Who is Flint?

In the past year, I've taken a liking to this place. The cozy little yoga studio where I teach, the bright airy farmers market where everybody knows everybody, the monthly art gallery parties downtown. Even the soup kitchen feels more like a big, loud family reunion than a meal for the poor. When I moved here, Flint's reputation had me crippled with fear. Yet the more I became exposed to the quirky and gentrified downtown, the more those concerns faded away and were replaced by another sort of blind satisfaction with this place.

Then a different side of Flint began to seep into my periphery. One of my patients told me he needed his hip to work for him because he couldn't walk outside in a compromised physical condition. Not because of pain or his inability to walk long distances, but because if he was jumped on the streets he wouldn't be able to get away. "It's a ferocious world out there," he told me, in a very manner-of-fact way.

One of my jobs is reading surveys given to people at the farmers market about their satisfaction with the new location. They are all resoundingly positive, and everyone is thrilled with the new community hub. Last week, the enthusiasm for the market came with a dark undertone. "It is like an island here," one survey read. "I feel like I am in a different universe. Everyone is so happy and nice." Most surveys mention that it feels like a safe place. I get monthly email notifications about shootings that occur at the bus station right across the street, so I never walk on that side. I started to realize that I live on the Flint island, and I have never even set foot on the beach.

Yesterday, I met Flint. She was a scrappy just-over middle aged woman wearing pajama pants and a jean jacket. She was the kind of person who looked tired and full of energy at the same time, bright, alert eyes framed by dark circles. She is an artist and a dancer and works for Walmart, and she has big plans for the city. She is writing a grant to turn an old warehouse into artist studio space. In the fall, she was going to buy a big house and convert it into an art studio/bed and breakfast, but her partner backed out on her at the last minute so she bought a house at the tax auction for 300 dollars instead. When you buy a house that way, she told me, you inherit all of it's problems. Without running water or a stove, she has been urban camping in this place ever since. She has a membership at the Y, where they have hot showers and coffee and snacks and a comfy leather couch where she can sit and read the paper. This was a great comfort to her during a rough patch after she had been attacked by two pit bulls, her car had broken down, and she was terrified to walk outside. Two years of constant loss, she told me. Two years of nothing going her way. Even Robin Williams died, she said. But on that sunny spring morning, she believed things would change. The next two years are going to be good, she told me, because we are due for it.  

Exhausted and full of energy. Beaten down and full of hope. I'm still not sure what Flint is, but I know it's never what I expect.





 

it will bee ok

The sun was fading quickly behind a stormcloud and the air was thick with bees. Flying in every direction at once. Electric with anticipation,  I opened up the hive with fidgety hands. It was roaring. In the green light that only glows during an evening summer storm hiatus, I searched the dark, glistening combs for the queen.

Frame after frame I searched. Resisting the urge to swat for fear of mistaking a bee for a mosquito, I let my blood for the thirsty hoards. The bees crawled curiously over my fingertips, palms, the crease of my elbow with a firm, sticky grip. Frame after frame of workers, drones, young fuzzy bees, old tattered ones, juicy white larvae. One newborn struggling out of her waxy womb. I saw everyone but the queen. 

My mind is crawling with bees, their hum blocks out all other thoughts. I know, before I even turn out the light, that they will dominate my dreams.  

It would have been nice to find the queen, to carry out my plan to make a neat hive split and mold the force of nature to my tidy square boxes and orderly frames. But nature cannot always be coaxed to my will.

In fact, nature has been asserting her dominance over me all month. The bees are doing their own thing in spite of my interference. The tendrils of my cucuzza squash are reaching for everything but their intended trellis. My kombucha mother is converting sugar water in ways I cannot predict or influence. My houseplants shrivel in the meticulously ideal conditions I have created for them.

Despite (or because of) my insignificance in the natural order of all my hobbies, they worked themselves out. The bees are making their own queens. The squash tendrils found a sunflower to grow up. The symbiotic mama ended up making some nice bubbly sweet tea. And the houseplants are still dying, which may be for the best. Things don't always go my way, but they always bee ok.  

  

potholes

Today I found myself sitting next to a man who was crouched next to a pothole on the service drive to the freeway, sifting through the asphalt crumbles with an arthritic knuckle. He was searching for cigarette butts that had a little white at the tip, the ones with a drag or two of life leftover. A growing parabola of urine stained the front of his grey sweat pants. He had on a pair of black leather shoes, slightly too big but laces neatly tied in a bow.

I was sitting in a black leather seat in the back of a new Ford Focus, listening to satellite radio with the air conditioning blowing over my face, thinking about what I would eat for dinner when we rolled to a stop next to him. I looked up to scope out the area, the way I always do when I come to a stop light in Flint. Someone in the car mumbled something about how we should leave the city by 7, and it was 7:05.

The car was silent for the duration of the light. The driver fiddled with the radio and then started to tap the steering wheel with her thumbs. We were anxious to get back to the suburbs, where the grass was mown and the potholes were filled and the cigarettes were either brand new or in the garbage and all the apartments looked the same and all the people in them were predictable and tidy and comfortable.

I kept thinking about his shoes, and what it must have been like the moment he was tying them.

