My family clock

Winding the clock was my Dad’s Sunday morning ritual, done while still in his pajamas. He’d already brought in the paper, had a smoke, and plugged in the Farberware coffee pot.  It’s an eight-day mantel clock that strikes the hours and dings the half hours.  Eight inches wide by twelve inches high. Decades of dust and polish have darkened its mahogany housing. 

My Dad opened its glass door by its brass rim or bezel and reached for the double end key that lay on the top of the clock.  He inserted the larger end of the key first into the shaft on the right side of the face, just under the number 4.  This wound the hours. Then he moved the key over and inserted it into the shaft on the left, under the number 8, winding the hour strike and the half hour chime. Gently, but deliberately. Not too tight---that could be fatal.  You never want to wind a clock too tight, everyone said. 

Then my Dad padded over to the black telephone in the far corner of the dining room and dialed “Time.” “At the sound of the tone, the time will be  . . . .  and thirty seconds.”  He returned and nudged the hour and minute hands into place.  The smaller end of the key could be used in a tiny pinhole in the center of the clock face---to adjust if the clock ran too fast or too slow.  That would be determined later in the week. 

He snapped the glass door shut and then gently tilted the clock to the left, setting the pendulum in motion. The tick always began. Then, just as deliberately, he returned to his chair---the sections of the paper rustled slightly and slid a bit under his slippers.  He lit a second cigarette.   Ready for another week.  

The clock is a centenarian. Manufactured by Seth Thomas who, come to find out, was a promoter of  mass production for clocks in the nineteenth century.  Clock factories were big in Connecticut and Massachusetts. Kept the industrial North running on time. 

The clock is in my house now.  My Dad’s handwriting in pencil on the back of the clock reads:  “Windsor So 10072.” Maybe a model number? No idea. The brass bezel around its glass door is tarnished. But the black Arabic numbers are still graceful against the yellowed, creamy enamel surface of its face.  I checked on eBay and found a dead-ringer going for $125. Its shiny rosewood housing surely refinished. In Flint, Gunther Gerholz found me an additional key.  I felt prepared for the future, but then Gunther’s shop closed.  We are on our own now. 

Nothing in my parents’ house was new or “store bought.” Most objects had a point of origin that provided a name. Enhanced the object in a child’s imagination.  My family called this mantel clock “the Coughlan clock.” The back story was that it had been a wedding gift to my father’s uncle, Timothy Michael Coughlan, a Lieutenant-Colonel in the U.S. Cavalry.  Around 1900 Timothy Michael married Helen Gardner.  Someone gifted the couple with this mantel clock, evidently an appropriate gift for a new household. Kept domestic life orderly. 

Colonel Coughlan served in the Great War.  Afterward, the Army established regional Corps Areas across the country to facilitate future national mobilizations. Colonel Coughlan belonged to the Artillery Group, 9th Corps Area, headquartered at the Presidio of San Francisco. Perhaps he had ambitions; he wrote a pamphlet entitled, “Mobilization in Retrospect,” bound in simulated leather and printed at his own expense in 1926. His family, now with four daughters, lived near the Presidio in the Richmond district in a three-story house on 16^th Avenue. Someone snapped my first baby picture on its stoop. Leaning over me is Aunt Helen, in a long-sleeved black dress, a strand of pearls dangling, the marcelled waves of her short gray hair to the camera. 

The clock must have been in the living room of that house, though I don’t recall it there.  Every year, my two cousins and I spent family Christmas celebrations roaming its upstairs floors. I remember a Prussian spiked helmet and a saber that tumbled out of a closet.  A panoramic photograph of a mounted cavalry regiment stretched across a bedroom wall.  A sewing room lined with windows that was still used. Bibelots from China, supposedly shipped home in a camphor chest after the Boxer Rebellion in 1900. 

We kids ate our Christmas dinner in the breakfast room off the kitchen.  An aproned Black maid specially hired for the holiday served us turkey and grits. The grown-ups milled around the dining room; tap, swoosh, thwack went the swinging pantry doors as parents, aunts, and uncles refilled endless cocktails.  One year the turkey hit the kitchen floor, my mother said later. 

When Aunt Helen died, the last of the family belongings---long since jumbled into an apartment---were parceled out. In the 1960s suburbs with wall to wall carpeting and pastel refrigerators, who wanted an old clock you had to wind?  My Dad claimed it. He placed it on the left side of the fireplace mantel in our living room.

