More has happened than I can write about . . .

Since my last posting I have begun teaching at UNM, I have almost finished unpacking, my friend's (we'll call her Edga because I always did) home was engulfed by water in New Orleans and she moved back here, I have made a few new friends, I have been besieged by allergies, and basically, I have been enjoying my time in Albuquerque, but I fear that the onslaught of student papers and job ads might just swamp me in the next week. I can't believe it's only the beginning of the fourth week of the semester and I feel like I am about to dip below the surface already. But after I grade the batch of 65 papers I get tomorrow -- and grade them, I should say, over a week or so -- then I can perhaps get to the real fun, new research.

All of that above was probably well and good, but not the stuff good blogs are made of.

So, Edga and her boyfriend and mom came back to Albuquerque after having been away for eight years. I visited her in New Orleans several times and twice this last year. If you read my other blog -- Southern Tier -- you saw pictures of her in that section of the blog. She really made a place for herself in that city and if they was anywhere my little half-Norwegian, half-Mexican Edga could feel at home it was in the muggy mystical-hothouse that was/is New Orleans. She worked at a coffee shop for a few years and then at a men's furnishings place called Adain Gill. Before that she worked at Juan's Flying Taco. She was and is tiny, dark-haired, high-voiced, funny, nervous, straightforward, Nuevo Mexicana, uniquely articulated, and a loyal friend.

We made cupcakes last October when I was visiting her the day before Halloween. Her little apartment on Louisiana Street was all decorated for Halloween and she had all of these Halloween mobiles on her front stoop and they made "scary" noises. We made faces for pictures, pretending we were scared. Her boyfriend N is very nice and had figurines of scary creatures on the bookshelf in the living room, with Edga's old Barbies. They were companions. We carved pumpkins and decorated cupcakes and I baked a loaf of bread with a wheel of Brie in it. It turns out that her friend who was decorating cupcakes and carving pumpkins with us that night thought I commandeered the cupcake-decorating. That enervated me when I heard it. It's not like I said, "Out of the way! Cupcake-decorating expert coming through! Stand back!" So that got to me. But we had so much fun that night and Edga had a cauldron of candy the scope of which I had never seen before. Apparently she had a ton of trick-or-treating kids in her neighborhood and when I called her the day after Halloween she told me she had in fact gone through all of that candy. We ate so much candy and so many cupcakes and so much bread and Brie on that night before Halloween.

Yesterday I finally got to see N and Edga. For the first two days they were here back in Albuquerque they were down at the Albuquerque Convention Center with other evacuees who had come to Albuquerque, some with friends or relatives here and some who just got transported here. Apparently everyone from the Red Cross at the Convention Center was very helpful, despite how busy they were, and in a day and a half, Edga and her mom and N got some clothes, communicated with their employers from Louisiana, heard about jobs around here, and learned about other resources that might aid them. They are staying in Edga's grandparents' old house, the house next to the one Edga moved out of eight years ago and never thought she'd return to.

When I picked her and N up yesterday, we were so happy to see each other. We went to Java Joe's and saw someone neither of us were so sure how we felt about seeing and he was so surprised to see us all he could say was "Weird . . . ." That was pretty lame.

We went and sat in the park after that and I bought green chiles from the organic farmers and two patty-pan squashes. We then went and had lunch at Lindy's. I am so happy to have Edga back near me, but oh the circumstances . . . .

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.

T Minus Eleven

I am leaving Detroit in eleven days. I have been here for nine years. I moved to Detroit because that's where I wanted to live after I quit my job at a buy-sell-trade clothing store in Ann Arbor in 1996. I also wanted to be near my friends, most of whom lived in Detroit. I quit that job in Ann Arbor, rented an apartment in the Renaud at Second and Hancock, and on the strength of my faith in a job for which I only had an interview, I committed to moving to Detroit. I remember the day I went to look at my apartment, apartment 15, in the Renaud for the first time.

It was early November 1996 and I had been at Zoot's with my friend Aaron, who at that time was running the place. There was a woman who ran a clothing shop in the back of Zoot's; her name was Carol and I do believe that she was certifiably insane. Anyway, I was standing at the counter talking to Aaron about my feeling that I just needed to move out of Ann Arbor, my time there was done, and up walks Carol saying that she is using an apartment in the Renaud, next to hers, as storage and that I might rent it. So, I walked over there with Carol and Aaron, checked the place out, loved its nuances, the weird details, that it was in a very old building, and so I was pretty much sold. I went back to Zoot's, called my parents from the pay-phone in the back hallway across from the bathroom, and I told my mom what I was planning to do. I will say that my parents weren't thrilled that their daughter was Detroit-bound, especially since two months before that I had been car-jacked two blocks from where my new apartment would be. I left that detail out when I told my mom about the place I was planning to rent in the Renaud.

So things moved pretty quickly after that. I did get a job for a mean lady who ran a public relations firm in Troy. I moved into apartment 15 right around Thanksgiving 1996. I was thrilled to be living by myself, in Detroit, and I remember the particular thrill I got when I wrote my address down. It was actually "Detroit," not Ferndale, Hamtramck, Ypsilanti, and it especially was not Royal Oak. I admit that I was proud just about the simple fact that I had a Detroit address and on an overcast winter day there seemed to be nothing more legitimate in this world than the match-up between my seasonal sadness and the entire situation of the city. I really liked that verisimilitude. I finally had chosen where I was living and was compelled to develop my identification with the place; I was proud of it and felt a sense of legitimacy. Now I see that these very same things grow and grow for people . . . to the point where one identifies with the city, or anything else really, to the point that what you are as a person independent of place really fades into the background. I was so determined to develop my place-based sense of self, as a young woman of 22, that now as a 31-one-year old I wonder if I can shed the "place" and keep a strong sense of who I am.

In a way, I am moving out of Detroit in much the same way that I moved to it. I decided, while awash in a sense of panic about continuing the job I had lined up again for this coming academic year, that I simply could not do it again. In a very quick fashion, I quit that job, arranged to move back to New Mexico, ferreted out a job there (which, similar to 1996, wasn't quite lined up yet), told my lovely landlord and -lady here that I was moving, and started to mentally prepare for the move and physically begin the packing. Once I decided that I needed to change the place I was in, the ball was, as it were, rolling and I couldn't, or felt I shouldn't, stop it. I thought that I might feel like, suddenly, what I am doing is wrong for me, but even though I don't know for sure that what lies ahead in New Mexico is right, I know that my time here in Detroit is done. I have decided that it is so.