trampled oct 3rd 2017

pictures will be added later.

so will my story of asking ford to stop working 15 hours a day.

what a mess. we kept hoping things would get better, and things have just continually gotten worse. the clouds of dust have been persistent for the entire summer. we've had so little rain. the neighbors have actually complained about the dust on their cars and homes each day. i've watched families flee from the park when huge dust clouds suddenly overtake the area.

of course - i emailed ford and they said they would use more water and more street sweepers. there are still huge clouds of dust.

there is billowing smoke from welding on any given floor - 5 floors of parking deck are in front of the house now. it's huge and ugly. the mechanical building at the end of the block has been sided - it is huge and light grey - and ugly. every new building is so naked and exposed and ugly. such a shame.

the geese fly over and have no where to stop - there used to be so many of them. but the wetlands are gone and the forest is gone and they honk but don't stay.


we've had rumbling for months. we've had house trembling for months. we have damage for sure. and then, about ten days ago, we were woken up to an incredible roller coaster of shocks through the house. bang! a big digger would smash into the ground on the other side of the ring road and then our house would shake. over and over. it was nauseating. then we started hearing new noises in our basement that we had not heard before. loud knocking - as if someone was outside our basement walls, knocking on them with something dense enough to send sound through cinder blocks.

for the first time ever, carl emailed fordland. he used all caps. he wanted to know what the hell was going on. that was monday, sept 25th. on the morning of tuesday, sept 26th, i received a phone call from a fordland dcampus representative. the poor thing - i felt bad that they made her call me. she said first that she wanted to thank me for emailing about the tree issue (will explain later) and secondly that my email about the new basement noises needed a response. she said it seemed the crew had found an old school foundation in the area they were digging for the new sewer line (8 foot in diameter cement sewer pipes being put in the ground all along the path of the yet to be expanded ring road) and that the old foundation would be removed in the near future so the project of sewer line could be finished.

i broke down in tears. i started telling her about how scary it was to live here through all of this house shaking, about how terrifying it is to be in the house when it happens, about how many months of noise and dirt and lost sleep we have already had and how our walls are cracked and that my family really could not take anymore of this. she apolagised repeatedly, and said hopefully the current disruption would be done in a few days.

found an old school foundation - duh. for bought the land edison school was on in the 80s, and ford knocked the school down, pewabic tile and all, and hauled it all away. much to the dismay of many residents who had gone to school there. of course ford knew it was on their land - they bought the damn thing and ruined it themselves. now they were trying to act all surprised that once upon a time some building had been there. so many lies.

i sat down and emailed fordland, and dcampus, and joe vicari, and the mayor, and james murray (who is in charge of parks, but i was thinking of him and his brother barry as the same person) and i wrote about how months of our lives have been ruined and our house has been damaged and it's been awful to live through this. i mentioned how ford kept saying they would not help with damages and yet our house clearly was suffering, and that i wanted to know what were they going to do to keep my family safe?


the house kept shaking. through last friday - the house kept shaking.


i had a city function on thursday night - part of a series to focus on dearborn as a whole and the people in it who have started their own businesses. i was part of a panel discussion on why i chose dearborn, what it's like to run a biz, and what sorts of things would make our city better to do biz in. before the panel discussion started, barry murray came up to me to ask how i was doing, and to inquire about the construction. he said he had seen my latest email and wanted more information.

WHAT? no one from the city had been willing to discuss this with me before now. shocked, i proceeded to tell him who i was dealing with and how for 9 months i had been told by the dcampus email answering service that no damages would be covered by ford for this project. barry told me one of the guys i had been emailing had actually retired from the project. he asked me if i had been in touch with a certain person (and of course i do not remember the name, nor did i write it down - foolish of me), to which i replied no i did know who that was. he then asked me if ford had brought over monitors to place in my home to monitor any cracks or vibrations, and i said no. i explained to him that tall eric, who had just come from ann arbor at the beginning of the process, had told me that program was available in the very beginning, but that everyone else i spoke with after told me it was not available and i could not have monitors in my house. barry said that was not right. and i agreed.


i was in awe that anyone wanted to talk to me from the city. it was truly shocking. of course, i sent barry a very nice email on friday morning, asking him to please put me in touch with the proper people at ford to discuss all these issues, to share with me the email and name of the man he mentioned on thursday night. i am still waiting to hear back from barry. i wonder if i will.



saturday night, at 745pm, while working in the yard, leslie herrick stopped by. she is running for city council and she lives a block over in the ford historic homes, which are not being affected at all by any of this construction. she stopped to talk to me about the issues i have been posting online - on social media and facebook over the last 9 months. she had a lot of questions. i had a lot of answers. she talked to me for 45 minutes. she had nothing new to add, no answers or solutions, but she still stopped by to ask how we were doing and again - i was surprised. after months of no one giving us the time of day - i had 2 diff city people talk to me in a 3 day time span. fascinating.



in between these 2 discussions, our neighbor who lives 2 doors down and works at ford, saw carl on friday evening walking the dogs. he stopped carl to say that the campus overhaul was going on hiatus. that the man who was in charge had been fired, and someone new had been brought in and the new guy hated it all - hated the plans, the layout, and esp said it was all too expensive. that the parking deck right across from us was being stopped where it was and finished as is - not expanded to the 1,000 feet it was originally going to be, and that the whole project was going on hiatus while plans were being redesigned.

for real? i still have no proof this is the new direction, but no new pieces have been added to the deck since last week. and on saturday they only worked until noon instead of 4 or 6 pm. and the digging on the foundation has stopped. so what is going on? agian - we have to wait and see.