I carried the clock back to Michigan on a plane, swaddled in towels, in a canvas bag resting on my lap. Now it stands on the left side of my fireplace mantel.  In the beginning, I was afraid of the clock, of the dreaded “winding it too tight.”  But I’ve learned the feel of the tension, when the turns of the key have stored just enough energy to carry the mechanism through the week.  I’ve grown into the task, it seems, inherited a satisfying Sunday ritual, a weekly recollection---timely, you might say, since all the religious ones have lost their hold and fallen away.  

The strike may startle if you’ve not lived with a clock that has a mechanical movement. Overnight guests are forewarned. In this century’s electronic soundscape, its clear tone is distinctive.   In bed, I often hear the clock striking---first two, then three am; the chime floats across the darkness, separating the sections of the night, assigning each hour its number. I’m hearing the same sound heard by my dead but once sleepless parents and a generation before them as well.  If it’s Saturday night and the strikes seem slow, well, tomorrow will be time for the morning ritual.  

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How I learned to love stories

“Jesus Christ!”  I said---with heavy intonation on the first syllable.  “Jee-zus.“  I had hit the dashboard and then crumpled to the floorboard of the car.  It was a 1940’s Chevy coupe, creamy beige with a red pin stripe along the sides. Tweedy tan upholstery with slender black and red threads pressed into my face.  I was six years old. 

My mother was driving and must have slammed the brakes.  No seat belts and I was small. Not that I really remember the event, but the story was repeated so often and I knew the context so well.  It was 1951 and before growth of full-time life in the suburbs.  My mother often drove into the city (San Francisco) from the small town north of the Golden Gate Bridge where we lived.  Medical appointments on Sutter or Post Streets.  Window shopping around Union Square.  A trip to the city entailed hat and gloves, some kind of coat.  Clothing that all went together, planned for an urban appearance.   Appropriate for walking on sidewalks (no sidewalks out in the unincorporated part of the county where we lived).   Old Kodaks show me in a gray and white checked coat and matching hat that my mother had sewed.  And white gloves.

What always embarrassed me when this story was recounted was my spirited and easy usurpation of adult behavior.  I must have been stunned.   My head must have hurt.  Mortified in a child way to have fallen off the passenger seat in my best clothes.

My dad swore.  That’s where my startling profanity came from.   He was from New York and Irish.  A born story-teller.  Expletives regularly erupted in my dad’s language, but their range was circumscribed.  It was all theological:  “Jesus Christ,” “Jesus H. Christ,” “hell,” “damn it,” “God damn it.”  Calibrated to the occasion and never casual.  I don’t recall ever hearing him use scatological terms.  Words like “shit” or “fuck” were unthinkably vulgar.  I never learned those words until much later, in the 1960s.  

My outburst of juvenile impiety took its place on the roster of family stories.  Storytelling was important in my family.   Dinner party conversation depended on stories.  I listened.  Partially grasped words and events stretched out as if along a tightrope of suspense.  The narrator---like an acrobat, red parasol in hand--- teetered step over step, the end just in sight.  I watched the grown-ups as any weave or wobble in the narrative elicited a flutter of surprise, a gasp , or groan.  I relished the listeners’ visible anticipation---what would happen?  Development, digression, denouement, and the devious pleasure of irony, seeped into my young understanding. 

Stories held other pleasures too, I learned.   The real secret of my father’s influence was not his firecracker profanity.  It was stories he told to me at bedtime.  My father’s stories always inched their way to a hilarious climax which I anticipated with a shiver of excitement no matter how many times I had heard them.  “Tell me the one about camp,” I’d beg.  The story about camp hinged on a description of my doting New York City grandmother packing trunks for my dad Frank and his younger brother, Howard---an uncle whom I’d never met.  The two grade school boys were sent off somewhere in upstate New York for the entire summer.  Two months’ worth of clothes and socks, underwear, plus two-piece jersey swimsuits---all in neat stacks. It was the late 1920s. Camp was a ritual for city families.  For me, a kid in California, the whole idea conjured up an exotic world:  the customs of the urban East where children were dispatched annually to the countryside. 

The boys were shipped off with their trunks, as the story went.  The only activities at camp recalled in my dad’s telling were swimming in a lake and baseball.  Digressions featured my dad’s mimicking his younger brother Howard’s whining falsetto.  “Frankie’s trying to drown me!”  “Frankie’s pitching me bean balls!”  “Frankie’s trying to kill me!”  Of food, counselors, or any edifying activities, nothing.  Just two skinny city boys playing in the sunshine until exhaustion.  An older boy brushing off his younger brother always trailing along---“Aw, Howie, don’t be a pest.”  My dad’s sole reference to the wonders of nature was that the constant whir of crickets kept him awake at night.

