Steven Harper Piziks

Darwin and I like to visit a gay-oriented campground in western Michigan over Memorial Day weekend. Campit Campground is a fun place to hang out and is also near Saugatuck and South Haven, two cities we like very much.  This year, with the pandemic restrictions lifting, we were especially looking forward to the trip.

Cue the evil music.

Darwin and I headed out just as cold snap swept into the region.  The daily high barely broke 60, and the overnight lows were in the 30s.  It made for a difficult trip.

Arrived we arrived and checked into our cabin on Friday, we explored the campground a bit--it had been rearranged--and then started shivering.  As the sun sank, it got colder and colder.  We tried starting a fire, but it had rained all morning, and the damp wood only gave up a feeble flame.  We finally gave up and went into the cabin, which wasn't in any way winterized and was heated, if you could call it that, with a portable radiator that put out a heat equal to a small kitten.  The floor was ice cold and almost painful to walk on in socks.  Darwin and I spent the night huddled up close under the blankets.

In the morning, I had planned to make breakfast on my camp stove, but it was just . . . too . . . cold to cook outside, let alone eat there.  Instead, we drove into town and had breakfast at a little restaurant that had on the tables these odd salt and paper shakers. They had flip-top lids that you levered up with your thumb.  They made me think of puppets, and I started doing little dialogues between the shakers for my own amusement.  In the end, I propped up my phone and made videos of them.  Darwin kept cracking up, and the other diners stared.  I'll post some of the videos later.

We headed into Saugatuck for the day. The sun grudgingly warmed up to the low 60s, and we had a very nice time.  My recent weight-loss has put me out of my clothes--an XL hangs badly on me now--and I discovered that a Large fits me very well!  So I did some clothes shopping and bought some nice summer shirts.

Which I couldn't wear because of the cold.  Yeesh.

We enjoyed a great lunch and we admired the boats in the harbor and we did all the other nothing-much tourists without children get to do.  We also stopped to buy a space heater (it was one of two left in the store) and a pair of slippers for me.

That evening back at the cabin, the temperature plunged into the 30s.  It was just too cold to be outside doing the usual fun stuff that goes on around Campit Campground.  Usually they have shows and group cookouts and other events, but this year everyone was hiding in their tents and cabins and campers.  Darwin and I huddled inside the cabin again, and the new heater did a much better job of keeping the space warm, but there wasn't much to do in there, especially since that particular area of the campground had no WiFi, and satellite signals were so weak that there was essentially no Internet. I read on my Kindle app on vacation, but it wouldn't function properly on the bad signals, so even that was denied me.

In the morning, we went to breakfast again--I made more silly salt and pepper videos--and headed into South Haven.  Wow, it was crowded!  The Michigan holiday weekend was in full swing.  Though everyone was uncertain about masking.  The official line from the state is that masks aren't required for anyone who is vaccinated, and almost no one wore them outdoors,  Indoors was a different story. This store required masks for everyone. That restaurant didn't require them for anyone. This shop had no sign--or policy--either way.  It was a confusing mishmash of government regulations and private business requirements.

By late afternoon, though, we were done.  We went back to the cabin and I conked out in a world-class nap for an hour.  When I got up, the temperatures were heading back down again, and it was supposed to be the coldest night yet.  Darwin suggested we just go home now.  I agreed to this proposal.  We swiftly packed up the car, checked out of the campground, and fled back home.

I'm filing this under, "Oh well--we tried."

Darwin has accepted a position as interim village administrator for Blissfield, which is just north of the Michigan's lower border, about 20 minutes from Toledo.  The place is a smidgen closer than Albion is, but it takes 90 minutes of driving to get there, and he can't commute daily.  He'll be working there for about three months or until they find a permanent administrator, whichever comes first.

This means we're spending a chunk of time apart again.  Darwin drives down to Blissfield on Sunday evening, works four ten-hour days, and drives back up Thursday evening.  The village is paying his housing costs when he's down there.

Darwin reports that Blissfield is a very nice town with very nice people. The council really likes his work, and they've made noises about maybe making his interim position permanent. Darwin nicely told them that his family is up here, and he unfortunately can't take a position that far away from home on a permanent basis.

He likes working in Blissfield, though neither of us likes being apart again.  I thought this aspect of his job was over when he left Albion, but apparently not.  It makes for lonely evenings for both of us. 

