and the rest? I think the owners let the tenants stay there for free.
The Fisher Building, for example – one of the most ornate secular buildings I’ve ever seen, with gilt and mosaics and seventy kinds of marble and twelve-foot-tall hanging light fixtures and painted groined vaulted ceilings, ahhh! - is tenanted entirely by nonprofits and government agencies. None of those people actually pay rent, I bet. It’s all got to be subsidized, I’m sure by the city, so that such a landmark doesn’t go empty and fall into disrepair.
Taking pictures in the nave of that building, people who work in it kept pausing to look up with me. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” “It sure is.” “No building like it in the world, is there?” “No ma’am. You’re fortunate to work here.”
It’s actually Fisher that’s fortunate. It may be the most fabulous building in Detroit, but it’s by no means the only one. Many of those empty skyscrapers (some easily 40 stories), built in the 1920’s, when money floated around like puffy white clouds here, would in any other city be considered jewels of the built landscape. Detroit is where decorative architecture spewed its last, explosive jets of tile insets and stained glass and cathedral-quality stonework... and then crawled off to slump in the corner and convert to strict functionalism out of sheer exhaustion.
The central branch of the library, another shining temple of a building, doesn't open until noon on weekdays. They've had a freeze on hiring professionals for two years and there are rumors of corruption at the management level; the vinyl chairs in the business section are twenty years old and cracked, but the murals on the third floor are fifty years old and glowing. Ok, that's Detroit. The average age of a librarian is 56.
But while every other big building I've been in here echoes like a marble tomb, this place is buzzing with people - lots and lots of people flowing in and out, using the computers, checking out books, attending programs. The librarians smile. Damn it. In an economically depressed area, library services are the last thing that should be underfunded.
The library is the anomaly, though. Everywhere else it's the same: an environment built for armies – armies of auto workers stamping and bending metal to make Mercury Sables and Ford Tauri, armies of suits marshalling their comings and their goings, and circling them, armies of prosperous, sharp, no-reason-not-to-be-optimistic feeders on this industry: admen, commodities brokers, labor brokers, hell, even parking brokers - has been simply left behind. There was not enough residual energy to demolish it before they left, or even to board it up. The Packard plant (above), where cars were built from 1907 until the 1950's, consists of 74 linked buildings on 80 acres. Nobody even bothers to break the glass anymore.
This had to have been a place that hummed. Danced. Harmonized. I would like to have seen it, but I have to admit, I love it empty. I took a lot of pictures.
In no particular order, some recent photos, partly to explain why I haven't been blogging much lately.
This is the big happy Baby A flying through the sky at the pool. I think maybe some airline should adopt this picture as their logo.
My men at the pool.
How much does this seven-year-old love reading? This summer he has charged through almost a book a day. He's reading books that I call Second Chapter Books - the ones you read after Magic Tree House
is too easy and before you start reading morbid 300 page novels. Secrets of Dripping Fang
, An Awfully Beastly Business
, How to Train Your Dragon
, and Dragonbreath
are his favorites this summer.
I have nothing to say about this picture except my god, how beautiful is this child? It's kind of frightening.
Here's Rabbit reading to his friends Zee, Legolas, Mao and Zhou. In case you're interested, that's The Dunderheads
by Paul Fleischman, illustrated by my secret husband David Roberts.
Quality parenting. Kid has a boo-boo, apply a cold National Boh to injured area and rub his back. Well done, me.
This is my husband casting a suspicious eye on, I believe, our older son, who may or may not be antagonizing children who wish to pass in front of the swingset. Lest you think my husband is being unduly vigilant (as parents can get sometimes, usually due to years of bitter experience), you can see that, behind him, Joel's Spider-sense has also been activated.
I'm going to come up with my own version of the game Clue
. And in it, one possible solution will be: BODY LOTION JOHN, in the ALLEY, with the MARGARITA PITCHER.
Last but not least, I finally got my children inked onto my body. This was a drawing that Zhou did of himself and his brother when he was four. I saved it because I loved the stick figures with their GIANT hands. I was explaining it to a friend the other day, saying, "Don't you love it? With GIANT hands, you could do ANYTHING!" when Zhou piped up from the corner of the room, where he had been quietly using LEGO to build Bucky balls or design new viruses or whatever: "Except sew!"
"Ok, yes, sewing would be difficult with GIANT hands."
Mao looks up from his book, "And dialing a cell phone."
"Granted, darling, you'd have to get a special cell phone."
"Also knitting!"
"Guys! It was a metaphor, ok? Plus, besides, you could totally knit with giant hands."
Hope your summer is just as grand as ours has been. Now I'm off to the doc in the box so they can look at a suspicious rash on a kid. Whee!
