Maree-Anne On Avon Street, Flint

When I moved to Flint in 1996 to teach Shakespeare at the university, I rented an apartment on Avon St. in the East Village (#701), and, as it happened, the man I married lived a few houses down on the other side of Avon Street (#710).  Mary Jo upon Avon:  the Shakespeare teacher reading the plays on a street named for the river that runs through Shakespeare’s birthplace, Stratford-upon-Avon.  It was not chance that determined the street’s name.  It was Edward Thomson, a lawyer who lived in our neighborhood during the nineteenth century and who amassed the largest collection of Shakespeare volumes in the state.   His collection--746 volumes--was donated to the University of Michigan main campus in Ann Arbor at his death in 1886, and the Avon name is about the last trace of his presence in Flint.  The summer before I started teaching at UM-Flint, I stayed in the Bed and Breakfast at the other end of Avon.  It was a June of humid air, cloudy days, and fireflies.  I walked up and down the quiet street, imagining myself holed up reading, wondering whether that activity alone could make a satisfying life on Avon Street.  Twenty years later, I can say that this has been a great place to disappear into books, but I am more and more thankful for the people—my neighbors—who are pulling me out of my hole and into the river of life.

Edward Thomson's library in Flint, circa 1876

Avon Street Bed and Breakfast 

My porch at 710 Avon St. becomes a sort of library in the summer

Late last winter I went to an educational session on baroque music before a performance of Monteverdi’s “L’Orfeo” that was to be performed on original instruments at Hill Auditorium in Ann Arbor.  I sat in a circle with other adults.  The Asian women to my left said her idea of a good way to die was listening to classical music in a bathtub, and a handsome professorial type on my right, wearing a purple shirt and corduroy jacket, started chatting me up.  What did I teach?  Where did I live?  FLINT?  REALLY?  Is there anything to do there?  Do you meet people like yourself?  That question was provocative.  What did he mean … “like myself”?  I assumed he meant people like him, people with the same level of education and the same basic cultural interests?  “No.  Definitely not.”  What I didn’t tell him is that I am deeply grateful to be surrounded by true Others. 

Things have changed on Avon Street since Edward Thomson’s day.  The mansions of General Motors big-wigs that once lined Kearsley Street are gone, and those who live on our street are a mix of home-owners (factory workers, a pair of professors, and a retired nurse), down-and-out renters, single-mothers, group-home inmates, students, and, until recently, one very public alcoholic.  My husband often brags that we live within our means and aren’t in an all-white suburb, but I’ve been more self-critical: “Get real, honey, how much do we interact with the neighbors?”  Ay, there’s the rub.  Fran, who rents rooms across the street, remarked once, “You guys keep to yourselves.”  This is and is not true.  I’ve always opened the door to people like Mary, a squatter in a nearby abandoned house who used to come around a few years ago, asking for change to do laundry or ride the bus, and once she just needed menstrual pads.  Moreover, my reading is not self-isolating or self-comforting (not completely) but an act of love, a going out of my own nature, a sympathetic identification with the mystery of the other, whether the other is a neighbor, a stranger, or God?  But it is true:  books are not enough and have only whetted my appetite for real interactions.  In my own way, I am just as hungry as my neighbors.  Maybe that’s why I have become such an avid walker.  I walk to shed the “tiny, tiny myness,” and to be swept up in the life of nature or the street, to feel myself a part of what Virginia Woolf describes as, “that vast republican army of anonymous trampers, whose society is so agreeable after the solitude of one’s room.”  But I credit the group-home guys—men with an array of psychological disorders, living lives of radical dependency—for pulling me out into the stream of life. 