So to cope, I bought an Oculus Rift.  Who needs a husband when you have VR?

Darwin is no longer working for Albion.  The council decided to give him a severance package.  As you probably guessed, there's a whole lot going on here.  The short, polite, version is that the council made a mistake, and now they're paying for it.  Good.

I'll let you in on a secret: I never liked Albion.  I pretended I did, and tried to see the good parts of the town.  Cute park, surrounded by some nice countryside.  But the longer Darwin and I were associated with the place, the less I liked it.  Run-down, dumpy, half-empty, and filled with insular, short-sighted people.  Half the stores downtown are empty and decaying.  A furniture place has dedicated more space in its show windows to Trump/Pence banners than to actual furniture.  Sure, the town has Albion College, but the college keeps itself to itself, even requires the students to live on-campus.  You don't see any students or other young people around the town itself.  There's no night life, no shopping, no real activities.  The big event of the year is the Festival of the Forks (think "river forks"), and it's a boring, badly-organized affair.  Getting groceries involves a 40-minute drive.  The town has one movie theater that closes at 9 PM.  You get the idea.

Here's a tidbit: back when the Cedar Point amusement park--the one that evolved over the decades into a world-class roller coaster park--was getting started, it selected Albion for its location.  Cedar Point saw the town's many advantages.  Albion is just off a major highway, is equidistant between Detroit and Chicago, easy to reach from a number of places in the Midwest, and is surrounded by inexpensive land that would allow for easy expansion.  It would bring hundreds of jobs to a blue-collar town that had been recently devastated by several factory closings.

Albion said no.  They didn't want an amusement park in their backyard.  Cedar Point instead went to Sandusky, Ohio and became fantastically successful there.  This tells you everything you need to know about Albion.

Our thinking was that this would be Darwin's last job before he retired.  We'd put up with being separated during the school year until I could retire and move there with him.  I had toyed with the thought of looking for teacher job near Albion or even taking early retirement and eating the financial loss so I could at least be with my husband.  So very glad I did neither.

We put the house on the market, hoping it would sell quickly.  The real estate market is hot, hot, HOT everywhere, right?  Also, Albion's housing market is filled with houses that are either super expensive (because they're near the college) or super cheap (because they're falling apart).  There was literally NOTHING mid-range and decent on the market.  Ours was the only house in that category.  Easy sale, yeah?  Nope.  Not in Albion.  We got only a couple showings and no offers.

Meanwhile, Darwin took a temp position as city clerk and treasurer in the city of Charlotte, which is within commuting distance of Albion.  He could continue occupying the house in Albion while we tried to sell it.  We still got nothing.

After a couple months, we were about to take the house off the market when we got a surprise offer.  Yay!  Darwin alerted the temp company that he would have to leave Charlotte in a few weeks.  They made noises about paying his rent at a hotel or apartment if he'd stay for a couple more months, but it didn't actually happen.  C'est la vie.

We closed down the house in Albion.  We packed everything up and divided it into two parts.  One part was stuff that would go to the lake condo in Waterford, and the other part was stuff we'd have to put into storage.  Fortunately, I found a storage facility that's literally within walking distance of the Waterford condo.

It was tricky finding a moving company.  Albion to Waterford is legally a long-distance move that requires a special license, and many companies won't handle that.  With a growing sense of anxiety, I called all around the Albion and Waterford areas.  At last, I found a company that would do the job.  It was a small, mom-and-pop organization, but as long as they did the move, I didn't care how they small they were.

On moving day, two guys showed up with a U-Haul truck and a U-Haul trailer.  The company was so small, they didn't have their own truck!  The guys muscled everything aboard.  At one point, Darwin overheard one of the guys saying that he hadn't had breakfast, and the other guy said that, yeah, he was getting a hunger headache, too.  I went up to them and said, "I'm heading over to MacDonald's for a sack of hamburgers.  Do either of you want anything?"

Huge looks of relief, and one of the movers offered a high-five.  I dashed out and returned with bags of food, which everyone devoured.

Once we arrived in Waterford, the guys muscled a couple huge pieces of furniture upstairs, including a heavy dresser and a bed.  The high-five guy collapsed theatrically to the floor once he set the dresser down.  Then they hauled down a bunch of stuff from the condo that also had to go into storage, drove it over to the storage place, and unloaded it.  It was nine-hour day, in all.  I tipped them huge.

