The 25th annual Woodward Dream Cruise jammed up 10 miles from Ferndale to Pontiac, Michigan, last weekend. My face still hurts from smiling so much. The third Saturday in August has been a national holiday in Motown since 1995. It began as an effort by Nelson House and a handful of volunteers to raise money for a children’s soccer field in Ferndale, just north of Detroit. They hoped to recreate the nostalgia of the 1950s and ’60s, when youth, music and Motor City steel roamed Woodward Avenue, America’s first highway. That year, 250,000 people participated, nearly 10 times the number expected. The rest, as they say, is history. Today, the…
-
-
Friends for life
It took a rather large pour of Chateau Grand Traverse Late Harvest Riesling, but we finally decided the last time we saw each other in person was 25 years ago. My friend Jean was living in Washington, D.C., with her husband, Joe, and their 6-month-old son, Patrick. I was living in Delaware, between newspaper jobs, barely earning minimum wage at a small medical office. It was August 1994. The debut of ”Friends” changed TV’s landscape forever. America Online offered a gateway to something called the World Wide Web. A first-class stamp was 29 cents. Regular gas was $1.11 per gallon. 1994: Patrick and me in D.C. Now St. Louis residents,…
-
Thumbs up
I knew we’d left too late in the day to make it to Mackinaw City when signs for Frankenmuth sparked this thought: “Rebecca, when is the last time you had chicken?” That’s right about the time we spotted billboards for Bronner’s, the world’s largest Christmas store, and Jellystone Park Camp Resort, about two hours north of Detroit. But we kept driving. Yogi Bear wasn’t going to steal food from these savvy tourists to restock his pic-a-nic basket. Sorry, Boo-Boo. Yogi Bear Now who’s smarter than the av-er-age bear? For decades, Frankenmuth has been known for chicken and Christmas, as well as the Bavarian Inn and Zehnder’s, two of the nation’s largest independently owned restaurants. Driving through…
-
Be still my heart
Around this same time a year ago, I was celebrating eight weeks’ post-op from heart valve repair surgery and about to start cardiac rehab. Everything turned out fine. Again. I had been under the knife for open-heart surgery once before, in summer 2001, to remove a cardiac tumor nearly the size of a tennis ball. Today is my 18th anniversary. Resembling a sinister collection of red blood cells, this silent monster growing inside my chest looked bad, almost certainly a secondary cancer that had originated somewhere else, according to my doctors, who shared that tidbit only after my surgery. Thank God it was benign. And thank goodness for Dr. Kevin…
-
Family reunion
Every family has a story. Welcome to ours. Twenty adults, nine kids and five dogs spent a long weekend in one big house on the lake. Sounds like the makings of a sitcom. We have reunions with relatives from my mother’s side of the family every couple of years. It helps us know what’s going on in each other’s lives, and reminds me again why I don’t have children. This year most of us managed to be free the second weekend of July to come together for a few days of fun, food and family at my middle sister’s place in Lakeport, Michigan, just north of Port Huron. We were…
-
Ewe never know
“Is there recess in college?” asked the prepubescent boy on the green and white shuttle bus taking us back to our dorm. “That depends,” his 70-ish grandmother said with a grin. Her response took me back to my undergraduate days at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, about 40 miles north of Detroit. My college experience involved commuting, working summers to earn money while living at home to save money to do more commuting. It took me a little over four years to earn my journalism degree, but I did it. Not the most fun I ever had. If I could do it over again, I would have somehow gone away…
-
‘Beauty-full day!’
For my paternal grandfather, there was no such thing as a bad day. “Beauty-full day!” he’d say just like that to anyone within earshot, as he puffed on his unfiltered Camel cigarette. With glasses and a thick mustache, he always sported a ratty beige cardigan sweater, even in summer. I don’t remember him wearing anything else. Above, Jiddu, in his later years. Top, Esper in his 20s. More than 100 years ago this month, Esper John, my father’s father who was known as Jiddu (grandfather in Arabic), fled Damascus, Syria. He had his reasons. From the many stories passed down through the generations, Jiddu mostly wanted to avoid being conscripted…
-
Gems from my father
There’s a saying: The older I get, the smarter my father gets. I’m embarrassed to say it’s taken me nearly 60 years to figure that out. Somewhat hard-headed. Like him. For my father, being on time meant arriving early. In his mind, if you were on time, you were late. I did not inherit this gene. Even in his last days, Dad kept one eye on the clock. “They’re late,” he said on the Sunday before officially departing this life, visibly ticked off at the tardiness of death’s knell. “Those guys in the dark suits. They’re supposed to be here.” But they weren’t. Not yet. It had been a difficult…
-
Spelling bees bite
I can still taste a tiny bit of barf creeping up into my throat after misspelling that stupid word in the Detroit News Spelling Bee at Goodale Elementary’s auditorium in 1971. Like Ralph and the flat tire scene in “A Christmas Story,” I said the F-word. But not aloud. A good Catholic girl, I was stoic, polite and thoroughly humiliated. The word, which will forever give me hives, was blossom. I spelled it with a U instead of the second O. Jesus God. “B-L-O-S-S-U-M.” WTH? That was it. I was toast. Take your seat, young lady. No trip to the 45th Scripps National Spelling Bee in Washington, for you, sister.…
-
Paperless greetings
Today is my one-year anniversary since having open-heart surgery to repair a mitral valve that didn’t fully close when my heart pumped blood. I am all fixed now. No more blood regurgitating backward from the left ventricle through the floppy valve into the left atrium, as the left ventricle contracted. At times my heart was so exhausted it pumped 140 beats per minute at rest. That sends you into something scary called atrial fibrillation, a.k.a., “A-fib.” Yet I didn’t feel a thing. As a friend says, “You never know what you’re walking around with.” Until you do. Now I’ve got two heart scars, and not one but two memorable cardiac…