in the meantime, i am hoping to have fordland people come survey the house and tell us what they can do to fix the issues they have caused. one of our neighbors is involved in the project, the construction end of it, and he sent me a long email about how none of the work being done is supposed to be affecting our home, and i told him i appreciated the info but i have been watching with my own eyes what has happened to our house and while general construction rules may work for other places - my home was not some other place. and that my before and after pictures were very different things. he replied that the money to fix our issues would be a drop in the bucket compared to the total budget and that ford should have no problem fixing things. now if only he was right....



in recent months, as the parking deck work has moved form it's beginnings near nowlin street toward our home, there have been a number of water main breaks on elmdale. i think, in fact, doug said there had been 5 at his house, and phil has had 2 or 3. elmdale is an old street. the sewer under it is old. home owners down about 6 blocks the other way from us talked about sewer breaks that caused sink holes in their yards, and only a few years back there was a sink hole at the sewer drain at elmdale and edison, and then a large deep depression formed in the berm along the ford fence line. there is a lot of empty space under the road. you can hear it when cars drive by - hear the weird reverberations down into the cavern under the street. of course that will affect our home in a diff way than other homes. something about the strata of the earth here, and the emptiness under the street, has caused our home to react in a different manner than other homes would. but a big corporation is not interested in these things - except they should be as the street is mere feet from all of the new design work and planned building, and if old sewer lines and water mains cause sinkholes, and the area has already proven that - wouldn't ford be interested in maintaining the soil and strength of the ground where they are building? and therefor wouldn't they have done surveys and realized the houses along the street were not going to hold up as well as ford wanted them to? or did i cause such a commotion in the beginning that ford and the city figured they would simply let our home go to pieces because i was a fly in the ointment? because i had been vocal enough to say this plan was bad for our neighborhood and that we would suffer so the rest of the city could benefit?


well, knowing there had been sinkholes, and knowing that the first batch of sight line trees had been planted incorrectly last autumn, i emailed the city in late sept to tell them, and fordland, that the trees were having issues. yes - they had lived, which surprised me because they were planted at such a weird time of year and no one ever came to water them or care for them, and most of the spring they truly looked dead, but one of them was for sure sinking into the ground, and next to it was a new large depression in the soil. the city came out to investigate. they said the tree's root ball had shrunk due to dry conditions, and that the sewers were fine. i thanked them for the good news. within a few days, the fairlane greens people who mow the lawn on the other side of the fence (fordland) showed up to put large amounts of dirt in each hole a tree had been planted in. then, they placed a large amount of mulch around each tree, all the way up to the trunk. it looks nice, but will kill the trees. any episode of this old house will teach you that. mulch causes the bark to rot and kills the tree. oh well. right? they are not my trees, i did not pay for them, but it is sad they won't last due to incorrect planting standards.

that is how i feel about this whole project - it will not last due to incorrect planning standards. and besides - ford is so far behind all the other companies doing the electric and autonomous car thing - who knows how long they will even be around. they will become, just like the acres of forest they clear cut, steamrolled, and nonexistent.

trampled july 2017 - no end in sight

when i told a friend recently that the wetlands were drained - he was astounded. same thing with the acres of forest. he asked me if there had been an environmental impact survey. he asked a lot of questions that were all very valid. he used to work for the department of environmental quality and he knows a lot of ins and outs about what is right and wrong.

i had no answers for him. FORD is not going to make that info public.


there was an issue in late june - when at about 11am on a monday morning a HUGE explosion happened across the street. neighbors came running out of their homes to see what had happened. all of our houses shook violently. this explosion affected an area at least 6 blocks wide and half a block deep - and had a number of loud banging aftershocks. i emailed FORD and asked what was happening. they took a whole week to reply - and when they did they said they thought it was a gravel hauler tire blow out........

my friend suggested i watch silkwood.

yeah - we think of moving every day. because, just like every day since january - the noise starts early - rumbling, beeping, lots of trucks and traffic and exhaust and dirt in the air - usually from at least 6am to 6pm. mon-sat. it's been 7 months now. and it's only the beginning.

the footings for the parking deck are just starting. we can see bit of concrete showing up. the noise - the nonstop noise - it's awful. and it is amplified by bouncing off the big building we live across from and then hitting the front of our house. a big echo chamber. you cannot escape it anywhere in the house. and the beeping backing up vehicles - again, the tones pierce our home with needle like precision.


would i get answers if i tried a freedom of information act thing? even if i did get answers - the town would not care. god, oh i mean FORD, came back to save the city and i may be the only athiest.


it has worn us down. a deep darkness is always around, always on our minds and in our lungs. no one wants to talk about it - no one wants to hear that we are a few months into a 10 year debacle with no way to escape unless we walk away. or at least that is what it seems like. just like all the birds and squirrels and foxes and frogs and turtles and fish who were so suddenly and horribly thrown out of their homes - we have been displaced.


yeah - i know - now the emails will come from my friends - "we are worried". well - that's cool. but the only solution they seem to have is go see a doctor and get on drugs. which is not my choice. as neighbors to this project, we all deserve better care than this. if this was the day of henry ford - we'd all be treated better. but it's modern times, and his family only cares about the investors and the bottom line - not the health of the neighborhood. or it's residents.  not human or wildlife.



seems the laws say the wetlands should have not been touched - but hey - this is FORD and the hand of god is allowed to touch what it wants. cult religions seem to brainwash that way.......




this is how close the cranes still are to our front door. literally across a patch of grass.

and here is some of the work that makes up the non-stop noise and dirt all day every day. 

this is literally across the street from our house

all that dirt blows around every day, mixed with cement dust

it has looked like this for months and months

piles of dirt moved one way, then back , then another way, then back - beeping all the while for 12 hours a day

this are used to be acres of forest - now it will be acres of concrete, stacked high with parked cars

this is the deck they started in oct of 2016 - it is immense and in the middle of the project - but still pretty darn close to a whole neighborhood of houses

and this is our backyard - every day, any time of day - we get to look at this glorious monstrosity of work going on. a huge mess. for 7 months now. and it's only the beginning. 