And then Darwin and I had to unpack and rearrange a whole bunch of stuff. 

The entire thing had me thinking "Didn't we JUST do this?" in despair.  Because of course, we had.

But now we're consolidated into one household again.  Darwin is living with me and I with him, and Albion is receding into the distance like a bad memory.

A couple weeks ago, Darwin and I decided enough was enough.  We needed to get away.  But this is a pandemic.  What to do?

Camping!

Of course, Darwin and I don't do tent camping at this point in our lives.  Instead, we go to Campit Campground, an LGBT campground near Saugatuck in west Michigan and rent a cabin.  The campground is huge, and they accommodate tent camping, RV camping, and rustic cabin camping.  And it's all LGBT people.

It was a delightful week.  The weather was perfect--never too hot or too cold.  No bugs.  Darwin ordered firewood from the campground office, and they asked, "How many?"  "Six!" he replied brightly, thinking they meant "how many logs?"  A while later, the campground's errand-runner came out with a trailer piled high with wood.  It was six sections of wood, each one the size of a 1'x1' box.  So we had this huge woodpile, and it forced us to have a campfire every night.  (We still had wood left over!)

Our cabin was basically a wooden box with a knee-high shelf for a bed, though it had a mattress.  It also had a small fridge and a very nice deck. And it was surrounded by gay guys.  They may strike some of you as funny, but I have to tell you--it's so very wonderful knowing every single person around you is like you and supports you and won't be a source of homophobia.  It's why we go to this place.

Usually when Darwin and I go camping (and I realize I'm using the term loosely, here), I don't cook much.  We usually go into town and eat in restaurants.  But with the pandemic, we wanted to keep that to a minimum, and we brought food with us, along with my camp stove.  Darwin had never seen this stove before.  It's old--I got it back when I was in college.  It's the size of two shoe boxes and has a chamber for liquid propane.  You use a tiny hand pump to pressurize it.  I like it better than the stoves that use propane canisters--it's less wasteful.  Darwin was both fascinated and appalled.  "How can you cook on that thing?" he said.

I demonstrated on the first morning by cooking bacon.  Cooking bacon outdoors while camping is cruel for everyone around you.  The wonderful, crispy bacon smell permeates the fresh morning air, and they know they aren't getting any!  The stove impressed Darwin very much.  I cooked nearly all our meals on it all week, and did the usual camping trick of setting water on it to heat while we ate so it would be ready for dish washing afterward.  I didn't know that Darwin had never done any campground cooking before, and he was more than a little amazed at how smoothly it went.

We did run into one problem.  We stopped at the store on our way to the campground, which meant we arrived with a whole mess of bagged groceries, but the cabin had no cupboards or shelves or anything.  We put the food and kitchen equipment under the bed, but it was highly disorganized and difficult to find anything, which makes my teeth ache.  The next time we were in town, we stopped at another store and I searched for . . . laundry baskets!  Two of them.  One for food, and one for kitchen stuff.  Everything went into the baskets, and the baskets slid neatly under the bed.  Ta da!

We lazed around Saugatuck and South Haven, two of our favorite Michigan towns.  Saugatuck is crowded with vacationers, even during a pandemic, and we amazed ourselves by scoring a perfect parking place right at the edge of downtown.  We kept our masks on, even outdoors, and so did almost everyone else.  Progress!

We also came across The Lake Problem.

The Great Lakes are riding way high this season.  No, seriously.  They're higher than any time in recorded history.  And nowhere was this more evident than in Saugatuck and South Haven.  Both of them are lake towns, with docks and piers right on the streets.  Usually the water levels are low enough that you have to climb down a short ladder on the dock to get to a boat.  Now?  Many of the docks are underwater.  Water has encroached into the streets, forcing some to close.  The Saugatuck Fire Department (which is on the river because it also rescues boats) was flooded.  Many houses are inches from water in the living room.  Inches.  Water pumps were everywhere, gamely gooshing water out of the street and back into the lake, only to have it return a few minutes later.  Nature always wins in the end.

We love South Haven so much that we joke about Darwin becoming city manager there one day as a retirement job.  While we were out there, he learned by accident that South Haven is currently looking for a new city manager. (!!)  He isn't going to apply, but it was a head-shaking moment.

We shopped and ate ice cream (and made sure Darwin used his insulin pump) and worked out bits of local history by studying the architecture of buildings and houses (What?  What do YOU do on vacation?). 