Eric with Panda on the porch of Harmony House

Even in the cold of the winter months, they are out on the porches of the two houses nearest Court Street.  “I like your dog,” yells a newcomer, sitting alert and smoking.  I thank him.  The next night, he shouts the same thing, “I like your dog.”  “That’s a cool dog.”  “He keeps you company, doesn’t he?”  Another night he asked me if I read the Bible and warned me that “Jesus was coming,” but mostly he stuck to talking about Panda.  Eventually, I asked his name, and over time we talked more and more.  He introduced me to an older black man, John—quiet and unassuming.  But through Eric, I gradually warmed up to another, more pesty guy who shuffles around in a down vest and army hat and doesn’t hesitate to ask for empties and spare change.  At first, I didn’t like him because he commented unselfconsciously about my January-May marriage: “Hey, that your husband?  He’s kind of old, huh?  Ha, ha.”  Paul says “Bottles’-guy” (our name for him before I learned his real name) is “way out of it,” but I disagree.  “Captain Frank—U.S. Army” is perceptive and enterprising, just trying his best to keep some dignity in a lousy situation.  He told me that he’d tried to join the Army, but they “kicked [him] out.”  Undeterred by rejection, he simply pretends.  When hot weather hit in late May, Frank started asking me for pop.  I’d open to the knock at my door and see him standing there, begging for “a can of Coke or something.”  Coke?  Sure, no problem.  What’s a can of pop?  I got in the habit of picking up liter bottles of Fanta at Kroger for him and the occasional box of cookies.  I’d leave them with whoever was sitting on the porch.  When we had a bumper crop of strawberries, the group-home guys passed around the brown paper bag filled with red berries right off the bush.  I don’t mean to make myself sound like a do-gooder because I’m the one who benefits from the exchange.  I may nourish them with food gifts, but they nourish me with their greetings and the opportunity to be a provider.

They call out to us from their porches.  They shout requests, greetings, blessings.  How many neighbors in “good” neighborhoods do that.  No one comes around asking for an egg or a cup of sugar anymore or to borrow a rake or screw driver, but these guys have needs and aren’t shy about making them known.  Because they do, they draw us close, invite us to share something of their lives.  The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas writes, “Happiness is made up not of an absence of needs, whose tyranny and imposed character one denounces, but of the satisfaction of all needs.”  What I take him to mean is that happiness is accomplishment:  it exists in a soul satisfied and not in a soul that has extirpated its needs, a castrated soul.  Frank needs pop, Gregory (a wiry black man with a broad toothless smile) needs an onion a cup of ice a hug, Eric needs a friend, and I know that I need to feel part of a community.  “Life is love of life, a relation with contents that are not my being but more dear than my being:  thinking, eating, sleeping, reading, working, warming oneself in the sun,” and, I would add, sitting under a tree or on a step and talking to my neighbor.  “Distinct from my substance but constituting it, these contents make up the worth of my life.”  Levinas’ philosophical musings are spot on.  The human being thrives on her needs; she is happy for her needs.

But the truth is—meeting my neighbors’ needs has not come easily.  The relentlessness calls of the group-home guys may be teaching me kindness, but I have at other times struggled with being the only affluent open-hand around.  How much can I give?  Are they going to hit me up for money every time we meet on the street?  Every time I express my curiosity about their lives?  My dealings with Cathy made me acutely aware of my own needs for friendship.  Cathy is black, poor, lives with a younger black man, Jamie, who is, as she says, “slow” but nice and “learning to cook.”  She tries to work—collecting signatures on petitions and sometimes cleaning houses—but she’s also addicted to pain meds and sells half her monthly prescription on the streets.  I’d given Cathy rides downtown when she regaled me with stories from past lives when she went to UM-Flint, did theater, had a career as a singer, made $50,000 a year, had teeth and lots of friends.  When I bumped into her last summer around the Cultural Center, she said her brother was dying of brain cancer and wondered if I had any cleaning work for her to do.  I didn’t.  I like Cathy, but it bothered me that she could never remember my name.  I knew hers.  I knew her story.  The fact that she kept calling me “Mary Ann” or “Mary Jane” or “Mary Lou” made me feel funny, like she was just talking to me to get something.

