ANN ABOUT TOWN: Look Up, Look Down

Over the weekend I spent some time in Detroit. Not in the suburbs, but in the heart of the city, including two hours standing in line on Woodward Avenue.

I hadn’t been in Detroit for nearly a decade, and I found myself fascinated with everything from interesting manhole covers to the way the MGM Grand rose like some armored alien from amidst burnt-out and graffiti’d buildings with boarded up windows. I shot pictures of everything I found interesting, struck up conversations with strangers, and had the singular experience of being in a place so close to my home base and yet as exotic as Myanmar or Slovenia.

Back in East Lansing, I wondered if I could see my familiar world with the eyes of an objective observer. I decided to take a walk, taking pictures to document this place and tell the story of the things on that walk without judgment about what was beautiful or terrible.

Across the street from my house I found what appeared to be a sort of Dachshund/slug/giraffe combination. It was just sitting on the curb.

I also spied a pile of what seemed to be broken glass nesting in the grass. I wondered where it came from since it looked too thick to be window glass and too plentiful to be from a broken bottle. It looked, mostly, like an eternal and unmelting pile of small ice cubes.

At the corner I stopped to look at the power station thingie which has, for some time, featured both some tagging and a Banksy-esque owl stencil. Who, I wondered, is tagging around here? How did the stencil get there? Does it mean something?

Nearby lay an empty bottle of cheap alcohol and an empty pack of cigarettes. It wasn’t too hard to figure out how those objects came to be on the front lawn of a student rental immediately after a warm, sunny, end-of-the-school-year weekend.

Next, there was this flowering tree with most buds still closed. Only this branch had burst open and served as witness to the coming of spring despite the dark sky, high wind and drizzle.

Around that time I observed my own cat, who had followed me. He seemed to be directing me to the memorial plaque for Zolton Ferency. It was hard to remain immersed in my “stranger in my own town” thing since I knew Zolton and his wife was my 8^th grade science teacher, but there remained the mystery of why the cat was so interested.

I saw more signs of spring, including some rather mysterious spiky things that had fallen on the sidewalk. They looked kind of like spiders.

Then this, which raised all kinds of questions like where did it come from, how did it get to be on a vacant lot, and was it left there by someone who was in any way a “Bad Seed:”

When it was clear that the cat was going to keep following me no matter how busy the streets I approached, I decided to turn back. First, though, I saw this juxtaposition of hole-y gate, flora and trash. It had a mystical look about it, as if it might be an unmarked passageway to Narnia.

There are stories all over this town, questions, mysteries, secrets and signs of lives known and unknown.

I’m glad I took the time to look.