The denouement in the camp story was the boys’ return to the city.  My devoted grandmother who had packed the trunks with such care opened my Uncle Howard’s trunk (dramatic pause):  empty---except for one old shoe and a tree stump.  No description of what was in my father’s trunk.  This story was entirely at the expense of the pest.  

My father’s stories were a special good night ritual.  He did not tell them every night, or even very often, as I remember.  Whatever were the exceptional occasions for them, I don’t know any longer. But I can see the outline of my Father on the edge of the bed, on my left side.  I can see the bed’s frame, a Jenny Lind style spooled bedstead.  My father’s face is a shadow; I cannot see his features.  But the lake glistening in summer sunshine, the shouts of the boys, a distant baseball diamond, and the empty trunk are all there.

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Community debate: moving the Flint Farmers' Market

Twelve Truisms about Moving
with gratitude to Sheldon Kopp’s Eschatological Laundry List

1.     Moving is hard

2.     It could have been done sooner

3.     Fear was part of it, from beginning to end

4.     Habit is comforting

5.     After two months, new habits developed

6.     Friends who were against the move got used to it

7.     New friends appeared

8.     Some places I left did not improve

9.      Other places I left look better now

10.     Even moves not of my own choosing turned out well anyway

11.     All the consequences of either staying or moving could not be known in advance

12.     Over time, fewer people shared my nostalgia; some moved, others died.

 Read more about the Farmers' Market controversy at http://eastvillagemagazine.org/

Harbor Freight

My partner Dennis is an inveterate jerry-rigger.  You know what a jerry-rig is---a quick, temporary fix that sometimes ends up being permanent.  Like, when the lever on the electric tea-kettle breaks off, you just insert a chopstick.  Works perfectly.  Economical; saves a trip to Target.  Of course, you are one chopstick short for your bowls of rice, but that won’t emerge until much later.  

Jerry-riggers rely on many bits and pieces of stuff for quick fixes---usually sorted into canning jars and loose tea tins that line the back of the workbench in the basement.  But when these riches fail, Dennis reluctantly yields to the last resort: the hardware store.

Dennis used to run to Gill-Roy’s, but the closest one---on Flushing Road---closed.  Not enough business, the staff said.  Property values declined, people stopped fixing things up.  So Dennis found a new hang-out: Harbor Freight.

Harbor Freight Tools is the working persons’ tool and equipment go-to place.  It was founded in 1977 as a catalog company.  It’s still family owned (according to their website).   “At a time when average folks need to stretch their dollars as far as possible, you can count on Harbor Freight Tools to continue to deliver on our founding commitment. Every day we deliver exceptional quality tools at ridiculously low prices.”

Flint’s Harbor Freight is completely average and very dollar stretching.  It’s not the usual place for suburban weekend do-it-yourselfers.  Sometimes you’ll see them---probably sent over from the big box stores.  They look dazed and desperate as they realize they’ve entered vise and drill press land.  

Surprisingly, the Flint store is very female.   Of course, you see a lot of women in Home Depot and Lowes.  They are selecting paint colors or lighting, or bathroom fixtures.  At Harbor Freight women roam the drill bit aisles.  And what’s more, women---middle-aged women---are on the floor helping them with real tools.  Maybe years back they would have worked in the shop.  Today they work at Harbor Freight.

Compared to Home Depot or Lowes, the Harbor Freight store is small.  So small that if I call out to Dennis, he’ll hear me.   The aisles are narrow and the shelves tightly packed.  No bulky ten- foot platform ladders here.   A woman in her fifties girdled in a padded back support belt with suspenders is helping Dennis.  Her name tag says “Patti.” They stand at a side wall that’s lined with drills and circular saws.  I’m sitting on a low stack of wooden dollies.  Dennis ponders an 18 volt 3/8” cordless drill/driver versus a drill/driver that plugs in.  He says he wants the consistent power that comes with a plug in. But the cordless gives you short-time power that’s flexible.  Then, again, the plug in would need an extension cord . . .  They move along the wall; Patti drags her hand lightly across the boxes as she goes.  According to Patti, her husband favored the plug in too, but then it wasn’t handy when he needed it in hard places.  “That’s what I told him,” says Patti.  “So what’s the use of all that power anyway?”   Dennis goes for the cordless.  Patti has won.   