One day in early December, it was cold.  I’d come in from walking the dog and had a small bit of time before picking up my daughter from school.  There was a knock at the door which I had not closed.  “Mary Ann!  Mary Ann!”  It was Cathy.  “You got any pain pills?!”  This was before I knew of her addiction.  “Well, I have some Tylenol.  That’s all I got.”  “Really?  I figured you must have something stronger.  I mean, we ain’t getting any younger.”  I was annoyed.  I stomped upstairs to the medicine cabinet, picked up the mostly empty bottle of Tylenol, stomped down and handed it to her.  “And MY NAME is MARY JO.”  I know she heard the annoyance in my voice, and hers came back lilting and laughing, “honey, you know most days I can’t remember my children’s names.  Not since I had that stroke.”  And somehow in that conversation, she tucked in a very clear statement of her needs and values for “food, sex, and travel” in that order.  I remember admiring her clarity and thinking that that wasn’t a bad short list of necessities.  I closed the door and locked myself into my own trap.  I knew what was bugging me:  maybe Cathy was in pain, but she had enough gumption to walk across the street on a cold, cold day and ask for help.  She had enough spirit to find a man to sleep with.  She could say what she needed.  Could I?  I felt shitty for taking out my frustration on her.  And after picking up Katya from school, I stopped at Rite Aid, bought her Motrin, a couple of small bottles of whiskey, and a chocolate bar.  Christmas was coming.  Settling my daughter in the house, I carried my purchases across the street.  Cathy and Jamie lived upstairs in the same house where I used to have an apartment (701 Avon).  The doorbells are broken now—out of state landlord—and to get their attention, I had to shout up toward the window which is usually open.  “Cathy!  Cathy!  Hey, I’ve got something for you.”  She came down, opened the door, and invited me upstairs, but I said I couldn’t stay.  I apologized, gave her what I’d put together, and we hugged.  I was grateful that she was so forgiving, that she was willing to give me a second chance.

Cathy with boyfriend, Jamie in front of 701 Avon Street

Even before I began talking to Cathy, I’d connected with her boyfriend, Jamie, because Jamie loves my corgi, Panda.  One day, when he was still just a puppy, Panda squeezed through the fence and ran straight over to Jamie, who often sits in a white plastic chair along the sidewalk.  “Hey Panda, Panda, Panda,” he says, putting his face close to my dog’s, brown eyes staring into brown eyes.  For a long time I’ve known that Jamie needs an animal to care for.  He’s familiar enough with us now that if he sees me in the porch or in the backyard, he’ll come over and come right on in.  The first time he lifted the latch and let himself in the fence, I was troubled.  This is MY YARD.  I didn’t say you could come in.  I felt the annoyance of having an interloper on MY property.  I hated myself for having these feelings, and, thankfully, I was able to put them aside and enjoy watching Jamie play with Panda.  And we talked.  I asked him if he was born in Flint.  “No.  Thailand.  I’m adopted.”  Thailand?  I was really surprised.  He explained very clearly—not “slow” at all—that he was born in 1968—“a Vietnam baby”—in Bangkok to a Thai woman and an American father, who was a soldier.  He loves Chinese food and isn’t angry about having been abandoned.  “Things were unstable.  There was the war.”  He grew up in Hurley Children’s Center and was adopted by a white family in Flint.  “That’s why I get along with white people better than most blacks.”  Eventually, after we’ve compared notes on adoption, talked about Flint, and Panda is dead tired from the tug of war game, I tell Jamie that I need to start cooking dinner.  I tell him that because I am used to my own quiet and my own space, and I am ashamed that I have such a low tolerance for human company.  Something I want to change.  “Okay.  Hey,” he asks with a big tonal question mark, “can you spare a few bucks?”  “What d’ya need?” I ask, feeling friendship corrupted by obligation.  “Oh, I don’t want to be greedy, but maybe like ten dollars.”  I go inside and pull a ten out of my wallet and hand it over, once again feeling that ugly feeling that everything with them comes down to money.  We just had a nice conversation, I’m thinking.  Why does money have to enter in?  Of course, the answer is that he and Cathy are poor.  She, as I’ll find out later, needs pain medicine and she had already spent her monthly check.  Jamie was trying to meet her need.  What’s wrong about having needs and asking for help?  Nothing.  And I pray the day will come that I will, with genuine gladness, meet such needs because, in the scheme of things, I can … without suffering any loss.  And because, Cathy does pay me back.  Several days later, she comes trundling over, heavy purse on her arm, waving dollar bills in the air like a fan, “Mary Ann!  Mary Ann!  I got some money for you.”

