My father was a heating and air-conditioning serviceman and a mechanic’s mechanic. We lived in southwest Detroit, and when he got home from work he’d spend the rest of the evening fixing anything mechanical, even turning out replacement parts on his lathe. He loved working with his hands, and a lot of the time he spent working in the garage was really pure mechanical engineering: he’d experiment with everything, whether it was building a new suspension system for his ’58 Olds or designing an electric mixer for my mom.
Dear Stephanie,
It’s been over a month, and not a day goes by that I don’t think of your father. I didn’t know Ed was sick until nearly the end, when Officer Skidmore told me. Now, whenever I’m running along a road, I still half expect to see that black pickup pull over, and Ed jump out with his usual swagger and smile, hollering, “Hey, Iceman!” God knows how many times he did that and we’d just talk right there on the roadside. Ed was always upbeat and funny, and he’d often say we needed to get together. And I would always put it off for another day because I was busy with college, writing my book, or doing some other “pressing” thing. Now it’s too late, and I’m truly sorry for that.
I last saw Mike just two weeks ago, at the Old Chicago in Southgate. We were best friends for forty years.
My journey with Mike began in the early 1970s, when we started hanging together with friends at the K-Andy bar in Detroit. Mike was small in stature and suffered from many physical difficulties, but it would be a mistake to judge a man like him by his size. Mike was a giant.
Letter to first graders,
Thanks so much for thinking of me on Memorial Day, you made me real happy! When I got your envelopes I sat outside under my favorite tree to read them. It was a beautiful sunny day, much like it was in Vietnam as I read each letter and looked at your drawings. You asked a lot of questions. I'm 62 years old and still feel great. I love to run and swim and I love ice cream with lots of bananas, chocolate and whipped cream. When I was in the Vietnam War way back in 1967-68 I was only 19 years old. I was a sergeant in the Army Rangers and the leader of a five-man team that searched the jungle for bad guys that we captured and turned into good guys.
I was born in Detroit’s Providence Hospital in 1948 and raised in an upstairs flat on Sixth Street, near Michigan Avenue and Tiger Stadium. My mother would later tell me how I loved watching the cars drive by our house and hearing the roar of the fans at the stadium each time a Tiger made a home run. But those were my mother’s memories, not mine. I was just 3 years old when we moved from the flat to our home in southwest Detroit. My mom picked the house because she felt her kids could safely walk down the alley to Patton Park and play without crossing any streets. And my dad was happy because he would finally have his own garage to tinker in, and because we were near the south end of Dearborn, where he was raised—the largest Arabic area in the United States.
It was cold windy run. There was no sun and it wasn't much fun being outside other than sharing time with my dog, Sarge. So I tucked him in his yard, gave him a bone and hurried inside to take a nice hot bubble bath. And that's when it happened. I was laying back relaxing, happily jabbering away on my old reliable Sanyo Taho flip cellphone when she just slipped from my hands and plunged into the deep white bubbly bath.