And we hunted graveyards.

See, Darwin has a number of ancestors who are buried out in that area, and he wanted to find their graves.  For a couple a days, we wandered through Niles and Berrien Springs.  Here, I was invaluable.  Totally true!  (Since this blog is All About Me.)  One graveyard surrounded a white, clapboard church way out in the country, a church that Darwin's great-grandparents helped found.  Their graves were somewhere in the graveyard, and I finally found them.  They were only a few yards from the church, and as far as Darwin and I could tell, they must have been among the first people buried there.  It was very interesting.

A side note: the church's outhouse was still standing.  It was divided into two sections, each with two seats.  I said to Darwin, "Your great-grandparents pooped in here."  And he nodded sagely.

Back to my invaluable-ness: Later, outside Niles, we were hunting through another cemetery for the grave of another ancestor, though this one didn't have the last name McClary.  We looked and looked, but found nothing.  Finally, I found something that made my jaw drop.  Darwin was in another part of the graveyard, distracted by an odd inscription.  I trotted over to him.

"Come over here and look," I said.

"Hold on," he said.  "I want to see what--"

"No, no," I interrupted.  "You want to see this.  Right now."

Sighing at the perfidy of husbands, he trudged over to where I was pointing and at last realization came over him.  =His= jaw dropped.  In the middle back of the graveyard, occupying a prominent position, was a large stone marker engraved with one word: MCCLARY.

This was a major find.  Darwin didn't know that he had a McClary presence in this graveyard.  Darwin immediately set about checking the stones.  He found a number of relatives buried in that plot, and these were graves he wasn't sure he'd ever see.  One was for a great-great uncle who lived on his own farm all his life, never married, and who eventually committed suicide by poison.  Darwin suspects that he was gay, and the guilt and pressure from a homophobic society and upbringing finally forced him over the edge.  I agree with him.

It must also be said that Darwin had a miracle find of his own.  We scoured the little graveyard, which was surrounded by a thick woodland on three sides and on the fourth by a busy road, looking for the non-McClary ancestor Darwin really wanted to find, and came up empty.  Finally, we called it a day and got into the car.  As I was driving toward the exit, Darwin yelped, "Wait! Wait! Stop!"

I did, and he got out.  A gravestone we had both seen before but passed over because it was too hard to read, had become legible after the sun moved and changed the way the shadows fell.  Darwin happened to catch sight of it as we were heading out, and it was the very grave he'd come there to find.  Win!

As we're wont to do, Darwin and I also spent some time exploring small town downtowns, commenting on the old buildings and whether the place was a decent one or not.  Many of the small downtowns we looked at had basically been wrecked by the local highway system.  Back when the state started linking up little towns with the then-new highways, the state just incorporated the town's main street into the highway.  The towns initially welcomed this--it brought more traffic and people to town.  But this was back when "traffic" still involved horses and those new-fangled automobiles that went a shocking thirty miles an hour.  As time went on, cars became faster, and semi trucks appeared on the scene, and they all use a highway system designed back in the 1920s. 

Now, the nice little downtowns are being wrecked by roaring traffic.  You might we strolling down the sidewalk, wondering if there's a cafe for lunch, when two semis and a dump truck bellow past you in a cloud of acrid diesel fumes, followed by a long line of cars that whoosh and rush and drown out both conversation and enjoyment.  And none of them are stopping in the downtown to shop or eat or do anything.  To them, the town is just a place that slows you down for a minute before you pound back up to 55.  It's a terrible shame, but it does give Darwin and me something to complain about.  You take your wins where you can.

The weather continued to be a delight--warm during the day, cool at night.  Perfect for campfires.  It was a fine week!

In non-rioting news, we got word that Ruby Rose, the first LGBT person to play an LGBT lead on a super-hero show, has decided to leave BATWOMAN after one season. Rumor has it that the punishing schedule proved too crushing for her. The CW has announced that, rather than recast the role, they're creating an entirely new character to become Batwoman. They're still planning to hire a lesbian, and Batwoman will continue to be an out LGBT super-hero. Well, cool, then. I would rather they had recast the role and gone ahead, but this could work, too.

But that's not what I really wanted to talk about.

This incident potentially sheds light on something I'd noticed about BATWOMAN. Did anyone else see it?

They seemed almost afraid to have Batwoman appear on her own show.

