Now Departed

I left Detroit on Thursday, August 11th. Leaving itself was a bit of a debacle. I was sitting on a stool in my front lawn trying to safely pad all of my china, dishes I've collected, various breakables, in bubble wrapping and pillows and towels and fit them in my trunk so as not to break them en route to Albuquerque. See, my boyfriend happened to be right in that I over estimated the size of my car. He kept saying, "your Passat is NOT a freight truck," meaning that I really could not conceivably fit 12 boxes in it and our luggage and all of my hundreds of records. I had a moving truck come on Tuesday, which took away most of my things, but there were certain things I wanted to keep with me, primarily records and dishes. I figured my car would care for them better than an ABF truck, under my sage guidance. Turns out I wasn't so sage, so Thursday morning, after a night of drinking at my friend Sarah's in Warren, I was unpacking and repacking on my front lawn, under a tree in the sun. I suppose that part was nice.

We did get the car packed, around noon I think, and I went and cleaned the apartment and took one last look at my beautiful garden while eating a root beer popsicle. We then had to drive to the Comcast location, which is on Lyndon and Wyoming avenues in Detroit, and if you've been there, you'll agree that taking in an eyeful of that neighborhood provides a pretty good isolated example of Detroit's many problems and the true depth of disrepair in the city. To my boyfriend's eyes, that neighborhood didn't look very different from the rest of the city, but I could really tell the difference between the degree of abandonment and disillusionment and poverty there versus the degree in my neighborhood by I-75 and Warren. The Lyndon and Wyoming neighborhood still looked totally neglected and the ambience carried over into the Comcast location where we saw several dodgy incidents as we waited to return my modem, which I ended up doing with little event. I hate to reiterate the stories of impoverishment and crime that abound about Detroit, so I won't, but as one of my last visions of the city that I love, that neighborhood served as a powerful and memorable and sadly not very unique, actually, final punctuation to my nine-year Detroit narrative.

We then drove to Chicago, starting from Detroit at about 2:00, which was two hours later than planned. I didn't start crying until about an hour outside of Detroit, and it wasn't because we had just driven through Ann Arbor, a city that I really don't like at all (even though my attitude about it has modulated a bit in the last year). I started crying because I was pretty sad about leaving, but not because I didn't want to leave. I wasn't regretful about the decision I'd made. As my friend Sara said to me when I was contemplating moving away from Detroit, "the things you miss are already gone." I guess I was crying about that.