A year ago right now (during our Alkalai School project, I should mention) Andrea and I were lying on the side of the highway leading to Mt. Rushmore, where all the locals who don’t want to pay admission fees go to watch the fireworks display. Radios blared the standard fireworks “Proud-To-Be-An-American” mix and cars whizzed right by our heads.
Later that night, carried away with patriotic fervor and truly American doses of alcohol, we made the following recording, which we post here tonight as our way of saying Happy Independence Day to you and yours.
Andrea and I had gotten used to seeing this cute old man shuffle by our house at a snail’s pace pretty regularly. You know, one of those people who’s lived in their old house for years and has probably taken the same walk thousands of times. There’s a cute old woman down by Packard and Stadium who does the same thing, walking I think from from a house just west of the intersection to one of the gas stations. She walks so slowly that you’ll see her as you pass on some errand and then see her on your way back - walking in the same direction. You have to kind of admire people like this for still making the walk despite what age has done to their bodies.
Anyway, in this case, the man walked from a house further north on our street to the liquor store across from our house. Every time we saw him shuffle by at his snail’s pace, Andrea and I both wanted to talk to him, though Andrea was a little bit creeped out by the way he seemed sometimes to stare at our house as if scrutinizing each little change we’ve made. Then one day as I was out on the front porch, the man stopped and barked across the front yard, “Who did those windows?” (He was referring to some glass block windows we’d just had installed on a small outbuilding on our property.) I answered cordially enough, and he told me that the person who did it knew what they were doing. Before I had a chance to ask him how we knew that, he dropped the bombshell that would instantly change our relationship:
“You know, I built that building.”
Which explained the staring. The cute old man introduced himself as “Frank” and went on to explain how he knew the original owners of our 1900-built house. He lived down the street as successive generations of the family lived here, and at some point, in the 70s I think, he was asked to do the masonry work on the little outbuilding.
From that point on, every time Frank would walk by and see us outside he’d say hi. Sometimes, I confess, we’d see him coming and go out just to be able to chat. We’re new to the neighborhood, and making friends and hearing all the history from someone who’s lived here his entire life gave us a nice feeling of some kind of torch being passed or something, some kind of approval of our presence here. What further endeared us to Frank was the fact that his old house down the street is situated just like ours, in a place where developers are extremely hungry to tear down and build more yuppie condos or parking lots. (”Bulldozer bacon” was the term reportedly used by one local developer to describe the place we call home.) As we’ve been fixing up our house, we’ve been inspired by our relationship with someone who’s stubbornly stayed here and grown old before us. And one time, literally as we were fixing up our house, re-roofing the building he built, sweat and roofing tar pouring off our bodies, we were reassured by Frank’s approving smile and the words he shouted up to us, which have been with us for every project since then: “Little by little, one step at a time.”
And just the other week, we finally stopped by his house as we walked by. We were invited in and treated to an earful of stories about the neighborhood with Frank’s nephew Vince and his neighbor Kathy. Frank was ill and mostly listened from under the blanket draped across his recliner. As we left that day, we resolved to return again soon with a freshly baked pie or something.
But a few weeks later, before we had a chance to visit him again, Frank P. Defelippi died. Neighbor Kathy told us that the illness he’d been suffering from led to surgery with some unforseeable complications. The Ann Arbor News obituary is here.
The service at St. Thomas this morning was nice, though I felt like everyone there was wondering who the young guy in the back getting all misty was. It’s stupid, I didn’t really know the guy, but he meant a lot. So I thought I’d write this post in memory of Frank - the cute old man who walked by our house, or stopped and said hello; the mason who built our outbuilding; a link to the past of our home and our neighborhood; and Ann Arbor’s ultimate townie, who lived here his entire life and as everything around him changed still mustered the will to take his walk to the corner store, right up until the end. Rest in peace, Frank. We’ll make our walk just the way you did, “little by little, one step at a time.”