We go to check out.  Now comes the deal: super coupons for free items---tape measures, scissors, and small flashlights.  I have to choose.  We already have a couple of tape measures and several pairs of scissors.  I go for the flashlight; maybe we’ll have a dinner party and use them as favors. 

In Los Angeles we go to Harbor Freight too.  This one’s in Lomita, a small city in LA County that straddles Pacific Coast Highway as it winds along toward Long Beach.   Dennis needs a digital multi-meter, and then maybe some bungee cords, and there’s a bench brush on sale. Clutching his list and a sheaf of Harbor Freight ads, Dennis forges ahead.  Meantime, I hold open the front door for an older woman in glasses with a gray Dutch cut.  She pushes a cart full of stuff toward the parking lot, the crumpled tails of her checked flannel shirt flapping below her old sweat shirt.

Like the Flint store, this Harbor Freight has its own local flavor.  The Lomita mix---white, Hispanic and Latino, Asian, Native American, Black, and Pacific Islander---roams the aisles.   Young Hispanic women stock shelves, or dart into the storeroom.  Young Mexican guys in A-shirts reach top shelves with tattoo-covered arms.  Middle-aged bikers, their gray hair pulled into thin pony tails, cluster in the automotive section.  A tall, elderly white-haired man, so thin that his leather belt holds up his pants in large gathers, confers with his wife, as he methodically turns the 24 pages of ads in the monthly savings book. 

The signs over the aisles are bi-lingual.  I stand with my head tilted back and sound out “cabrestantes” (winches) and “destornilladores” (screwdrivers).   A substantial Spanish vocabulary winds around the predictable layout: power tools, bench top tools, through clasps and clamps (woodworking), to abrasives and hammers, wrenches and sockets, pliers and screwdrivers, and measuring tools.  There’s a small section of odd garden tools.  “Home Accessories” contains a wheelchair and a walker. 

At the cash register the clerk rings up customers in English and answers the phone in Spanish.   She breaks in mid-sentence to offer Dennis an Inside Track Club membership.  Everyday he’d get a new product coupon.  I panic; he declines.  

Some friends tell me Harbor Freight stuff is crap.  But at my age, a life-time warranty holds no allure.  In contrast, entertainment is priceless.  Last year toward the end of summer Dennis came home with battery powered  fly swatter he’d gotten on sale for $3.99 (reg. $7.99).  We sat on the porch in a warm twilight sipping margaritas and swinging at mosquitoes.  Can’t beat Harbor Freight.

Read more essays like this one in East Village Magazine at http://eastvillagemagazine.org/

My Mother’s Body

The lilac in my back yard bloomed this spring for the first time since I planted it about ten years ago. In one of my early gardening attempts, I placed it on the north side of the house and too close to the foundation.  It struggled, slow growing in its sun-deprived location.  One of those plantings that should have been removed early, the longer it survived the more misbegotten it looked. It was too strong to pull out.  Each season its woody stems got taller, but its three or four branches produced only large leaves that progressed from light green to a dark, waxy green in summer.  A disappointing syringa vulgaris. My mother had been alive when the lilac went into the ground.   She died at age 91 and has been dead for four years.  And now the surprise: three clusters of blossoms have bloomed at the top of the bush where it grazes the second story---its flowers too high to reach and cut.

Other startling things happened this year.  Getting in to the shower I looked down to see my mother’s thighs. I stared, puzzled at the slack, narrow folds of flesh and the skin with a cross-hatch surface.  The body is mine, but I last saw the flaccid rippled flesh on my mother when I bathed her. Sharp-eyed mavens of female aging term such skin “crapey”.  Can this textile metaphor be apt?  I pinch the skin together in my hands and ponder.  The materials I knew as wool or silk crape made wonderful garments.  The women in my family sewed and they valued crape.  With its soft, submissive hand, the material follows the shape of the body line, comforts the flesh and bones beneath.  In silk the fabric’s complex weave does produce a crimpy surface, but I hadn’t noticed.  


I’ve gotten side-tracked from the shower and sit on the side of the tub, transfixed by my corporeality.  At the tips of my fingers I see my grandmother’s fingernails, narrow and ridged.  I grew up with my grandmother and with the curiosity of a child I observed the details of her body never thinking of it as prophetic of my own.  The ring finger on my left hand crooks slightly sideways as I remember hers did when she was old.  She’s come back to me now, fifty years after her death.  She is in my body, this body which now is becoming the body of my female elders---those to whom I was subordinate, those whom I admired and sometimes feared, those about whom I was curious, and those whom in the 1960s I could disdain.  I am them.

