Here I Go
I like to think I was born in Paris. My parents had met there, both still adolescents. Soon afterward they found separate lives in different cities in America. I came into existence and grew up where they ultimately re-united. In Detroit. Years later, just the other day in fact, I went “back” to Paris.Jetting from New York to Paris I looked through the perspex into a deep black oval. I was thinking how I missed the wind and the rattling of flaps and ailerons, the din, and the punishing whoosh in my face, the aerial poetry of France’s most famous airman, Saint Exupery. He wrote about flying solo in an open cockpit in the 1930’s. No radar, no directional instruments, radio contact that was hit-and-miss. It was now 2017 and I, seated far from the wizard-y electronic cockpit, stayed fastened into my pod seat and waited to be deposited like the submissive prey of a kindly, gentle eagle. On a very far continent. Night had suddenly fled to morning. Paris came with heavy traffic, with street names that sang to me. And here it was, not a sand-blown desert airstrip on a Moroccan coast, but – Paris.
Paris is a much farther cry from my designated hometown, Detroit. Motown and Motor City. Not the badass place it’s become today. Not when I was trying to grow up there. Detroit was where I first heard a real orchestra, squelched in a balcony seat in the vast and dimly Second Egyptian Dynasty-ish Masonic Temple, scrambling with fellow fifth-graders to keep our feet from bashing each other’s legs and forced into muscle-cramping silence by the looming, eye-threatening Mr. Todt. He was on guard and on hustle duty, this muscled shop teacher surely uncomfortable in the suit and tie he wore with full fidget.Detroit is where I first fell in love. We were seven years old and I was entranced by her straight, almost white blond hair and the homemade dresses she wore. Those dresses, neither white, or much colored, shifted and twirled about her skinny frame unlike the way that boys’ pants and shirts stayed stiff and still. Her swirly skirts and her flippy hair defined her as total, other-creature-y girl. Kirsten, a girl’s name fastened to her like her blowy dress and hair.Detroit is where I discovered books because, on first entering, I immediately had to inhabit the great looming Parkman Branch Library. To earn the right to visit there daily I had pretended to need books. So I began a reading career. I worked along the shelves set out by Mr. Dewey, his System. Books became identified, somehow deified, under that high, heaven-high, coffered ceiling. Books acquired esteem just being cosseted by oak or even mahogany paneling. Light from that huge clerestory window trans-illuminated the print on those book pages as if divinely writ. I read as if compelled to read, just to feel worthy. To find my own special home life there. A literary temple all my own.Despite struggle-free years doing math and science I longed to take up books as my life’s work. From those library years I had wanted to be a writer. I knew nothing about what that meant. English classes taught me grammar and sentence parsing and literature appreciation. But I only seemed suited, gifted as a reader. How does that translate into becoming a writer? It was only after paying my life’s compendia of dues (tune in later), did I assume the “pen” (first an Olympia SM3 portable typewriter, then a computer keyboard) and began writing. Some poems. Some short stories. A novel. And now some real books. And even children’s books!