I was still a little hungry after we came home from dinner tonight, so I went to the kitchen and fixed myself a little bread with peanut butter. Andrea followed me in there and started inspecting the contents of the containers of leftovers in the fridge until she settled on a bowl of cantaloupe. But it was I, not she, who hadn’t gotten full from dinner. So after a few bites she had a moment of self-consciousness and frantically put the lid back on the bowl of cantaloupe. While doing so she burst out the following string of sentences in rapid succession: “Why am I eating?!…I’m eating because you are!…Why are you eating?!” I immediately recognized in her outburst a certain poetic quality, which I appreciated with an audible chuckle while finishing my bread. Only to realize, a few seconds later, that what she said had a specific syllabic structure. Thomas (our friend who writes the zine “Haiku A Day”), this little after-dinner snack is for you:
Last Sunday Andrea and I pulled an all-nighter in order to finish some very time-sensitive house renovations. At about 4 a.m. we had lights on all over the place as Andrea nailed in shoe molding and I painted window trim. We had the radio blaring so we could hear it throughout the house. (Our neighbors on both sides are businesses, so nobody sleeps there at night.)
At one point, I noticed through the window I was painting a bright light shining in our backyard. It seemed a little brighter than what might usually come from a car turning onto our street at night, but I dismissed it as someone driving with their brights on or just my having rarely looked out of that particular window at that time of night.
Suddenly I was jolted from my trim painting by a figure on the other side of the glass knocking and shining a flashlight. Yep, the police. A woman knocking, and a man looming behind in the shadows. I give the woman a quick “one second” gesture as I put down my brush and hurry to the side door.
“The music’s too loud, isn’t it?” I asked. The officer said no and asked if I or someone else was trying to break into the house. I replied that no, we’re just having a late work night. She said that someone out walking in the neighborhood had reported what appeared to be a break-in. Earlier we had been carrying furniture between the house and our storage shed and using multiple points of entry to avoid freshly stained floors, so it made sense. Since it was pretty obvious that I was telling the truth - they must have had a few minutes to watch us through the windows before knocking - the woman officer started to back away. But before she could turn around completely, the other officer stepped out from the shadows and asked “Is someone in there using a nail gun?”
That’s when it dawned on me that those lights I’d seen in the backyard some twenty minutes earlier were police search lights. The first officer to arrive must have heard what sounded like gunfire and waited for backup to begin a careful descent on our home. When I confirmed that yes, we were using a nail gun, he seemed a little disappointed.
Sure enough, when we looked out the front window after they left, there were several cars out on the street, ready for action.
ADDENDUM: Later that morning, the police got some action on another trip to our neighborhood to fish a dead body out of the Huron River. The detail of that story that everyone seems to concentrate on is that the woman who found the body apparently waded into the water to “hold onto the body” and prevent it from going over the dam until police arrived. Which raises a few questions: how far into the water did this woman have to wade to get to the body, exactly what kind of contact did her “holding” entail, and what extent of contact and wading distance would you go through to do the same thing she did?
Tim will soon write a post about our Valentine’s Day at White Castle. He will also probably take down this picture. But until then: UPDATE (by Tim): Yes, I’m weird about having pictures of my face on the blog, so I took down the picture. It’s still up at the White Castle Valentine’s Day site though. It seems Andrea was trying to force me to write about it by posting the picture, so it’s only fair…
Even though I’d heard from several people that White Castle did a special Valentine’s Day thing, I was still half expecting to be laughed at when I asked the lady on the phone from corporate for reservations. But sure enough, she asked me my location and confirmed that the Castle on Packard near Carpenter participated.
All I told Andrea was that we had reservations and that she should dress up. At a dinner earlier that week, some of her friends were impressed - “Ooh, how romantic.” I just sat there and grinned; it was a fun secret to have. That night, as we drove there dressed in our finest, my anticipation was bubbling over. I watched Andrea take careful notice of every turn we made, trying to figure out our destination. First to downtown, then back out towards Ypsi, to the southeast…Andrea wondered aloud what restaurants were down that way. I could barely contain myself.