Come six o’clock I’ll raise a large goblet and toast these women and their bodies with red wine.  My mother's drink was scotch.  She wasn’t a connoisseur, but had moved from Dewar’s to Johnny Walker Red.  In the evening she’d pour a couple of fingers and say, at age 86, "I deserve it."  This expression repelled and puzzled me.  A year later, we moved it all---scotch bottles and “Old Fashioned” glasses, along with the chests, pictures, rugs, and clothes.  We crammed it into her one-bedroom apartment in an assisted living complex.  But suddenly the taste for liquor was gone, she said, surprised herself that this long habit of the cocktail hour---the reward of the day---had disappeared and she hardly missed it. 

My grandmother was from Kentucky and drank bourbon.  She said that the tradition was “bourbon and branch water,” a strange expression and the kind of odd phrase an observant child recalls.  Later I learned that branch water meant water from the distillery’s stream that kept the taste of the bourbon pure.  She lived to be 88 and I don’t know when bourbon stopped tasting good to her or reminding her of the South. 


My red wine libation is gentler, especially its lighter variants of pinots, Grenaches, and Syrahs.  Reassured by the diet and health experts that a daily glass is salutary, I measure the pour:  6 ounces is generous, 4 is scant.  I try to hit 5.  If I drink two glasses, the bottles go fast.  A friend is crafting a tray made of wine corks, so I feel helpful as another bottle hits the trash.  For a brief hour or so, my joints and muscles ease.  I remember my mother and grandmother with kindness.


If I am like my mother and grandmother, some twenty-five more years of life are ahead.  I’ve landed in new terrain.  As in a dream I grope intuitively among familiar details that combine strangely with foreign elements.  Like a traveler, I’ve grabbed a guidebook for the major monuments---essays and news reports on age and aging in the New York Times.  Cognizant of a major reader cohort, some Times features reassure an audience purportedly still young---the fifty, sixty, and seventy-year old well-fed and well-educated Americans.  Believers in a “shining future” promised by scientifically supported regimens of exercise, diet, and spirituality.   Relentlessly optimistic.  Other essays are darker. How to obtain care for elderly parents, deal with Alzheimer’s and cancer, broach end of life decisions? Accustomed to a sense of competence, readers seem shocked by the demands of the ancient human family.  Their online comments describe frustration and confusion with these tasks.  Worse, in the shadow of assisting our elders, we touch situations that will engulf us in a few decades.  


Grim. But the mothers in my body signal something else.  They tell me that they are there and powerful.  The burden of responsibility for my mother’s last years of life---once so heavy---has floated away, just like her taste for Johnny Walker.  Now she and my grandmother return in the startling efflorescence of an ordinary lilac, just at the time their genetic traces transform my body. Maybe a reminder of the admirable persistence of life in unappreciated and expected forms.  

 Read more personal essays in East Village Magazine at http://eastvillagemagazine.org/

The Happiness Light

Until recently I relied what I called my ”happiness light."  It's a faux Asian lamp that sits on an authentic Japanese tansu chest in my dining room. Sipping tea on gray winter mornings I gaze into its milky glow; my spirits lift. It requires a special- sized light bulb.  I have to trek to Wynn's Lighting on South Saginaw Street to buy it.  This is a business that knows the power of light, the emotional atmosphere that just the right light can create.  Entering their showroom floor I raise my face into a cathedral of light. Radiance from hundreds of fixtures washes over me. Electric heaven.  Once, years ago, my mother wanted to replace a lampshade for a treasured 1940s lamp. Sure enough, Wynn's had a decent replica.  The “happiness light” doesn’t have a lampshade.  Its milky glow comes from a glass cover around the globe.  I found that in Wynn’s downstairs storage area where rows of  plank shelving  hold hundreds of replacement globes for lighting fixtures used in wealthy Flint homes going back to the 1920s.

Light is powerful and I need a lot of it.  For many years I thought I had a tendency toward depression.  It began in adolescence and never completely abated.  Over the next several decades it returned, the predictable sequel to other emotional events.   Growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area I’d lived with overcast skies almost year round.  Then there was the fog.  Forget Sandburg’s “little cat feet.” [1]  Fog rolls over you in huge, lumbering bales.  Bay Area natives would often say that it “burns off,” by noon; true, but then it returned like a damp shroud in evening.  I wakened to it, drove through it, went to sleep with it.  I walked in it and drank in it.  Forget the smoky atmosphere of 1940s black and white spy movies or the romantic nineteenth-century London of Sherlock Holmes.  For me, fog turned out to be a downer.