No, really. The show seemed to be working overtime to keep Kathy Kane out of the cowl. When Alice persuaded/forced Kathy to break into Arkham with her, for example, the show twisted the plot so that Kathy wore a rabbit mask instead of her Batwoman costume. In another show, they had Kathy be so upset about killing someone that she couldn't bear to put the costume on, and only wore it in the last couple minutes of the show. In fact, on multiple episodes, Batwoman showed up only in the climactic scene.

I started getting ticked. Why wouldn't they let Kathy be Batwoman? Supergirl spends most of her episodes wearing the big red S. The Flash and Green Arrow both wore their costumes at least half the time. Why didn't Kathy get into her costume more? Are they depowering the lesbian, perhaps? It seemed possible, even likely, given the history of LGBT characters in the media.

But with this bit of new news, I'm wondering if Ruby Rose actually had something to do with it. Perhaps getting into and out of the costume was more time-consuming than she was willing to handle, and she pushed the writers into changing the stories around so she could wear it less often.

Did anyone else who watched the show notice this, or was it just me?

 

Now that I've denigrated comics, I have to tell you that this page makes me tear up. I can't tell you how much it would have meant to twelve-year-old me. It's why representation matters.

Our Albion Saga continues:

The silverware was still missing.  We searched through all the boxes, all the bins, everywhere.  No silverware.  It was seriously weird.  I remembered dividing it up and packing it, but it was nowhere to be found.

The following weekend, Darwin came to Wherever, and we did more shopping for house stuff, including curtains.

I should note here that, per tradition, the previous homeowners had left their drapes up. However, they were on cheap-ass rods (you know the kind--the easily-bent aluminum POS rods) and the fabric was more of that dull, dingy brown, with white sheers underneath.  Yuck!  So when the painters took them down, Darwin just tossed them all.  But that left the house with no curtains.  Fortunately, the way the house and the neighbors are positioned, it's difficult to see into most of the windows after dark.  In the bedroom, we took to propping flattened moving boxes against the glass.

We browsed Bed, Bath, and Beyond, but the curtains were hugely expensive, especially considering we were draping an entire house.  We looked at Ikea, but (and I can't cherry-coat this) their curtains sucked ass.

At last we ended up at JCPenney's.  You can tell Penney is going under, at least at Twelve Oaks Mall.  (Sears is already gone.)  A large section of the store has been blocked off with no explanation, though it's obvious they're cutting back on inventory and don't want to say so.  We sidled into the drapery section and found the right style of curtains, but not the right colors.  Regardless, we needed dozens of curtains, and Penney only carried a few of each kind.

We ended up talking to a friendly clerk, who offered to order what we wanted, which would have the additional advantage of shipping--the curtains would go straight to the house in Albion.  In about a week.

Meanwhile, I went out to Albion again for a weekend.  It's not easy doing the apart thing.  Part of my and Darwin's routine is evenings spent in our shared office at our desks.  Every so often, we share something we find or bring something up for discussion.  Or we laugh over something stupid.  Now that's ended.  I'm not used to sleeping alone, either.  When I was single, I didn't move much when I slept, and when I got up in the morning, I basically just twitched the bedclothes back into place and the bed was made.  But when Darwin and I share a bed, we tend to climb all over each other in our sleep, and by morning the bed looks like the results of an explosion in a sheet factory.  These days, it's back to twitching. 

The house is far emptier.  It's just Max and me most of the time, and quite a lot of the time it's just me.  It's lonely and unhappy-making.  For the first two years we saw each other, Darwin and I looked forward intensely to living together--and, when it became legal, being married.  We could eat dinners together and sleep in the same bed every single night instead of just weekends.  When we moved in together, the dream was realized.  I was happy knowing Darwin was there, and he with me. 

Now we're back to living apart and seeing each other on weekends and odd holidays.  My life feels as empty and echoey as the house.  I'm not writing as much, and I have a tendency to stress eat.  I'm sure these areas will improve as I (we) regain my equilibrium, but the thought of spending the next few years like this . . . well, I'm unhappy about it.

In the meantime, I've changed my attitude toward the house in Wherever.  I knew we'd have to sell it eventually.  It's a huge house, and it's silly to pour so much money into a place with space we aren't going to use.  But I liked the house.  I like the layout, I like the space, I like the location, I like the trees around it, I like the neighborhood (despite the leaf blower brigade), and I love my big, shady, leafy front porch with its comfortable furniture and perfect writing ambience.  I acknowledged that we'd be selling, but secretly I was thinking how nice it would be to put it off for a while.

