I used to go to this little area in River Rouge growing up. My mom cut the hair of a blind woman who lived there and we went to this little sweaty Baptist church like 5 times a week for church and my mom's singing rehearsals. There is this cool little wall there that wraps around the back end of Zugg Island (A factory town on the Rouge/Detroit border). It was one of my favorite places to be, we would play on that wall all day. I would climb under and over the barb wire and into the factory grounds and climb the huge oil tankers and stand on the top. Sorry mom, I realize now this wasn't a safe thing to do. But it was fun. Over the years, a broken neighborhood became an abandoned one. We went back last night and looked as all of the houses on this street were boarded up and spray painted. The grass waist high, the streets broken to small pieces that kids have picked up and thrown through the windows of the homes that once belonged to old Ford workers and steel millers. Somehow though, for whatever reason, people have been going back to this wall and updating the cartoons. Some of them are new ones that were not there when I was a kid.
It shows that no matter how dilapidated the world becomes, there will always be those that appreciate cartoons and innocence. There will still be the people that won't just let everything go. Even if they are little things, they can mean a lot. Like in the place that the old Tiger Stadium was, there is a guy who at his own expense and time has been cutting the field grass and pulling the weeds so kids can go out there and play in the same place that Al Kaline and Sweet Lou Whittaker played. Of course the city is giving him problems over it, I guess because it is a union job that the union is neglecting. Just like so many other things that people have let die, some flowers still grow through the cracks in the cement.
Sing.
Migrate.
To leave a comment, click on the specific blog title and the comment form will be at the bottom of the page.