My susceptibility to depression is partially inherited.  My mother characterized her own moodiness as bi-polar disorder.  I’m not sure that was true, although one of her nephews was diagnosed with schizophrenia and ultimately committed suicide.  My emotional depression was incomparably milder, but it was persistent.  In my twenties and thirties it was just endless apologies to friends for being “down,“ short-term counseling in really rough periods.  By my fifties, some mild meds were in order.  Then I moved to Michigan.  Here the natives grouse about the grayness of winter.  Worse than the cold, they say, as they pack for Florida. 

The Midwest seasons helped, however.  In summer, it seemed I had no problem.  Even the warm nighttime stillness was pleasurable.  At least half the year was pretty good.  You had time to prepare for the oncoming gloom.  In the early years I’ve lived in Michigan, the 1990s, we seemed to have some winters with heavy snowstorms---snow days for school, the sound of sledding on nearby hills in bright sun.  So much snow that even the depressives were distracted.   In between blizzards, I was still struggling, experimenting with medication and boring my friends with symptoms.  Our winters grew milder, warmer, and grayer.

In a 2009 essay in New York Times, Olivia Judson surveys the applications of chronotherapy (http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/22/enter-the-chronotherapists/ ) Her notes reference an array of studies on the relationships between circadian rhythms and obesity, cancer, hormones, and psychiatric disorders.  That last one got me. By now, “seasonal affective disorder” had been in the news for nearly two decades.  Following my circadian rhythms might be good for my health, but what good would it do to become a healthy depressive?  I began to read about emotional calendars.   And that’s how I found chronotherapy, or as they say online, the "manipulations of biological rhythms and sleep” in order to adjust the effects of light and melatonin. 

Columbia University seems to be a nexus for the light people.  Its Center for Light Treatment and Biological Rhythms offers chronotherapeutics ---“a novel set of biological rhythm correction procedures.”  The procedures are used not only to establish normal sleep patterns, but also to “relieve winter depression (seasonal affective disorder, or SAD, or the milder winter doldrums or winter blues)” and “alleviate symptoms of unipolar and bipolar depression, whether or not the depression is seasonal.” (http://columbiapsychiatry.org/clinicalservices/light-treatment-center).   Head of the Center, Dr. Michael Terman, Professor of Clinical Psychology in Psychiatry at Columbia, is also president of the international Center for Environmental Therapeutics (http://www.cet.org/).  My problem is global. Latitudinally challenged confreres live across a band from 45 to 60 degrees North--- France; northern Italy; the Balkans, Ukraine; Kazakhstan; Uzbekistan; China; Mongolia; Hokkaidō, Japan; Ontario, Canada. I feel a bond with fellow American sufferers in the Pacific Northwest and New England.   I’ve woken up late, you might say, to this interest.  Groping intuitively over many years, in the dark, you might say, I discovered light.  No wonder the little Asian lamp was powerful. 

That’s how I got my light box.  It’s called a “Day-Light.”  It comes from "Uplift Technologies."  No surprise; it's made in Nova Scotia, Canada---home of fellow sufferers at 43 degrees North.  Its package alerted me that “Day-Lights" are “innovative light supply systems and are not listed medical devices in the USA."  Well, after some five decades of medically approved gambits, I am ready.  I sit at an arms-length distance of my “10,000LUX Bright Light” for a treatment time of 20 to 30 minutes in the morning. 

This year I've begun the light box early---the last week in October, before we went off daylight savings time.  Why wait until psychosis sets in?  An eerie, gray light comes through the clouds, watery and sunless.  At the ends of the tree branches the last leaves twist in air, amazingly still attached.  Their spinning silhouettes combine fragility with tenacity, a metaphor for my years of struggle.

Read more essays at  http://eastvillagemagazine.org/

---

[1] Carl Sandburg

The fog comes
on little cat feet.
It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches	5
and then moves on.

Feeling a little subprime

After the financial crisis of 2008 and the revelation that subprime mortgages were involved in the bubble, commentators intoned that we’ve just gone too far in America with everyone wanting to own their own home. This utter folly was attributed to (among others) George W. Bush.

