Memories...light the corners of my mind... :)

• • by Susan Cameron

    Another day, another semi-rant. I'll be taking a break from the Brit blog I've been contributing to and working on my own again, but meanwhile, here's a modified version of the cautionary tale I posted to them about my old home town...

• on August 24, 2011 at 10:42 pmSusie C.

  Ah, Detroit, my home town. Former Arsenal of Democracy, economic powerhouse, Paris of the Midwest — tree-lined boulevards, stately mansions, working-class neighborhoods full of clean and tidy homes, one of the top educational systems in the nation, beautiful parks, world-class museum…

  It took less than fifty years to turn into a shithole.

  You can find what they call “Detroit ruins porn” on the internet — the graffitied burnt-out remnants of fabulous buildings designed by famous architects. You can find virtual tours filmed by thrill-seekers from their car windows, taking their lives in their hands by driving through streets no sane person would walk on. You can type in “Detroit City Council” and listen in disbelief at what passes for urban governance.

  Or you can take my word for it when I tell you about the time I had a sawed-off shotgun stuck in my face, or the time two men with hatchets chased me out of my seat on a city bus, or when another man pulled a pistol on me while robbing my place of work and told me to take off my blouse (I refused and lived to tell the tale). Yes, I do have a peculiar sense of humor, which is one of the many reasons I hang out on this blog. Gallows humor is one useful survival tool, as most of you are all too aware.

  Anyhow, I took a final tour of my old stomping grounds years ago. Houses I’d rented flats in — burned to the ground, basements filled with soil, grass growing where they’d been. Trees busting through curb and gutter. Quail and rabbits spooked and running in front of my car. Urban prairie and gutted houses. I drove downtown. A skyscraper I’d worked in was boarded up with plywood. The Ford Auditorium on the riverfront — boarded up. I parked the car and walked to Woodward Avenue, walked to the middle and stood there, hands on hips. Where I was standing would have been the equivalent of Trafalgar Square. Traffic lights blinking red and green — no traffic anywhere as far as I could see. A tumbleweed rolled past me. The twelve-story department stores were boarded up. The only businesses open were pawn shops and stores with platinum wigs and such for hookers. I must have stood there for five minutes, watching the few people on Woodward being very careful not to look at me. Of course! Crazy-ass white woman, hands on hips — obviously a cop sent out as bait! I drove away, flew away, and haven’t been back since.

  So why am I posting this? It’s not self-pity, believe me. I have a life that’s so great it’s almost beyond belief. I’m saying very few people in Detroit fifty or sixty years ago would have imagined what it is today, and very few people in England have a clue just how bad bad can be.

  Just all of you cops.

  Actually, there are young white hipsters moving downtown these days, artists and musicians, restauranteurs and urban farmers, attracted by low commercial rents and housing so cheap it’s almost free. I wish them all the best, and hope they make it. But me — I still remember defensive driving, Detroit style. See a red light way up ahead? Slow down, keep driving, try to time it so the light is green when you get there. That way snipers on rooftops can’t pick you off easily at the red.

  You can buy a three bedroom house on the street where I grew up for $3500 — about 2100 pounds. Other streets on the east side have houses for sale for a couple hundred dollars. You could emigrate there and help be part of the repopulation effort, but I don’t think you’d find a club you’d like to belong to.

  I just figured I’d throw in a boots on the ground perspective. Erm, please excuse me, I feel that twitch coming back…
• copyright 2011 Susan Cameron
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Our Home

by Susan Cameron

I really like our home. It's a cheerful, inviting place, and most of my thirty-three years' worth of memories here are good ones. But things change. I no longer own the business that's a mere half-mile commute away. The neighbors I liked are gone or dead. This evening I put a can of graffiti remover and a roll of paper towels in a plastic bag and took a walk around my neighborhood, cleaning up four little patches of wannabee gangsta bullshit written on sidewalks and posts -- thanks for the new continuation school three blocks away, Orange County! Appreciate it!

Selling the house this year is out of the question; the bank repo across the street will screw up the comps for sure. I'm betting the ranch (house) on a comeback in a year or two like everybody else -- hope we are all not wrong.

But another part of the reason for dragging my feet is, I've been here so long I've grown roots deeper than my Cecile Brunner roses. I know the pricey-and-good restaurants, the cheap-and-good restaurants, the places with nice patios and tables where you can write. I know some of the hidden staircases down the cliffs of Laguna and Corona del Mar, the most likely places to find a parking spot at the beaches, even on Balboa Island in summer. I know good thrift stores and bookstores and coffeehouses, and I've walked around marinas and beaches from San Clemente and Dana Point to Seal Beach and over the border into Los Alamitos Bay and Naples Island and Belmont Shores, and I still don't know everything about this place. I'm still not tired of it. Above all, I've made good friends here, and I'd hate to lose them.

And here's the other thing: I went to five elementary schools by the fifth grade. I got my own place when I was seventeen and moved eleven times in five years before moving here. Amazing, eleven moves in five years, always looking for nicer places with cheaper rents and better roommates. It's not quite as tough as it sounds; most of the time, what I owned fit in my car. The first time I had to rent a little U-Haul trailer, I was sort of pleased. I'd finally acquired a piece or two of furniture and was a solid citizen.

Anyhow, once I hit Orange County, I planted roots and would not be budged. Still have not. I love to travel, but I also love coming home. I love to drive up and see the house and flowers and trees. I turn the key in the lock and there are the comfortable chairs, my pretty paintings, green plants and candles, and I'm home.

Could we make a home someplace else? Of course. Could I be happy living someplace else? I'm sure of it. And someday we will move, whether obnoxious neighbors finally prompt it, or economics, or my husband's desire for less crowded surroundings, or just the wheel of change slowly turning and taking me with it.

On my last trip to Detroit, I made a pilgrimage to all the places I'd lived. The house in which I spent years nine through seventeen had been painted charcoal gray and looked as grim on the outside as it had been on the inside. Most of the places I'd rented were battered and forlorn, and one of my favorites (the one with beveled glass windows and mahogany woodwork and ivy growing over the kitchen window) had vanished entirely. There was grass growing on the empty lot where it had stood, and there were three or four other vacant lots just like it on the block. It seems the City of Detroit had decided it was better to raze the abandoned houses that were being used as crack dens, fill the basements with dirt, and plant grass. Less chance of liability for the city, slightly less crime for the few remaining neighbors to deal with. I drove around the ruins of Coplin, Lakepointe, Evanston, Hampshire, Hazelridge -- crazy white girl risking her present just to look at her past.

People in Detroit in the 1950's would have thought the destruction of their city impossible. Twenty years from now, will I come back to Fountain Valley for a final farewell tour and find my beloved old home trashed or gone? No lie, that would be a tragedy. That would break my heart.

Meanwhile, I'll be out there in the neighborhood with my can of Goof-Off, helping to preserve the home that is still mine.

copyright 2011, Susan Cameron