Both my wife and I are possessed of the need to own many notebooks and journals. And so, I learn, is my son. I pick up one and open it. On the first page he has written, “And now let us begin with a blessing . . .”
My son lives in Lansing, a few blocks north of the capital. Two blocks north of him is the former site of the Michigan School for the Blind, a once elegant building built in 1880 on forty-five acres of grounds. Since closing in 1994 the building has been repurposed for affordable senior housing. Young Stevland Hardaway Judkins was a student there. Better known as Stevie Wonder.
We go for a walk with my son’s friend Donnie and his four-year-old son Salem. We are at a Fitzgerald Park in Grand Ledge on the Grand River. Salem is confused when I am introduced. “Wait,” he says, “where is the son?”
“I am the son,” my son says.
Salem did not understand that sons could be adults, his hope for a playmate dashed.
The purpose of our hike, according to Salem, is to search for salamanders. Every time he overturns a rock in this effort we, both my son and I, are reminded of our summers in the high desert of the eastern Sierra. He and his brother were about Salem’s age. They searched tirelessly under the rocks for scorpions, often successfully. There are no salamanders this day but Salem seems undaunted that he doesn’t find any.
We are driving in a hard rain toward my mother’s house on Blue Lake. Just west of Mt. Pleasant M-20 crosses the Chippewa River I am jolted to attention. I recently had learned in Jim Harrison’s biography that this is the exact site of the car accident that killed Harrison’s beloved sister and father on November 21, 1962, the day before Thanksgiving. As far as I can tell, he never stopped grieving their deaths. “No one,” he once wrote, “ever gets over anything.”
Driving north toward Caberfae a ski area outside of Cadillac: An eagle picking at roadkill alongside the highway. A reminder: they’re scavengers.
My son doesn’t drink or keep alcohol at his house, so I asked to stop at a party store. In Michigan a party store is what the rest of the world calls a liquor store. My son adds a stash of candy to my adult beverage stash, including, oddly I thought, a couple packs of candy cigarettes. I remember them from long-ago Halloweens, but was surprised to see they are still being made. Curiously, the sight of these candy cigarettes engages the cashier, an Indian man with a very thick black beard. He begins telling us about his young son trying to smoke candy cigarettes. “And I said to him,” the cashier says, “MOTHA FUCKA!” and he raises his hand to show he either whacked the kid or threatened to do so.
We were taken a back. I said, “This is my son.”
Such an odd, intimate encounter. When we got back to the car, my son said, “This is why I love Lansing.”
My son’s truck is drastically leaking transmission fluid onto the driveway. Repairing this–he does this kind of thing himself–requires days of parts locating and various gyrations now complicated by the fact that he has no working vehicle. As he comes close to finishing the repair we have to bicycle to the car parts store. This requires pumping air into the bike tires and cycling a couple miles through Old Towne with its occasional late patches of dirty snow and then alongside a freeway through a trash-strewn industrial wasteland.
My son returns from this outing, but a couple hours later another trip is required. My turn. The bike is undersized and awkward to pedal. The seat is misaligned and the tires have a slow leak.
When I get back with the transmission fluid I tell my son that all I could think of while I was riding was the music from the Wizard of Oz when the wicked lady has dog-napped Toto and has him in her bike’s basket.
“Exactly,” he says.
Since we are grounded in Lansing by the lack of a vehicle my son says we will take a long walk through Lansing.
“But you can’t wear that coat,” he says.
My coat, the only one I have brought, is some kind of North Face hybrid jacket. I wouldn’t consider it flashy in any way, but I guess the color, a greenish yellow, stands out a bit.
“This is a place where you don’t want to draw any attention to yourself,” he explains.
He finds an old work coat, a little greasy, not unlike the one he’s been wearing underneath his truck in the driveway.
The coat is oversized on me.
“Perfect,” he says.
On the ceremonial last day of the season many ski areas hold a “slush cup,” in which skiers build up speed toward a pond constructed for this purpose and attempt to ski across it to the other side without falling into the water. The pond is constructed such that success is highly unlikely. These events are typically sponsored by local beer distributors. We are at Schuss Mountain and the slush cup keeps people off the chairlifts. The rain keeps them off the lifts as well. We happen to be on a lift with a view of the actual slush cup event and see a man in an enormous eagle costume ski about halfway across the pond before he flops dramatically into the water. The crowd roars its approval. It’s the only attempt we see.
On the last day of my trip to Michigan we stop to visit my friend Eddie at the memory care home to which he is confined. “Confined” is how he sees it. But the truth is that he needs 24 hour a day care, otherwise he would wander off. We find Eddie walking with his sister and her dogs on a trail along a pond, a backwater of the Rouge River. We sit at some benches and take in gorgeous late winter weather. Eddie is quiet in the presence of his sister and my son, but when they give us a private moment he opens up about his frustrating existence as a person with almost no memories. It’s heartbreaking. Above the trees an eagle glides by. An eagle in Dearborn, Michigan. A first for me. It feels like a miraculous vision. Eddie’s memory most likely will not return, his self slipping into the recesses of his brain, almost impossible for him to access. But he remembers throwing snowballs at cars on Cherry Hill and running like hell to escape their enraged owners. And there’s an eagle in the sky over Dearborn. Any miracle might yet happen.
That invocation for a blessing? That was the blessing.
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