When he came into office in 2002 he promoted an “ownership society” where owning a home would give people a stake in society.(1) Attractive to minorities, lucrative for big donors to the Republican Party and feasible for Wall Street under lax regulation, this was a “win-win” vision.

Then, lo! The financial debacle hit and exposed mortgage-backed securities — tranches of mortgages, bundles of bad loans to the highly unqualified new buyers. The shady subprime world was revealed.(2)

I’ve been following this drama. It’s infinitely more complex, riddled with arcane phrases and acronyms, packed with factors besides bad mortgages. Nothing rivets me to the TV screen like an interview with economists like Joseph Stiglitz or Paul Krugman. Or better yet, someone I can understand, like Sheila Bair.(3) And don’t get me started on the movies — Too Big to Fail, Margin Call or Inside Job.

I have a stake in this topic because I own a house that I love more than it’s worth. My love has grown as the market value has declined. It’s a healthy house from head to toe — with a new roof and a dry basement. Large windows face the sunrise. In its backyard I’ve learned how to grow roses that bloom from June to November.

In good weather my mother read for peaceful hours on its front porch, observed the school bus schedule, noted who got FedEx deliveries. And the house has a congenial setting — a neighborhood.

I’m new to the neighborhood idea. As a kid I lived on the hillsides of northern California. Only a few houses were visible. It was an unincorporated area, outside the city limits. Nobody lived “next door.” We had volunteer fire departments, septic tanks, dirt and gravel roads and sometimes in the summer, a random rattlesnake that a German Swiss neighbor killed with a shovel.

When you saw a neighbor, it was an emergency — for example, a finger severed with a scythe.

Later, I lived in a big city, on the top floor of a high-rise apartment building. I learned the nuances of nods and mumbles, the social forms appropriate to the elevator and the hallway.

After that, on Main Street in a small town. Everyone minded your business, knew what you bought at the local IGA, observed what you wore to church and commented on how you raised your kid. It seemed ingrown and insufferable.

Then, by accident, I came to live in Mott Park. But I didn’t understand its real value until the mortgage crisis of 2008.

The first Mott Park homes were built in 1921 along Flushing and Bagley streets. For the next decade houses went up along Frank, Dickinson and Monteith, then Altoona and Thomas. By 1933, private developers built Mott Park’s remaining homes, including those along Nolen Drive where the houses are larger and more architecturally complex and are situated on picturesque sites along the Flint River across from the Mott Park Golf Course.

Developers marketed these homes to the city’s elite by placing ads in society magazines. Varied building styles, curvilinear streets, public parks and many trees made the area attractive. Urban planning researchers have called Mott Park “a cornerstone American neighborhood community that represents the American dream.”(4)

Photos and reminiscences record this mid-20th century neighborhood in its heyday. Compiled by two former neighborhood residents, The Mott Park Chronicles shows happy 1950s families and children on the sidewalks going to nearby schools.(5) There’d be family car in the driveway (probably a Buick). It was a lifestyle of pride in ownership of a home that lasted several decades — precisely the years of President Bush’s youth.

When I bought a house in the neighborhood in 1995, the Fifties afterglow was still palpable, even though Flint had suffered in the decades-long decline of the auto industry. Now, 11 years later, in the wake of the 2008 mortgage and financial crisis, sharper signs of hardship mingle with new values and new ways.

Homeowners who could afford (and chose) to leave the neighborhood have moved away. Some left for typical reasons. Older folks retire. Even the dogs they used to walk die. Younger couples want better schools or more bedrooms as the kids grow up.

Others have left because of the unaddressed issues with crime and decline in safety enforcement. And still others were unable to keep their homes for financial reasons and simply abandoned them, increasing the number of vacant homes drastically.

On my walks I see that a house is suddenly empty. Through the glass of uncovered windows, rooms at the back of the house are visible. One week all seems normal. The next, people are just gone. How long did these people deliberate before decamping? Perhaps months of desperation were not visible to the Sunday walker.

Meantime, landlords looking to make a quick dollar and out-of-state investment companies have bought up homes in the neighborhood.

Already in 2008, 53 percent of homes were owned by investment companies, 29 percent were real estate owned and 16 percent were privately owned. Of those investors, 22 percent were out-of-state companies, 21 percent located in Michigan, 27 percent in Genesee County, 23 percent in Flint and 6 percent in Mott Park.(6)

My expectations have adjusted to reality. Fewer traditional property owners live here. New people live in a different world than those for whom these houses were built or the first generation of homeowners that followed them. New residents surely enjoy the freedom, fresh air and green expanses that still decent houses in a fairly good neighborhood provide.