I'm not too sure what came over me Saturday afternoon. Maybe it was the Baltimore Facebook phenomenon of somebody changing their status to "CRABS TONIGHT!" and two dozen friends leaping in to comment, "Where are you getting them?" "How much for #1 males?" "Is the truck on Rte 97 still there?" I swear, you'd think it was code for really good marijuana. Huh. Maybe it is. I've always been a little slow about drugs.
We have recently decided that this summer is Vegetarian Summer. Why not? We don't eat a whole lot of meat anyway, I think the kids should see what it's like. Oh but they are pissed. I am not sure why - I'm not sure they can accurately identify what in their diet is meat in the first place. So we placated them somewhat. We assured them they they could have burgers on the 4th of July, hot dogs at the pool, and ribs whenever anyone offered them some.
Also, we explained to them that we would, of course, be following the dietary regime known as "Baltimore Vegetarianism." We learned about that one night out with Bob's brother Joe, a lifelong vegetarian who was experiencing a major attack of the wavers when confronted with the spectacular, cannonball-sized crab cakes at the restaurant around the corner. Baltimore Vegetarian is similar to Baltimore Kosher. Crabs don't count. In our case, fish don't count either.
This is the crab truck near the pool. Bob pointed it out last year, commenting, "I guess that's one of your no-no's." (I have rigorous and complicated rules about where food should come from. The Peruvian rotisserie chicken on the streetcorners in our old neighborhood in Brooklyn was an Absolutely Not.) I surprised him when I gave it an appraising glance and said, "Actually I bet that's a good place to get crabs." Live crabs and corn. Buy them off a truck.
Live crabs. You can buy cooked crabs from a store, usually one called "Captain (Insert-Salty-Sounding-Name-Here)". But it's nothing to cook them at home, and you get to have live, slightly dangerous invertebrates in your house.
Mao peeked in at these, a bushel of jimmies (males), with their sharp claws and carapaces, and when they did a big convulsive clacking squirm he jumped a little and grabbed my hand. He denies it. He's almost eight and I bet that's the last time he'll ever grab my hand like that.
The crab guy showed them both how to hold a crab. I have never done such a thing with my bare hand, and Bob, who is from the Cleveland suburbs, nearly fainted. My dad likes to tell a story about how a crab speared his uncle right through the thumbnail with one of those claws. When a crab has clenched its claw, separating the claw from the crab has no effect. You have to bash the two pincers apart with a hammer. Freaky little alien beasts. Yeeeuch.
We bought two dozen and got a few for free (to my Baltimore friends - the truck at the corner of Woodbourne and Perring Parkway, $40/dozen for large males, 2 dozen for $74) and met my parents at my house. They brought their crab pot, but any extremely large pot will do, you just need to make a platform at the bottom so that the crabs don't get wet. In the pot goes about 8 cups of liquid, mostly water, a couple cups of vinegar if you like, some people swear by beer.
In Florida, I have heard, they BOIL crabs. Let us not speak of it again.
Despite having lived in Baltimore for, oh, 7 years now, we haven't had crabs that often. Having little kids put the kibosh on eating crabs for a long time - you cannot tend a baby when your hands are completely encrusted with Old Bay. That shit is mostly salt and cayenne pepper. The last place it should end up is on a baby's face. Or, god help him, inside his diaper.
Old Bay is the crab spice that everyone knows about, but purists make their own spice mix, and philistines like me pay the guy at the crab truck a buck for a bag of miscellaneous red-orange dust. Some crab spice mixes have more black pepper, some have more cayenne and paprika. You just have to give it a sniff to see if it's to your taste. And you have to really load it on. Plus rock salt.
Twenty minutes should do, during which time the boys can shuck the corn. In our family, there is always some discussion about "what else" we should have, because "nobody fills up on crabs". Most everyone agrees with corn. You can eat it with your hands and it's a vegetable. Some people believe in tomato wedges, for scraping the steamed spice mix up from the outside of the crabs, oh yeah, that is GOOD to eat... and if you're at a restaurant eating crabs there may be french fries or something. But in my opinion, "what else" is - more crabs.
We also had time to slick up Zhou's mohawk for his grandparents' benefit, and to demonstrate the Time Warp. My kids are 6 and 7, and I am here to tell you, there is nothing inherently dirty about the pelvic thrust. It's the cutest thing you've ever seen, in fact.
This is the point at which I stopped taking pictures for a while, because I got all crab-gooky. Please note, however, who is first at the table, mallet at the ready.
Not to be outdone, his brother, at the age of six, not only uses tools to get at crabmeat (I myself am strictly a hands-and-teeth hunter-gatherer), but has also inherited his grandfather's tendency to brag. "Look at this! Is this the backfin?! It's so big!" Both the kids ate, must have been, four crabs apiece, stayed at the table until the last claws were excavated, asked for more. I admire that commitment. They would have been the members of the tribe to have tried oysters for the first time.