trampled june 14th, 2017

i have not posted in weeks. it get tiresome to see hear smell and taste this damn construction every day, and so sometimes i have to take breaks. PLUS - who cares that i am complaining? just me,a nd sometimes i do not have the stomach to think about it anymore than i already do.


so the cranes have now all been parked out front of our house, just to the left. a whole battalion of them. and the space they were working in - digging huge holes, moving around large bunches of wires and rebar encased in cement - is now full of smaller work vehicles - diggers, dump trucks, cement trucks. they are ending their days earlier than before. they all seem rather clueless about their goal, or if they even have one now.

most days - the clouds of dirt and cement dust from these vehicles fills our whole area. i can look to the left and see dust, i can look to the right and see the whole park, still full of children as it is now summer and they are in need of things to do - full of a haze that looks like los angeles or somewhere that is on fire. the dirt cloud comes in our windows, and our neighbors windows too, and leaves a grimy gritty covering on everything. if i had the time to put in the effort - i could dust every day. there is that much crud coming in. it covers the house, and the plants in the yard. i can never tell how it is that all those ford workers walk through those clouds willingly each day on their lunch break. they must have good health insurance.


the news is full, thugoh not so full, of stories about ford these days. about the new ceo and how he is gonna make things better. about how the investors are unhappy. about how telsa and alphabet are a decade advanced on all the new car tech, and that not a single ford line is wired the way all gm vehicles are. the news is sort of full, but also not, of stories about the buyouts, and i found one story that said they would mostly be dearborn workers, but no one else would say that. no one else would say if any of the current projects would be in jeapordy if ford suddenly hemmorages people or money. plans change, things are abandoned. the packard plant once was a thriving industrious place......


i think of all the work and disruption of this project, and i see if empty. times are changing too fast. this work should have been done 10 years ago. now - now ford is chasing it's tail like a dog who is bored or has separation anxiety. spinning it's wheels, and going nowhere.

trampled may 13 2017 - save the mallards

So this week was weird. As i said – last weekend was silent. And so refreshing. But monday morning came and at 530 the noises started and by 7am everything was loud as per usual. Loud in the am, loud after i got home from work. They tend to work till 6pm. Evening was fine – usual piles of dirt and debris and cranes and trucks all over.

Tuesday seemed the same. Long loud day.

Wednesday started very different. Rumbling at 530 like normal, general noise till about 7am, and then there was a noise, like a large machine was breaking up concrete, and it woke us. Awake enough to feel the house roll. The framed art on our bedroom wall rattled. So did the mirror. And then it happened again, and again. Loud banging in the lot, house rolling like an earthquake hit it. This happened, on and off, for over 35 minutes. Some quakes were a minute apart, some were every 3 to 5 minutes. Eveything in the house shook each time the tremors came.

I got out of bed and emailed one of the project supervisors to ask what was going on, because this was not something we had encountered in the last 5 months. He wrote back and said a piece of equipment was adjusted at 730 which may have caused the issue, and i explained in full detail what the previous 5 months were like and what was so diff about wed morning. He said he would look into it.

By wednesday afternoon, a seismagraph had been installed across the street and just to the left of our house. It is in a yellow cooler looking plastic box, and has an antenae that sticks up and a probe that goes down into the earth. Well, i thought, at least they are monitoring what's up.

All the work done on thurs and friday this week was quieter – all the cranes were in quieter gears. There was less noise and less rumbling. It was weird. I do not know if the quiet is simply because they realized they were being too loud for the paramaters they are working in, or if they turned everything down because now they are being recorded. But whatever – it was nice to have al ittle quieter of an experince.

Except that wed morning really threw us both for a loop. It was scary to have the house tremble like that. To have it happen so many times in a 35 or 40 minute time frame. What is that doing to our foundation and our sewer system? Ugh.

And now today is saturday. They started before 7am and just now finished at 6pm. The scene is ugly. So many huge piles of dirt and cement goo and machinery everywhere. It looks like a bomb went off. However – the big red bodied crane that has been parked in front of our living room window since january 2^nd has now been moved. It is elsewhere. It seems weird to look out and see it gone. I'm thankful – and maybe someone finally realized what a burden on the neighborhood that crane was. No matter where you were or who you were you could see it. It was part of why we could not sell our house. Maybe this means we will have better luck in a month or so.....

the crane that has moved - it sat in this spot for 5 months

the last tidbit from this week is that we're seeing and hearing how many animals that previously lived in the acres of clear cut forest, and in the wetlands on FORD property that were drained, now are trying to find homes. So many new birds in our trees, and so many more birds. More raccons and possums. The coyotes went to the henry ford estate and to the area near outer drive and ford road, or greenfield and ann arbor trail. And the rats went toward oakwood and outer d rive – residents are reporting rats the size of cats in their streets. Here – we had a momma mallard and her 15 babies IN OUR YARD looking for a safe place to make their home. Carl managed to keep the dogs away from them, and helped them out of the yard and down the street. But there is no water in our area – they had to go across one or 2 VERY busy streets to get anwhere close to a pond to be safe in. Momma mallard came home to where her instincts said she should be, and her home was gone. I hope she found somewhere safe to be. I hope we all do.  

trampled may 8th, 2017

the most amazing thing happened this past weekend.