But what former apartment dweller moves in with a lawnmower? The yard around the house, the paint and repairs are probably not the renters’ responsibility. Landlords do the minimum, often less. If people are buying on land contract, they can make payments, but not much more.

My unscientific calculation is that a single-family dwelling occupied by renters can last about two years before external decline becomes pronounced. A vacant house goes in a year. And some edges of the Mott Park neighborhood have gone beyond reclaiming.

A Genesee County Land Bank assessment charts the changing status of the neighborhood’s housing stock. A color-coded map of parcels rates the houses as good (rose), fair (pink), poor (violet), or structurally deficient (red).(7) You can see which properties the Land Bank owns and where the tax foreclosures are.(8)

I’m over the shock of the changes, visual ones mostly, and the loss of property value. I’ve discovered something else that seems to matter more. It’s tied to the neighborhood, just a bunch of people all in the same residential life boat. They have grit, like the workers who first lived in Mott Park. The Neighborhood Association is indefatigable. Its members trek on.

For five years or more, members have conducted monthly recycling that raises money to repair the park playground and patch the asphalt on the tennis courts. Volunteers hang new nets and repair fencing. Gardeners plant the neighborhood’s flower beds.

Another neighborhood group has incorporated as the Golf Course Association, a nonprofit to seek grants to maintain the golf course. A small grant funded a “neat street” project where residents adopt a street to keep free of trash. Joining Genesee County’s Little Free Libraries, Mott Park residents constructed four little libraries for kids in the neighborhood.(9)

In October about 30 volunteers from Kettering University, Calvary United Methodist and Mott Park residents joined forces to clean up the alleys behind Joliet and Chevrolet, as well as Bagley, Perry, Dupont and the surrounding areas. The Flint sanitation division helped by picking up an enormous trash pile.

The neighborhood’s Facebook page that holds all these efforts together shows how creative and energetic these neighborhood people are. Many are young, new to the neighborhood, and they have children.

When I drive through other distinctive neighborhoods in Flint, I’m amazed at how solid they still seem, those larger and more imposing houses of the College and Cultural Center or Woodcroft. My eye is canny, however. I know how much change can be hidden. Friends in those neighborhoods worry too.

The mortgage and financial crisis of 2008 on top of two decades of urban collapse has affected all Flint neighborhoods. As for Mott Park, the year 2019 will mark the centennial of its founding, of a historic commitment to the workers of America’s automotive industry. That industry and its workers are mostly gone, but much of their housing survives.

And the people in those homes are not subprime at all. 

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(1) Jo Becker, Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Stephen Labaton, “Bush drive for home ownership fueled housing bubble,” New York Times, December 21, 2008.

(2) After a two-year investigation by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigation, their report, Wall Street and the Financial Crisis: Anatomy of a Financial Collapse, was released in April 2011. It’s a free download on Kindle.

(3) Chairperson of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), 2006-2011.

(4) “Reclaiming the Neighborhood: Addressing Vacant Homes in Mott Park”. Prepared by Tara AuBuchon & Krista Trout-Edwards, University of Michigan Urban and Regional Planning. May 2009. As cited in Susan Burhans, “Mott Park Neighborhood Stabilization Plan,” Oct. 2, 2012.

(5) Cathy Snyder, ed. Mott Park Chronicles. The Story of an American Neighborhood. Historic Photos and Memories of Life in Flint, Michigan, 1908-2009 (Grand Blanc, MI: Grand Blanc Printing Company, 2009).

(6) Vacant Properties Survey; June – August 2008; City of Flint Assessor’s web site (Aug. 31, 2008), as cited in Susan Burhans, “Mott Park Neighborhood Stabilization Plan” [working document], Oct. 2, 2012.

(7) Genesee County Land Bank, Mott Park Housing Condition Assessment 2012, Nov. 7, 2012.

(8) The Land Bank owns five properties in Mott Park: two have been completed rehabbed; two have rehab in progress, and one is a pending sale. Buyers just need to qualify for a mortgage. The payments are cheaper than rent. See http://www.thelandbank.org/ Accessed Nov. 2, 2012. The Land Bank was established in 2002 after a 1999 Michigan tax law change.

(9) See https://www.facebook.com/MottParkLittleFreeLibrary. Accessed Nov. 8, 2012.

Read more essays like this in East Village Magazine at http://www.eastvillagemagazine.org/