My dad accepted a beer (or four) from our cooler and observed, "Since when have you two (referring to my husband and myself, noted beer snobs) started drinking Miller Lite? In cans?" Hm. Yes. Well, the answer is: Bob's lost a bunch of weight working out, and one day he just sort of realized that he might reach his weight loss goal a little faster if he tried drinking light beer. I gave it a try when I realized that "blue beer" (we kind of can't bring ourselves to call it "Miller Lite") has way less alcohol than fancy beer. I love me a Dogfish Head 60-minute IPA, but one of those and I am no good for the rest of the morning. Plus? The recycling? So much lighter and less clanky!
Zhou, gazing over my shoulder right now, sighed, "I wish that picture could come alive... so I could have those crabs, those delicious crabs."
Happy solstice, from Baltimore.
In spring, I try to get them to let me cut their hair off. As an incentive, I offer to dye it if they like. It's only hair, and they're only children. Why not?
Today seemed like the perfect day for it - the house has recently been professionally cleaned in preparation for a Big Event on Saturday, and I'd like to keep it nice until then. Plus, they're off to see their uncles and aunties this weekend in the middle of tick territory, so short hair seems like a good idea.
Let's set this up:
This is their winter look. Well, Mao usually wears a shirt under his biker jacket, but I'm talking about the hair. That kid has such thick hair he's been compared to a) Danny Torrance and b) David Cassidy.
This is what we did today:
Ohh, how I wanted to leave a long shock on top, but once I started cutting, he just wanted it ALLLL off. I felt it too - I came very damn close to running those clippers around my ears and across the back of my neck. It would feel SO GOOD to get some of this stuff off my neck.
He wanted just one orange racing stripe down the side. Understated, is our Mao.
And the other?
Wanted to look like "Syndrome with a mohawk."
Eat his dust - that's MY boy.
Yeah, no. Actually, now that the contractors have gone, MY work increases exponentially. I (we) have to figure out where things go in the new kitchen, wash or wipe or vacuum or dust EVERY SINGLE THING IN THE HOUSE, seal the deck, seal the grout, seal the new bathroom floor, install the carpet in the basement, move furniture, paint, figure out curtains and blinds... basically reconfigure my house.
But I don't mind. You know I don't. I'm sitting here in the new kitchen working on the laptop and the only sounds I hear are the dishwasher and the washing machine (both of which have been running more or less constantly since Friday, the last day the contractors were here). I can gaze out the kitchen window at my two new bird feeders. I can gaze, uh, INSIDE the kitchen window at the toaster sitting peacefully in its corner on the new countertop. All is well.
To wrap up this thing, here are before, during, and after photos of the work on our house. We had half the basement leveled and built a family room / guest room and full bath down there. We re-did the kitchen. We had sliding doors installed in the dining room, leading to a new deck.
BASEMENT
Before:
During:
They had to cut out the previous, viciously slanted, basement floor and pour a new, flat, one. That corner in the upper left is where the bathroom is now.
Basement guest room leveled and framed. Stairs are to the outside.
Guest room painted.
This little ell was going to be my office, but now looks like a good spot for an elliptical for Bob. We'll make the old playroom into an office / homework room. It has windows.
Bathroom getting its slate floor.
After:
Here's that little ell with drywall, ceiling, electricity, paint and molding.
The blue-sky guest room, with ceiling, light, a new window.
And! Visitors to Chez Librarian will luxuriate in their very own full bathroom! Enjoy the heated floor, the ample light, and the oversize tub! Be sure to notice the dark-purple towels that an entire staff of librarians and everyone I know on Facebook helped me find! Stocked with LUSH products, courtesy of my sister-in-law Janie!
I love this room.
KITCHEN
Before-before-before:
This was an early conception, using IKEA's kitchen planning software. That program kept crapping out on me, it uses a lot of memory. But it's pretty close to what we ended up doing, actually.
Before:
And this is on its VERY BEST DAY.
During:
First they destroyed it.
Then they rebuilt it.
Then it was paint, floor, electricity, cabinets.
After:
And then it was time to stand back and sniffle.
DECK
Before:
Hugged tight to the house, only projects about 8' at its deepest. Old and splintery, with nails that we knocked back in every spring. Its time had come.
During:
Wrecking the old deck. I would have enjoyed doing that part myself, actually.
Building the new one. Bigger. Two levels.
We wanted it to step down into the yard in increments, like.After:
DINING ROOM (sliding door to deck)
Before:
See those two little casement windows? That was previously about it for our view of the backyard. Our house seemed to literally turn its back on the yard - you couldn't see it from anywhere inside the house.
During:
So we paid men to come and chop a big giant hole in the wall.
They found a pack of cigarettes. This is the same brand in which the famous Honus Wagner baseball card was found. No card. We put 'em back in the wall, along with a half-smoked pack of Marlboro Reds.
After:
"Then, window, let day in, and let life out."
And curtains for when the sun is too much.