NOTHING.

nothing happened.

you see, it rained on thursday and friday. rained all day. and the construction work does not take place in the rain. so on thursday and friday there were no rumbling cranes, no beep beeping vehicles, no cement trucks or clouds of dust. it was fantastic. we were able to sleep, in our bed, in the morning - something we have not been doing soundly for 5 months now.

and then the real miracle came. on saturday the ground was too mushy for any work to be done. so once again, for the third day in a row, we were able to sleep soundly past 7am. we got up, made breakfast, stepped out in the yard to play with the dogs. and it was quiet. totally quiet.

all day saturday, and all day sunday, for the first time in over 5 months, the entire FORD r&d campus was silent. no air conditioning, no furnaces, no belching buildings. no high powered vacuum trucks. no street cleaning, no lawn mowing, no cement trucks. there was not a sound from the entire complex. my husband and i were amazed.

the complete lack of noise, and the quiet atmosphere , reminded us of why we moved here in 2010. of why this had been, up until summer of 2016, such a wonderous place of calm and beauty.

two full days of absolute quiet.


i actually wrote to joe vicari (land management) and dcampus (head of current overhaul project) and thanked them for whatever gift the neighborhood was being given. told them how 2 days of absolute quiet were such a miracle, and suggested that if each weekend could be like this it would make living on the fringe of this project so much easier.


the solitude also reminded us of how happy and calm we are when there is no noise. up to then, all day, everyday, for months - we have been dealing with construction noise during the day and then building noise at night. LOUD building noise. high pitched, low pitched. and there are frequencies happening here, resonant frequencies, called INFRASOUND, that actually negatively impact human health. it is sound that falls below what a human can hear, but our bones and flesh can feel the sound waves. they cause nausea, dizziness, anxiety, depression, headaches and sleeplessness. the sound waves are esp harmful when humans are exposed to them for long periods of time, and can produce PTSD.


so - the low rumblings that have produced 15 new cracks in our walls and ceilings also have the ability to affect our mental and physical health. oh joy.


some neighbors came by sunday evening and commented on how quiet it was. how for the first time in a long time it was finally quiet in their house. they live about a half block up from us. they mentioned the low rumbling that has been ever present in their house for months now, as have neighbors 2 streets down. those neighbors described it as having a semi or mack truck parked next to their home for 8 plus hours a day. that on some days they cannot think or concentrate on their jobs because the noise and rumbling is so bad.


i do not want to celebrate these neighbors joining my ranks - but my goodness is it nice to not feel so alone in my issues.


this past week, around the first or second of the month, i discovered homeowners near us complaining online in a social media forum. there are people who live clear on the other side of the project, complaining about their houses rumbling and shaking 12 hours a day when dump trucks from the FORD project drive by their homes on Pelham street. that is a good half mile from where we are. south west of us. those folks are not dealing with any of the cranes or drilling or cement trucks, but simply hearing that an area somewhat distant from the project was having issues due to the truck routes of the dump trucks hauling away so many mounds of excavated earth from the auger holes was reassuring. sad - i do not want anyone to be suffering. and frustrating - it is a much wider and larger circle of disruption in our area than just here on elmdale.

then a woman chimed in who lives just around the corner from us. along donaldson. she talked about how sad she was that FORD clear cut the forest in front of her house, and how now she heard all the noise and her house shook and it was so ugly and dreadful compared to what she previously looked at. we emailed each other. we compared photos. we talked about how neither of us had been given any of the info we had requested. so across from my house the parking deck is going in. at the right hand end of the deck (if you are looking out my living room window) there will be a maintenance building constructed. that building will be directly across from her house. she wanted answers on what were the outer walls going to look like and what kind and how much shielding (walling, blocking) would be planted, and no one would answer her questions.


why is this happening in the midst of a neighborhood?  why didn't FORD offer to buy the blocks around the site and help us relocate? in her words - "they've taken this beautiful park like setting and ruined it". you know - i can't agree more.



today is may 8th, 2017. the parking deck work resumed at 7am today. the cranes dug deep holes with their augers. the dumptrucks hauled away earth. the cement trucks rumbled and threw cement dust into the sky. the workers are still working, and it 530pm. they are lowering rebar structures down into holes that will soon be filled with cement - the pile legs to set the deck on. from what was dug today - the deck will at least be in front of half of our yard. we'll see how the rest of the week goes. the last plan we were shown had the deck not so far over to our left.....but i hear the plans keep changing.

and while we were all told initially that this was a 5 year plan (it being one half of the ten year complete overhaul of 2 campuses) then why did FORD lease offices at fairlane mall and in taylor at masco for ten years? the employees on the 340 acre campus across from my house have been relocated for the next ten years.



what is next? when will the design center start? it will be directly to the left of our house. and to build it, according to the plans, other buildings have to be demolished. what a debacle. what a lousy place to have ended up on the front lines of. at least now i know - i am not alone in my frustration. having a few neighbors join me has made me feel validated in my struggle. our collective voice may never be enough to get answers or make change - but we can be informed together, and we can help other people in our community understand what is happening.


my final riff here - why won't bill ford ever answer any of the emails i send him? why won't he get involved? he must feel so high and mighty - like  he is the king, and we are his serfdom, his peons in the community. in his dreams he is probably driving those cranes and running each and every one of us over, grinding us down into the ground. and i'm sure he has a huge smile on his face while he's doing it.

trampled april 26th 2017

a while back i stopped posting the word trampled and jsut started using dates an i thik i lost a number of you....


so it is the end of april at 628pm. todays work started around 6am. remember - the original lie was that work would only be from 7 to 330 each dya, and generally not on satudays.

yes - the original lie.

so the noise starts at 530am most days. loud metal noises - like cement being dropped into empty metal truck bins. then by 630 the cranes are running and then every other fucking thing is beeping.....and that, today, is still going on. like most days. they are working till 7 or so....so each day, for more than 12 hours, we hear the construction. we feel the waves of vibration go through the house. they work on saturdays too. usually from 6am to 4pm. and because they cut down the forested areas - we now hear all the loud noises the building air conditioners ect make.