Since I’ve never been to that White Castle, I got in the turn lane too late and missed the driveway. As I pulled into the adjacent vacuum store lot, Andrea said “For a second there I thought you were taking me to White Castle.” I said nothing and only studied the expression on her face as I maneuvered the car back around to the White Castle driveway. “You’re kidding, right? You’re kidding….”
When we entered, a hostess greeted us and asked if we had reservations. I said yes and gave my last name. Then we were led to our table and presented with a custom pink-colored menu with my name printed on it. Each table had a bouquet of fake roses and a candle on it. The partitions were adorned with more candles, roses, and greenery. Unfortunately, the florescent lights overhead could not be dimmed, or the restaurant would have looked closed from the street. I doubt they have a dimmer control anyway.
We ordered a few sliders and were treated to complimentary sparkling cider in plastic wine glasses and chocolate cupcakes. The service was excellent. Andrea joked with one of our servers something about having to do this every day, and she replied under her breath, “Girl, you don’t even know…” or something to that effect. (I left a tip before we left.)
But you could tell everyone was having fun. There were cute old couples there and lots of red clothes. Since our reservation was during the last half-hour timeblock before regular Castle service resumed, towards the end some regular customers without reservations started trickling in. One man sat down next to us, bewildered. The staff gave him table service, and we heard him call someone on the phone and say “You won’t believe this….”
The manager came out and snapped the picture that I linked to above. He was friendly and excited, and just before we left we saw him posing with the rest of the staff for more pictures. It rounded out the nice feeling we had as we got into the car and drove home. A Valentine’s Day to remember.
Our stomachs certainly didn’t forget it the entire next day.
Last weekend, Andrea and I went shopping around for refrigerators. I say “shopping around” because at this early stage in our potential refrigerator consumption, we went to a big appliance mart intending more to see what was available than to actually purchase anything.
The young man who guided us around the showroom kept suggesting large refrigerators. Andrea’s immediate response was to open the door of each of these models, reach in vain for the top shelf, and say something like “See, no.” Our helper was moved to admit that he didn’t realize how much his wife asked him to reach things in their kitchen.
But even the shorter fridges with reachable top shelves had a capacity built for that kind of Y2K-stockpile mentality that seemed, we agreed, distinctly American. So it was fitting, but no less hilarious to us, when the appliance specialist answered our repeated requests for something smaller with the question “Did you guys live in Europe for a while or something?”
Later, when I did some searching online, I discovered that the internet replicates pretty well this man’s association of small-capacity refrigerators with Europe. (Though the more common term for 9-12 cubic foot refrigerators in the US is “apartment size”.)
Anyway. Learning the subtle semiotics of refrigerators while shopping around for refrigerators somewhat mitigates the fact that you’re shopping around for refrigerators. And for the record, we have not lived in Europe. We live alone, we like to eat fresh food, and we know that full refrigerators are more efficient than empty ones. And our kitchen is tiny.
1. Have you seen a shaved squirrel running around Ann Arbor? My dad got us a squirrel-proof feeder for Christmas, which was working well until the other day - I looked out and a fat squirrel had knocked the thing on the ground and was kind of sitting upright in the feeder and stuffing his face. Tim opened the door and yelled at him, and as the squirrel skittered away we noticed that he has some sort of weird reverse mohawk. I’m not sure if this was natural hair loss or if someone actually took a razor to the poor thing, but it looked unnatural.
2. The temperature is dropping as I type, but if Saturday happens to be warmish, you can anticipate a report on our resident groundhog, whom I refer to fondly as the Otter. This particular critter lives with his family in our backyard and I am completely willing to sacrifice his destruction of our already very rough and ugly backyard for his extraordinary psychic powers. He’s kind of a dumb one - if I open the back door to scold him for munching on our grass, he usually runs his tubby body behind a single stalk of weeds and “hides.” While I won’t be coaxing him out, or bringing Action News over, I’ll let you know what our groundhog says about winter (and you let me know if you have a good name for him.)