Its a bumpy ride home. Here, potholes and highways mark the boundary between heartbreak and sterility.

Highest Aim

When I was little, one of my favorite ways to spend a Sunday evening in the summer was at my Great Grandma Padalino’s home in East Detroit. We wouldn’t go inside- but straight back to the yard where she was invariably doing something in the garden. She would lead all of the kids into her cobwebby garage, walls lined with jars of seeds from gardens past and crusty tools whose wooden handles were soft from decades of use. Above the workbench was strung the most marvelous collection of sun bonnets I have ever come across. There were bonnets with ribbons, bonnets with flashy artificial flowers stuck to the brim, scratchy bonnets made of straw. She would let us each choose one, and then we would all head to the garden to water and pick and play and explore. I admired these bonnets, and the time I spent in them. When I sat down to think about my ‘highest aim’, the bonnets were the first thing that came to mind. And then the jars of seed. And the soft-handled tools. And the long summer evenings in the garden with the people I loved. The essence of these evenings is my highest aim. 

It’s not really an impressive bonnet collection that I want. It’s not a collection of seeds and tools (although I wouldn’t say no!). To me, the bonnets represent a lifetime of colorful experiences, a tangible reflection of a lifetime of living, and the ability to share that life experience with others. The seeds represent a direct connection to the past and the future, that exist perfectly contented and patient in the present moment. And the tools with the soft handles represent work. Hard work, a relentless struggle to begin, to grow, to survive. And when the time comes, to rust with acceptance, knowing that I used myself up. 

Those long evenings, sitting with my family under the open garage door in lawn chairs, that was love. Listening to the crickets chirp the night in as the sun sunk lower and oranger into the horizon, that was love. Perfect, contented love. And that is my highest aim.

Seeing Pickerel Lake

what does water look like? I wondered, as I watched it.
It was brown and silvery and purple and smooth.
But it was more than color, texture, shine.
It could not be drawn with my sharpie.

I looked harder and saw less, until I saw nothing at all.
I stopped searching, my eyes relaxed, my attention shifted
A frog burp in the arroweed, the soft whip of the casted line,
The honk of a billed bird, the plop of a snacking bluegill

Suddenly the surface revealed itself to me.
A reed line and tree line and skyline.
The underworld so real
rustled by wind and by ripples.

Sunlight and coffee and love

Yesterday was grey, and I spent my day looking down. Down at my boots on the salty concrete, over cigarette butts and spit and billowing chemical smoke that slowed under my wide black hood, turning stale. Agitated, broken, empty young men huddled side by side on a plastic bench spat curses and insults at each other as I stood by, too overwhelmed to continue my peace efforts. I was in over my boots, in way over my head.

They passed the time with porn and sleep and energy drinks and smoke, with nothing better to talk about than the asses of every girl who walked by. They barked in the hallway at passing staff, imitated the more severely brain damaged clients, and asked the girls to sit across from them so they could not-so-subtlety rub themselves in the commons area over conversations about the weather.

That day, I left exactly 8 minutes after I was told to get the f--- out of his room, and the eight minutes of tormented yelling and swearing was almost more than I could bear. The end of my shift and I escaped over the crunchy salt and butts and spit, face stung by the bitter cold and fat sad flakes of snow. Relief did not come with escape. I was free, but he was stuck in there. He couldn't escape from himself. I cried on the way home.

This morning, the dormant dread of this hellish workplace pulsed back to life with the electric shriek of my alarm clock.

I brushed my teeth. I brewed some coffee. I packed my lunch and ate a bowl of steaming oatmeal while reading my favorite cookbook. I drove to work and took the shortcut through the neighborhood and past the park. The open field gave me a glimpse of the perfect orange-blue gradation of the morning sky, promising a sunny day. I thought about all the love I have for the people in my life, and I the love they have for me. The sunshine and coffee and love was starting to thaw the dread.

I was warmed so deep that I saw sparks of life in people, not dying embers. I saw people anguished and in pain, but surrounding each of them, a team of people there to comfort and strengthen and heal. They may have been miserable, low, but we were doing what we could to dig them out of rock bottom. This is not what I'm cut out for, it's not what I'm good at, but it's what I'm doing now. And now, just a moment drowned in infinity, is all I have.

I missed the sunset, but I was there for the afterglow

Nestled in the supple comfort of an old leather chair and sipping a glass of watered-down scotch, I looked at the light catching the bare trees along Forest Avenue. It was only six-thirty, but the colors that I saw told me the day would not last much longer. Weariness from a day of tree climbing and dune hiking and wood piling melted into the chair and held my limp body there like glue. A restless tug, coming from a place somewhere between my head and my heart, beckoned me towards the shore and the setting sun, and I was caught in limbo.  

Time has been relentless. It slips away so quickly that I forget to live in the moment. I lay out my future in the cluttered pages of my planner, and in the present I become a robotical thespian, bound to the calendar script I live by. The present is clouded by my constant awareness of the past and the future. Where is my heart when my head is talking? Where is my head to translate what my heart keeps trying to tell it? A part of my conscious always seems to be drifting around somewhere else.

That day, I missed the sunset. But, with the help of some friends, I made it there for the afterglow. The clouds were purple, the sky was orange, and the waves crashed black and cold against the pier.