24 hours a day it is loud here now. 12 plus hours of construction noise an vibration, and 12 hours of building noise. why is this happening in the middle of a residential area ??


i took some time off of posting - life matters to deal with. a sick brother in the hospital and many important issues at work. also trying to get yard work done - hoping to spiff things up as best we can so maybe someone will walk by this summer and exclaim, as they usually do, "your house is so lovely - are you ever going to sell it?". at which point we can tell them Yes - we are taking offers.....



read a lot today about how low frequency noise makes people and animals physically ill. INFRASOUND - the vibrations of sound your ears cannot hear but your body can feel.


how to stay positive and upbeat? bought more flowers for the front porch. trying to stay away from home.....all those people who suggested we jsut stay at work longer hours.....the people who do not live right near us......12 fucking hours a day of beep beep and vibrations and heavy trucks. i am trying to envision a place where all will be well again. it's probably in a diff city.

anthology of a friendship

Windy Weber

August 29, 2010 · 

anthology of a friendship - i step on you, you sting me back

it's summer. we work in the garden every sunday in the summer. and in all my free time. i don't do much else. so today, like all sundays, we watered the flowers, deadheaded plants, picked tomatoes, drank beer, and enjoyed the day. we'll be outside by noon and stay out till midnight, bbqing for dinner and getting far too much sun. every sunday i plant a few new flowers, plant a few seeds for flowers, weed the garden, and watch the bees.

oh my friends the bees! the big fluffy ones are my favorites - they buzz so loudly and have those wonderful fat yellow pouches of pollen on their legs. they are responsible for all the beautiful things growing in our yard, and all of our vegetables growing and ripening all over.

i love the bees. i paint pictures of them. i sing to them. i do not swat them and i pull them out of the dog water bowl when they fall in. i think of them as my friends.

as we all know, friendships can fall on hard times.

today, after weeding, watering, watching birds, and getting ready to start the grill, i, the lover of bees, got stung. barefoot in the grass, like every sunday all warm year long, i stepped on a bee.

oh god - it is that immediate whole body instinct that something is extremely wrong. my foot landed on it and it stung me on the bottom of my left foot baby toe, causing my entire foot to clench up and me to scream. really scream - out in the yard. i knew what it was - in a high pitched frightened and injured voice i told carl i had been stung by a bee. he replied that he saw one come up out of the grass as soon as i lifted my foot.

i hobbled to the house - carl was right next to me and opened the door. he said he'd get the tweezers and pull out the stinger for me. i sat down in the bathroom and tried to let him look at my foot, but i felt as if i could not uncurl my toes. the pain was intense. it made the bone in my toe feel like it was on fire. i was instantly sick to my stomach and crying. carl pulled my toes away from my foot, looked all over, and saw no stinger. he got me an ice cube. i cried like a baby. the pain was awful, and i was scared. i have not been stung by a bee since i was 5 years old. my mom and i were in the truck going through the drive through at the bank when it happened - the bee had landed on the seat and i set my leg on it. she, too, had rushed to get me an ice cube for it. i was not allergic at 5 years old, but that was a long time ago.

after i dried my tears and put some hydrocortisone cream on my toe, i went back outside. the whole side of my foot ached - the bone still felt as if it were on fire. it did not swell up, and i'm glad about that. it's been more than 3 hours now, and i can walk, but i am still sick to my stomach. maybe from that adrenaline rush, from that few seconds of intense fear and pain.

i guess i'll have to wear shoes from now on in the yard, although i mostly feel that in a few weeks i will have forgotten and i'll just take my chances again, hoping no more bees sting me in the future. but i also think that is kind of a lesson in life about friends - you can hurt each other on accident, and you can sting back in retalliation - on accident. we're all just trying to live our lives.

the story of t rex

the story of t rex

July 1, 2013 at 7:56pm

it's been raining for days now. days. and the whole household is feeling the boredom of being stuck inside the house. eva has developed some new neurosis - she has decided that rain and thunder are constant companions, and since she is now afraid of thunder, all rain is potentially bad, and she refuses to go out in it. to get her to use the grass - i actually have to go out into the yard with her, like a living security blanket against loud noises. 

there should be a remedy for this malaise - some easy fix for the rainy week blues. it does seem from my life experience that music of some kind should be inserted here - something to sooth the soul and relieve me of the melancholy i'm accruing. but, music is not always a joy for me. it is not always a companion for happy times, for life affirming events. 

sometimes music is sad. 

for me, music is attached to everything. every thing. every single thing i touch, or hear, or think about or say. it is all music. except for a while after my mom died, when there was no music. there was no sound, really, except for crying, and the racing of my heart with each panic attack. but normally - it is all music. so naturally, when good things happen there are songs attached. conversely, though, it means when sad things happen, there are songs attached. 

many years ago, when my parents were both still alive, so the late 90s, 97 or 98, i was working at a record store that was not my own. i had been there a few years, and was accustomed to the poor people who sold records, the local bands who sold records, the junkies in need of cash who stole and sold records. i saw, daily, an incredible stream of used vinyl filter in the door, and often times had first crack at any of the things i wanted to buy. in the case of it being great music, and me not needing it, someone i knew was always ready to get that call - the great call about some hard to find album they had been dying for. holy cow did i see a lot of records come and go. 

how did all this start? when did this music obsession begin? the constant need for an accompaniment of sound, the shutting off of the rest of the world to only hear the lyrics of daydreams? i have some points to highlight, i know mostly how it all came to be. 

family. it was family. starting with my mom loving bob dylan, and my siblings constantly playing music and going to concerts. CONSTANTLY. which, for someone like me, who loves music, is a good thing. 

my siblings are all older. their influence on me was huge. i heard a lot of neil young, emerson lake and palmer, jimi hendrix. boston, blue oyster cult. music was on non-stop in our house. thanksgiving day parties with arlo guthrie as the main course. my siblings, and their friends. 