Why is it that people turn store names into possessives?
Here in southeast Michigan, it happens with a lot of grocery stores names. Meijer becomes “Meijer’s.” Kroger becomes “Kroger’s.” Farmer Jack becomes “Farmer Jack’s.” Even Kerrytown’s little Sparrow becomes “Sparrow’s,” (after owner Bob Sparrow). And it’s common to hear people say that they or someone they know works at “Ford’s.” It makes sense when a store’s name derives from a person’s name.
But it happens also with national chains like Blockbuster’s, Barnes and Noble’s, JCPenny’s, and even Wal Mart’s. Is it just easier for our little language-wired minds to talk/think about such huge, nebulous entities as if they had straightforward ownership and eponymic signifiers? Or are we masking something by making them sound more local, more mom-and-pop, more ours? (And is this why it always bothers me when I hear people call Buffalo Wild Wings “B-Dubs”?)
Sometimes a company will officially change its name to reflect the fact that so many people already make it possessive, as was the case with Friendly’s.
Othershavenoticedthisphenomenon, but its history and regionality haven’t been pinned down to my satisfaction. Is it really only a Midwestern thing? Or was it once a Southern thing? Which other stores do you know that get turned into possessives? And which don’t? And where? And why?
Yesterday on my way home from work I drove past this:
In a busy Midwestern college town, this has to happen to everyone at least once. The poor guy was clearing snow away from his car using only his hands. I felt kind of bad about taking the picture, and then I remembered that I’d thrown a shovel in my truck that morning in case the very same thing had happened to my work truck. So I pulled around the block and on my next pass called out “Want a shovel?” We made quick eye contact and he replied “I’m good.” Maybe he recognized me as the picture taker and interpreted my question as a taunt. Or maybe he had already resigned himself to that once-in-a-lifetime fate of being plowed in.
The other day my job led me to a place I’d never been before - the alley right next to the State Theater entrance. Some graffiti on the wall there announced a free concert at another alley in Ann Arbor, an alley with a name: Tripper’s Alley.
Tripper’s Alley is supposedly named for the longtime presence of brightly colored graffiti adorning almost every surface there and the habit psychotropic drug users may or may not actually have of walking around there while under the influence. It also echoes the name of Detroit’s famous Trapper’s Alley.
The alley mural began as a one-man project in the 1980s and became a popular spot for graffiti artists. The city took the spot over in 1999 by hiring artist Katherine Tombeau Cost to paint over the original mural and graffiti with a new 5,000-square-foot mural. The graffiti artists haven’t entirely relinquished their claim to it, meaning that Cost’s mural has been partially defaced…be sure to seek out the “trippers’” bubble gum wall toward the back.
Here’s what my friendly acquaintance and one-time poker competitor Josh had to say over at AnnArborIsOverrated:
…The mural alley was much, much cooler when it was graffiti murals instead of the commissioned bullshit that replaced it. Over the years, what had started as one guy’s graf had turned into a collaborative gallery, with no one painting over each other’s stuff- instead, they’d extend it further and further, like an exquisite corpse made of spray paint. To turn it into cartoon fun land really took a lot of the art out of it.
Anyway, I don’t really want to get too far into the merits of the current mural at that particular alley. What interests me is the general embracing of alleys as distinct places, or what it takes for alleys to have names.
What are some other alleys with names? Or what names should be given to other notable alleys in Ann Arbor? Off the top of my head, I can think of a few possible candidates: the Borders alley, with all those cover-less magazines to be found in the dumpsters and the big ant murals on the Maynard side; that alley - I can’t remember where exactly - with the horse stable mural painted over the garage door; the alley with the entrance to the 8 Ball; etc etc. Anyone care to chime in?
While you’re thinking, watch this video of someone doing fire poi in Tripper’s Alley:
