Flint Hand-Me-Down

I’ve always preferred other peoples’ clothes worn to the shape of their lives.  For the last four weeks, I’ve been visiting older adults at the Lockwood Senior Living facility in Burton, and today was my last day—well, for the time being.  A few days ago, I emailed Candace the activities director questions for the participants to think over:  how did your parents or grandparents wind up in Flint?  What would be on your map of the world when you were seven years old?  Can you remember a favorite walk you took in Flint?  The talk was so warm, punctuated with laughter and groans.  At the end, most said, “Oh, I have really enjoyed this.”  Fran didn’t even get up to go to church this time.  “We don’t get to talk like this very often.”  “It helps to learn more about the people you live with.”  Reluctantly, or so it seemed to me, they pulled chairs back from the table around which we’d sat, released the brakes on their walkers, and headed off, either down to lunch or back to their private apartments.  Kurt, whose grandfather had come from the Ukraine with an invention that was “stolen,” got depressed and eventually killed himself, said, “You know, when all the people I knew are now gone, I have to ask myself why I am still here.  It occurred to me that maybe I am here for this,” and he gestured to the table around which we’d been sitting and sharing the memories of lives lived in a very different Flint—“when Flint was THE place to be.”

And here I am—a professor and aging woman who may one day live in such a place, whose mother died in a version of this place, and who continues to wander the east side, climbing through weeds to peer into the foundations of burned-down houses, listening intently for what the ruins have to say.  Since coming to Flint, I have found and loved people who help me to fill in the holes and cover the ruins with lives past and present.  First there was Fran, whose family—up from Tennessee—ran a boarding house for factory workers.  “When I’d go to cities without factories, I’d think ‘these are not REAL cities’,” she told me.  I married Paul, in part, because he’d walk down railroad tracks with me through Chevy-in-the-Hole and give me a walking tour of all the mills and buildings that once were and now were no more.  When I met this group of seniors, my joy was genuine (a partial satisfaction of a longstanding desire).  They clearly wanted to share with me memories more sparkling than heirlooms, more vivid than the black and white photo of Dolly kissing Joe in front of a shiny new Chevrolet.  Finally, here I am gazing into the faces of Flint people rather than char-burned holes, and as I listen, my images of the city shift and so do the sounds: instead of crickets and natural sounds that signal neighborhoods returning to nature, I hear the happy sounds of kids playing, the whirr of roller-skates on concrete, the noise of factories working, and voices of people who have lived through a lot and are still joking and laughing.  

The things they have touched are held out to me

Like the sleeve of an old coat

To try on.  I pull one arm in,

Listening to the story of its making:

There was a boarding house with a Victrola playing

European men—crushes—working at Chevrolet.

Baskets half woven in an upstairs bedroom:

“I learned basket-weaving in the hospital

After the electric shock.”  When Fran got cancer

She gave my husband her father’s violin

And told me how her own mother

never wanted him to play.

Norma tells of her father electrocuted at work,

but “GM gave my mother a job in cut and sew. 

I was five years old.  She married again,

and he was real nice.” 

Mercury balls the Papas brought home for toys

We didn’t know then what we know now

They really pinged.

Sidewalks so smooth you could roller skate down ‘em

And we walked everywhere … EVERYWHERE.

On Saturdays we’d go to the theatre

For five cents you could see a show

And if you had a dime you could get a bag

Of popcorn.  A boy threw an apple core at the screen

And the matron yelled, “That’s it,” and the ticket price went

Up to 25 cents.  That was too much.  We nearly died.

In the winter, they’d flood the field by the armory

And we’d ice skate.  There was a warming shed

Where we waited for rides

We didn’t have cell phones to call our parents and say

We’re freezing. 

Missouri, Wisconsin, Iron Mountain, Chippewa lands

Norway, Sweden, Scotland, Ukraine

Languages spoken at home

Beverly still remembers numbers 1-10 in Norwegian

But that’s all.  Rose left home at 12 on the firing end

Of a shotgun pointed at her stepfather:  “he beat me,”

Was all she could say.  Things were hard

The strike, the work, the noise, the neglect,

But when put into a new role, Rose

“didn’t think about it much, I’d just do

What needed to be done.

How?  Well, I liked people.”

No thoughts of suicide then.  Almost none.

“There was a pump in the front yard

And neighbors would bring their jugs--

The water from that artesian well

Was so cold—oh, it made the best iced tea.”

“Pa’s work partner in the factory was a black man.

It was hot in the summer so Pa bought a fan to blow

On both of them.  The man was so happy

He wanted to pay for half the fan.”

Early marriages, no furniture, tales of managing

Cooking, canning, sewing

Learned at the knee of a grandmother. 

Some came from parents who were adopted

Others were shunted from foster home to foster home

“No folk?” Well, my ma and pa made their own

Seven kids. 

The problem today is there is

No communication

Silence except for the click of keys

No talking

No sharing

No mixing of young and old.

We have to work on that, work to find one another again.  I made an effort.  I didn’t know if they would like me.  I didn’t know if they would share.  But I wrote the questions.  I threw myself in.  I ate the fried dough with brown sugar that Betty made every week.  I told them about losing Mom.  I ached when it ended today.  Not over.  Never over.  We have so much to preserve … before the growing season ends, before the snows of winter come.