my brothers had a friend name joe, we called him joey, and he lived down the street less than a mile. it seems like he was always there, in the time line i mean, and so he in my mind is like a third brother. he and larry were so close. he liked glam rock in the early 80s and loved to get dressed up. he was friends with the guys in seduce and went to the bar every weekend to see bands. he dated my sister for a little while, and on occasion baby sat me when needed. i remember one halloween when he stopped by after i had come home from trick or treating - he was dressed up as a pirate in these tight white satin pants and a black frilly shirt, with make up and a pirates hat. he had a big beer mug full of coins, because back then you could go out as an adult and get change from people and they would not yell at you or tell you off. joey stopped by to have a drink and visit my mom and talk about life. 

i was about 14 when my brother larry came home to visit from florida, and i got to hang out with the guys - who, at that time, were about 26. they seemed like rock stars to me - they traveled, they went to concerts, they were cool. and while larry drove down the street, he and joey snorted coke off a cassette tape case in the car. yep, while driving and with their 14 year old sister in the car. it seemed normal to me - that was how life was lived. 

you see, i grew up surrounded by people with addictions - drugs, alcohol, sex, speed, violence - it almost seemed as if my family was a magnet for the wildest people on earth, and it was all a big game to everyone involved. adrenaline - how much can you pack into each second of each day? how high can you get, and how high can you get next time? this was all topped off by the fact my parents were skydivers, and all their friends loved to jump out of planes. what a wild ride my life has been. 

so yeah, joey and larry and billy partied a lot. and listened to music. in fact, t rex was joey's favorite. in the late 90s, working at that record store for someone else, i thought of him over and over. how may times i wanted to call him and say, "oh my god, joey - the most incredible t rex albums are coming into the shop! you have to come see them!! imports, picture discs, stuff no one here has ever seen!!". but instead i called my friends and told them about the awesome cache of albums coming in, and we all bought t rex albums and listened to them screamingly loud and sang along. it was extremely good times!!

at christmas that year, i drove past joey's house on my way back from the mall. i had been out christmas shopping, and on my way home i passed his house and my parents house, but did not stop. even though he was only 4 or 5 houses from the corner i was at, i just kept driving. i'll call him later, i said to myself. he'll be around. 

i got home, and did some things, who knows what now that it has been so many years, and then i called my mom, who was not home. instead, my dad answered the phone. he started telling me my mom was really sick, that she had this incredible drinking problem and was addicted to pills, and since dad was the one who always lied and made up stories and was the true alcoholic, i did not believe him. but then he said, "you know, if she is not careful she is gonna go POOF! like joey - and she'll be gone." 

i said "dad what do you mean poof like joey?", and he told me that joey had over dosed on heroin the night before and was dead. the whole world stopped spinning. 

those records, all those t rex records, the ones joey would have loved - he did love, until his need for heroin over took him. those records were his - he had been giving them to a friend to sell to the shop i worked at so i did not see him coming and going, so i was shielded from his addiction and all the evils that went with it. 15 years ago i was 26 so he would have been 38, and he had lost his hair, gotten very out of shape, and was a manager at a burger king. his life had gone nowhere, and he was finally tired of being the bald overweight faggot that managed a burger king. he had let his addiction take over, and take his life. 

i called my friends. i asked them to be as kind to the records they had bought as they could be, because those records had belonged to someone who to me was family, and i told them all the story. i asked them that if they ever decided to sell those records - would they please sell them to me, so i could have a little piece of joey back. they all said yes. it's never come up in conversation again - i think out of respect they never will give them up, and i'm okay with that. or, maybe they are trying to keep my heart from breaking even further. 

i love t rex records. love them. all the imagery, all the fairy tales and beautiful things, all those guitars. and for all that love there is some sadness, no matter how hard i try to block it out, or not feel it - every time i hear t rex i think of joey, and i miss him. 

in the midst of too many days of rain all in a row, of being melancholy and inward facing, i think of those i have lost, and of their connection to me, and my life, and my love of music. and i just listen to the rain. 

when the end of summer reminds you

when the end of summer reminds you

WINDY WEBER·MONDAY, AUGUST 22, 2016

it rained on saturday, a couple diff times, and yet the humidity still had not cleared. weeks and weeks of high 80s and above with high humidity had dominated ths summer, and supposedly the end was near on saturday. i sat, in the house with no central air, and waited for carl to get home from a full day of work. we've both been so tired, and out of sorts, as have the dogs - not too much time outside, our schedules are a mess, too hot for dog walks and our aching bodies have just not wanted to go on them anyway.

carl got home, and we had a drink. waited. lounged around. took the dogs on a short loop, and decided that yes - we could stay awake long enough to go across the street and visit with our neighbors, who were having a gathering to celebrate the coming change in weather, and our friendships.

our neighbors - our friends. we never knew what it was like to have such great people live near us till we moved here. 20 years in dearborn heights and the only real friends we had there became drug addicts and were killed by gunfire while delivering drugs......so this whole "neighbors as friends " thing was new to us. but these people - how did we get so lucky?

we were certainly late to the party, by only 10 pm, but still glad to be there. we laughed as we talked about the neighborhood "pteradactyl" that would make us call each other in feeble attempts to save the koi in back yard ponds. while a joyous thing to see blue herons coming in from the ford estate, we all knew they were only coming for free lunch at our backyard's expense. i told them "this is how i know you are my friends - you agree with me that this is a dinosaur and you don't make fun of me about it!!"

we laughed a lot. we had good coversations as the breezes finally brought in the cool dry air we had been waiting for for almost 2 months. our gardens were pitiful, the rabbits and squirells had stolen all that we grew, but we had each other, our dogs, and our health to be joyous about. it was the first time all summer we could spend time with them - as we'd been consumed for almost 3 months with having to relocate our business.

so much work. 7 weeks of getting ready, and then moving, and then putting it all back together. sore bodies, sore minds. an absolute disconnect from everything that is normal.

we bid good night to our friends, and went to bed, knowing that on our day off, our only day off, we had 2 house calls to make to look at records for store stock.

i love selling records - it is the only job i have ever done. 28 years now - something carl was just telling me i need to promote more - that i am the only female record shop owner in detroit, and most certainly the only woman who has been selling records for 28 years in the area. it's not about the money - and thank god - because there hardly is any....those of us in the biz are here because we love music, and to me the joy comes from helping people find a record they really want, to hear music they really love,and to help them find new music that will make their world a better place. i go to great lengths to make this happen, and put up with a lot of bullshit and weird stuff.

now it's sunday at noon. we're about to leave to go to fenkel and greenfield. i can hear my sisters in the back of my head - "do you have a gun? - you need to take a gun!!", "did you tell anybody where you are going, give them a phone number, make sure they call you to make sure you got home in one piece?", and i run though my thoughts of should i call a neighbor and tell them to check on us.....or at least come by and see if the dogs are okay......carl reminds me to charge my cell phone, and we take the hand drawn directions to the hood we're traveling to.

the phone call came in mid july. a man who had been in the service overseas in the 60s had 3 footlockers full of jazz and r&b - did we want to come see them? carl said yes, but we had to wait because we were moving the shop and simply could not do it right when he called. he said he'd wait. on the way to his house, we passed a lot of old, lovely, huge houses, brick houses, with gorgeous windows and big lots and houses next to them that had exploded, or been burnt out. we got to the block before his, and all the houses were boarded up and burned out. i was thinking about the gun my sisters said i should have.......and then we turned onto a block was that was lovely - beautiful well cared for homes with great landscaping and heavy wrought iron security doors. we parked in the drive and were ushered into the back door by the man selling his collection.

let's see - if you saw miles daivs in copenhagen in 1963, or there abouts, then you do the math and see that this man was near 80 years old. this tall man, with hardly any grey hair, and fewer wrinkles, and who stood tall and proud, was near 80 years old. seemed impossible, but by his stories it was true. and by his records it was also true. the collection was not as nice as we had hoped - lots of common things we could not use, or did not want to take with us, and some family members records thrown in too that were hard to find but unplayable blue notes and impulse lps........and we spent maybe 75 minutes talking with him and his wife - they were moving due to an inability to make it comfortably up and down the stairs these days - bad knees. they were nice people - kinda distant, kinda reserved, and at the end carl made them an offer.

"hmmmm, i expected more than that. what are you giving me per record? i expected more than that, becuase the man who came to buy them before you did took fewer records and paid me far more........"

god damn it. i mean - really? you said you'd wait for us till we could come out and see them, but then you called someone else and sold the best part of your collection to someone else.

and when his wife described the guy - we just shook our heads.

again, because of having to move the store, we got screwed out of something we should have had first crack at. should have had the ability to make happen. should have. and didn't.

we explained that had we known someone else had been there we woudl have never come. that our offer stood, and if he did not want to sell he did not have to. he ended up agreeing, and we took the records and left. frustrated and stirred up all over again about how our summer turned out.

then we drove down greenfield to dearborn. damn - i'm glad i do not live north of warren off greenfield. the road is utter hell to drive on, and the side streets all look abandoned. it's all so tired and neglected. and then you literally cross a set of tracks and it all changes. as you come up to warren - everything changes. the building signs are in arabic, and the streets are clean. eveything is painted calm colors, and the grass is mowed. it looks lived in.

we made jokes at the corner of warren and greenfield - that we needed to take pictures for those times we are dragged into ridiculous conversations about "is dearborn under sharia law?", because we sat at the light looking at an adult novelty shop, a tattoo parlor named mary janes that had rastafarians painted on the walls, and diners touting meat sandwiches. there may have even been a topless bar. but - it was all clean, and was a far cry from what we had just driven through.

we made our way to michigan ave, and then down to clark. we were on our way to mexicantown, but even then, just a little north of it......thankful to be going in the day time on a sunday when most people are in church or sleeping it off. we were going to see a woman who had too many records to put in the car to bring to us......

the streets are narrow. they are one ways. if you squinted just a tiny bit you were sure you were in chicago, south end chicago. no driveways, houses on top of each other. 7 foot high fences around them, including the front yards. we stopped at the address we were given (our phone calls were not returned - we were winging it) and a little hispanic woman, probably in her late 50s early 60s holled from across the street - "you the record people? i'm on my way!!".

she had come out of one of these houses covered in dust, and hauling stuff from out of the house to a huge pile of debris sitting along the curb. she had on a yellow shirt, which i found out later was polysester, since we talked a lot about how all clothes from all years are the same, just with new colors and new patterns on them. she introuduced herself and took us up a flight of stairs to a back bedroom full of stuff.

oh yeah, there were records. at least a thousand of them. in boxes, on shelves, on a table. there was a window that was cracked open a little, but no other airflow. she explained the records were from all sorts of people, family, renters, djs. we started looking and realized we truly should have brought gloves and a mask.

i told carl i was bringing extra allergy pills in case there was a cat, but somehow i had blanked on what condition these things might have been in. and the lady who called us - she had no idea. as in, there are things in this world you do not touch and you do not handle or move - and she was just grabbing them and throwing them around. we had to stop her from probably sending us all to the hospital.

i say all because her husband would come "babysit" us, and then her cousin, and then she would return. one of them would stand in the doorway while we looked through records. stacked like pancakes. so many good tiles warped beyond repair - kept in piles in hot rooms, or stacks that were red and purple with mold, and we carefully and slowly moved them to the side to keep looking.