A week or two later, I’m pull my car in the driveway and Jamie runs over.  “Hey, you know that white guy …” , and, weirdly, I do know the man he’s talking about—the drunk who, for many years, has sat on his porch downing box after box of Rose wine and smoking … for hours everyday … winter, spring, summer, fall.  He was the neighborhood watchman.  “He died.”  I was genuinely shocked.  Jamie knew his name was “Brad,” and I knew there was a lot of traffic between the two porches—Brad’s and Jamie’s—and that Brad had had some kind of relationship with the rail-thin black woman, “Vivien,” who I somehow imagined to be a crackhead.  I’d stayed away from Brad when he started giving flowers to my toddler daughter and later when he got in my face and told me I needed to call Child Protective Services about Sam and Jasmine’s mother.  I wrote him off as a judgmental jerk.  Did I think … that I was the only neighbor who had the right to form judgments?  Just as Brad was a constant presence on his porch, watching the street, so he was a touchstone in my mind.  Some winters he’d drink outside, wearing a hard hat and a beige Carhart jumpsuit, and I envied him his freedom from responsibility.  More recently, he’d hibernate during the winter and I’d worry when he hadn’t come out even once the weather got fine.  I hoped quietly that he’d survived.  During my own deep depression two years ago, when I was smoking and drinking during the day (little sips of wine from a demitasse cup), Brad’s presence two houses away made me feel less alone and less messed up.  “He died. … How?” I gasped.  “I don’t know, but when they found him, he’d been dead in the house for three or four days.”  “Oh, God.  That’s awful.”  There would be no second chance this time.  No hugs.  No liquor exchanged.  No nothing. 

That night, all the neighborhood blacks hung out in the yard across from Brad’s apartment in those white plastic chairs.  It seemed to me they were waking him.  By the time I picked and washed a mess of strawberries to take over, they were gone.  Not quite:  there was Jamie coming up a side street.  He must have seen me standing in his yard, looking … for someone.  I gave him the bag of fruit.  He thanked me.  He didn’t seem to feel threatened by my presence in his yard, but, then, his has no fence. 

Just the other day, late afternoon, I’d walked Panda around a block and came up to Cathy sitting under the maple tree eating a plate of something she’d cooked.  She gave the dog her last piece of food and asked me to sit down and talk.  She filled me in on Brad—how he lived and how he died:  “He was in the Navy … cook on a submarine,”  “a hoarder,” “hundreds of wine boxes,” “spoiled meat crawling with maggots,” “Vivien was goin with him.”  She asked me about my life.  “What’s it like—Boston?”  When I told her about my recent troubles with my daughter, she said, “she’s not a lesbian, not screwing black guys or Mexicans—don’t let her go with any Mexicans,” and “she’s not having twins and needing an abortion … honey, your problems small compared to real-world ones.”  I laughed and agreed.  “Make yourself some banana splits.  Get yourself a journal.  You growing up with her.  Plus, I can tell she’s a good girl.  She’s beautiful.  Remember that day I was over at your place?  She came out of the house, looked me dead in the eye, and handed me a quarter.  She’s alright.”  I stand up to go, and this time, she doesn’t ask for anything.  “See ya later, Mary Ann.”  It no longer matters that she doesn’t know my name.  “Okay.  Enjoy the evening, Cathy.”  In the pale night light of summer around 9:00 I see her racing down Avon Street on a bike. 

My Avon may be a street in a rust-belt city and not a river in Warwickshire, but it, too, has a current.  Lately, I feel glad when I hear someone shout out, “Maree-Ann!” or “Hey, Jo-Jo.”  When I answer to these new names, I step into the current, let go my hold on all the tiny mynesses I’ve clung to—my name, my yard, my money, my free time, my work.  And free at last, liberated by my neighbors’ needs, I have to wonder where, oh where, does this Avon go? 

There were still horses on Avon St. in 1996 when I moved here.