On Detroit

I’m from Detroit. Allow me to clarify…I’m from the East Side. Note the capital letters. Almost everyone from Detroit is from the East Side or the West Side. Very few of us crossed Woodward Avenue for more than a few hours at a time.

I lived on Bellevue and St. Paul until I was about nine, and later on Van Dyke and Parker. I could walk to Belle Isle, and did, probably thousands of times…well, maybe hundreds of times. Later on, we drove and watched the submarine races. My grandfather Mayse, (we all called him Daddy) my mother, and my uncle Carl all worked at the Rubber Company. Later on they re-named it Uniroyal, but it was still the Rubber Company to us. It made me mad when they moved the big stove to the fairgrounds, but no one asked my opinion.

On Saturdays, we went to the Eastern Market. There were bushels of fruit that my Grandma Mayse (we all called her Mama) canned. Her specialty was fruit cocktail; chopped peaches and pears and red cherries (they still had the pits, so you had to be careful not to crack a tooth.) She canned green beans and tomatoes and corn. I helped snap the beans and shuck the corn. There must have been hundreds of Ball and Mason jars. The shelves in our kitchen were full when she finished.

A crate of chickens came home from the market with us. ..live chickens. Daddy would cut off their heads as we needed one to cook. Sometimes a half a young hog, about three feet long, split from head to tail.

Sometimes we went to Jefferson Beach, not for swimming, but for the amusement park. It was second rate to me. My favorite amusement park came at the end of a ride on the Bob-Lo Boat. It cruised up the Detroit River to Bob-Lo Island, where they had the standard amusement park rides, a Ferris wheel, a tilt-a-wheel, and my personal favorite, a merry go round. I always wanted a horse that went up and down. Never cared much for the pigs or big rabbit.Oral pills and implants do work to treat order cialis online check over here impotence. Erectile dysfunction is a medical condition mostly in men that are over generic levitra from india the age of 40 but cannot occur in younger men. Have you been suffering from irritable bowel syndrome symptoms? The good news view content levitra without prescription is you can still solve this problem using natural approaches. Kamagra jelly provides improvement in cGMP substance cialis properien and thus leading to improvement of the blood circulation.

On Saturdays, my daddy (not my grandfather) took me downtown. We had the 65c turkey dinner in the Kresge basement restaurant and saw a movie at one of the big, fabulous movie houses. Sometimes we saw a stage show at the Fox Theatre. Martin and Lewis, Betty Grable and Harry James, Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald.

And, as my pastor, Brother Hafford H. Overbey, (who baptized us and married us and buried us for thirty-five years) used to say, I said all that to say this:

I have a head cold, and I live in Vegas now, and I can’t get any Vernor’s Ginger Ale here. Only people from Detroit, either side, East or West, will understand my misery.