do you see - do you understand now - what i mean when i say i do this job for the love of music and for the love of helping others? who would do this just for money? oh yeah - i forgot - people like the shark who got those other records before us......

i seperated piles by what i thought we could use. mold, glenn miller, glenn cambell and tito puente went in the we don't need it piles. van halen, ac/dc, and booty bass went in the other. and while we sorted and checked condition, the story unfolded.

this woman had recently buried, if i remember correctly, 3 brothers, both parents, 3 cousins, and a niece and nephew. it had started with her youngest brother, who was only 45 at the time, and then like clockwork, she said, every 3 months another one of them died. she said it was like some weird horror story or tv show - every three months. and now she was the only one left. she had a daughter who wanted her to move out of the ghetto and come live in a suburb, but she said she was born and raised inthe ghetto, and would stay there.

in between discussing clothing styles and the lack of insurance her cousins had, she told me about how members of her church come to her for psychic readings. coming from the background i do - i had no reason whatsoever to question this. she told us that she could tell right away she could trust us - that her gut said we were good people, and that if her gut had said otherwise, esp when we met out front of her house - she would have told us to leave. we talked about gut instinct, and the importance of family and friends, and then she broke down. it was the first time she cried - talking about how her mom died in her arms, and that she saw the last look and she heard the last breath and suddently was so afraid for the end of her own life. about how fast life goes, and she cried.

i cannot stand next to woman, a human being, who is obviously in such pain, and not react. i reached over and grabbed her shoulder and squeezed it, and her arm came up and she grabbed ahold of my arm and held on to me while she cried for a minute or two. carl had his back to us. these are the hardest situations to be in - this is business - we need stock for the shop - but so so many times it comes from the situation i have described - people die and leave things behind. everyone of those records had memories attached to them.....every box in that room had memories attached to it. there were 8 track tapes, boxes of spools of yard, glass ware, who knows what else.

the shelves were heavy and leaning. the table had a broken leg. we tried to balance the records in ways that they would not cause anything to collapse or give way, and in that same balancing act i talked with our host and carl finished up looking and deciding on a price. she accepted our offer, and thanked us for being good people. i asked her if she had enough support from the people in her church - because i could tell she was in need of support. some good people to lean on.

the whole place was in disarray. boxes everywhere. she had several houses to clean to get ready to re-rent, and some of them were places her family had lived in. as carl took the boxes of records down the stairs, i saw 2 beautiful wrought iron chairs in the living room. they were painted white and blue. and before i could stop myself i said "my mom had those chairs - she left them to me when she passed....." and this woman said "those were my momma and papas chairs - take them - you were so kind to me today - take them - i know they will have a good home and i have so much more stuff to deal with........." and then she talked again about her mom, and she sobbed like a baby, and i hugged her and told her she had to let it out sometimes or it would eat her alive.

i am standing, in a derelict house, in a run down and poverty stricken area of detroit, and i have in my arms the maybe 60 year old woman whose records i've just gone through, and she is shaking like the world is ending. i know that fear - i know that pain......i can feel it, again, like when it was new to me. and then she tells me that time magazine is coming to interview her, because of her psychic abilities, because of how everyone in the hood comes to her for readings, and that is ia god given gift. i'm standing in the mix of voodoo - church going crystal ball reading witchcraft. carl comes up the stairs, looks at the chairs that are now near the doorway and can tell they are now ours, and says "wow, usually we ask out turtles and frogs and planters" and the lady says she has lots of those - she will dig them out and call us back.

as we get ready to leave, she invites us to a coming bbq, and tells about the great food they will have. she says she considers us friends now, and knows she will see us again. and we shake her hand and thank her and go on our way.

i think, now, that i have written all of that out - i understand why when i got home i was drained. i revisited some extremely raw emotions i have not let myself feel in a long time. it explains why last night, all night long, i had nightmares - horrific, hollywood movie style nightmares, that scared me so badly i actually tried to stay awake to avoid them. i knew the instant i fell back alseep i'd be back in the midst of them. i thought, through most of today, tha tthey were caused by the proximity of this woman and her experiences, or by the mold i know we breathed off those records, and to some extent i'm sure they were........but i see now that i let myself FEEL something i had not felt in a long time, and my brain had trouble processing all that all over again. only this time there was no lead up - it was just an immediate face to face with the loss that has so greatly changed my own life. having your mother gone - one of life's lowest points.

we drove back on lonyo, through metal scrap yards and filthy streets. i saw arabic ladies and their children playing ball - and thought about how to me this place seemed like hell but to someone who has come frm a country of constant death and bombing the calm and stable life must be a god send, and we slowly got back to the world we are used to. michigan ave seemed so peaceful and serene, and damn - when we got home i said to carl that i had no right to complain about a single thing ever - because compared to what we jsut experienced - we live in heaven.

after the nightmares, and trying to clear the sleep from my eyes, this morning the mail came, with the letter from ford land about the upcoming informational session next week - where they will tell us all about how they are going to build 75 foot tall parking decks out our front door.......and the anxiety and fear washed back over me. we made it through the store move, and now it is time to focus on our house move. we have to go - i cannot mentally or physically live across from 5 years of construction, from buildings that will block my view of the sky and vibrations that will cause my vertigo to go wild. it's time - time to go.

life is never a steady path, never an easy course to get on and follow through. in the midst of all the plans and hopes you have, and things you think you will do so easily - life happens. and you deal with the shit as it comes. just like losing my own mom. just like having to move the shop so unexpectedly. we had a night to spend with our friends, to remember why we have loved it here so much for 6 years, and now we have to go, hopefully not so far that we won't see them, hopefully not so far as to forget a wonderful cool evening in the end of summer with people we really love.

life is short. it's time to move on.