Now?  Darwin's mostly gone, Max is leaving soon, and the thought of being mostly alone in this giant space has overriden my love of the house. Now I'm looking forward to selling it and getting a small, cozier place in the Wherever area.  I'll live there until I can retire and rejoin Darwin--or he leaves the Albion job and rejoins me.  Whichever.

And we still can't find the silverware.

While we were in the middle of all that house-hunting, the Festival of the Forks arrived, and Darwin was specifically asked to attend.  He agreed, and we made arrangements to stay in Albion for that weekend.  We had to be in Albion anyway because Darwin (and therefore I) had been invited to attend Albion College's annual banquet for distinguished alumni.

At the banquet, we met a whole pile of people, all of whom told Darwin how glad they were that he had accepted the job.  This was a little overwhelming for both of us--never had Darwin been greeted with such enthusiasm, nor had he come across a community in which so many people cared so deeply about the position of city manager.

I should mention here, though, that Albion's most recent city manager was left under a cloud of scandal.  Also, the managers before that were apparently iffy at best (from what various citizens told us) and did little to pull the city forward.  To a one, these managers focused on trying to bring back manufacturing, and they all failed.  So the community was desperate for someone with both experience and new ideas.  This is Darwin.

Anyway, the banquet was very interesting, way more so than I anticipated.  Five Albion alumni had been selected as distinguished, and during the banquet, each stood up and gave a speech.  As a speech teacher, I tend to nitpick other people's speaking, and though I don't show it, I get bored easily during bad speeches.  The first speech didn't disappoint.  The recipient was so quiet, you could barely hear.  But then the next lady took the podium and gave a speech reminiscent of a Baptist preacher.  She was getting her moment to shine, dammit, and she was taking it!  She was great!  And then another woman spoke, a former teacher who knew what she was doing with a microphone.  And then a combat veteran who was both funny and poignant.

Back at our room, Darwin and I rested for a while--I'd worked all day before the banquet and was tired.  But finally we decided to go out and see the festival.  We headed out at about ten minutes before nine--and found the festival was shutting down for the night.  Totally dead.  People were heading for parking lots and houses.  We were a little startled and disappointed.  We contented ourselves with exploring the darkened side streets and getting a feel for the residential areas.

Saturday we attended the festival proper.  This started with a parade down the main street, in which Darwin and I walked.  We were there with firefighters and the school marching band and the police and convertibles with local business luminaries in them.  No floats, oddly. 

I'd never done a parade before, and I don't think anyone much knew who I was or why I was walking with the city councilors, but I waved at everyone anyway.  It was kind of fun.  The parade passed by a booth with an LGBT rainbow on it.  I was surprised and curious, both.  They waved enthusiastically at Darwin.  I made a mental note to go back.

After we finished the parade, Darwin and I went back through the main street to explore the festival properly.  Darwin got hung up talking to police and paramedics at the Public Safety tent, and I suddenly remembered the rainbow booth.  I trotted down the street and found them.  The booth was staffed by two older women and a young man.  I introduced myself as the husband of the new city manager, and they were happy to see me.  Well, really they were happy about Darwin.  I asked what the gay community is like in Albion.

"There isn't much of one," the young man said.  "We're not really organized.  This group we've started is new."

I brought Darwin down to meet them, to more enthusiasm. 

"We're really glad to see a gay city manager," one of the women said.  "It helps so much."

The straight community often thinks that there's this vast network of LGBT people these days, and to an extent that's true, but it's pretty much confined to large cities.  Small towns and rural areas are hurting in this regard.  Even with the Internet, LGBT people in outlying areas are often isolated, not only because there are fewer such people to network with, but also because homophobia and threats of violence are still ongoing concerns.

Darwin and I explored the rest of the festival.  Everyone we talked to had hyped it up, so our expectations were high.  It was . . . nice.  Some fun exhibits and a bit of shopping.  But we ran into a number of oddities.  The biggest one was that it shut down very early every day.  On Friday, as I said, it was over by 9 PM, and Saturday it ended at 7 PM.  There was no festival on Sunday at all.  A small fight broke out at one point, and Darwin and I happened to be present when the police were talking about it with the guy in charge of organizing the festival. 

"Next year, we should shut down earlier," the cops said.

 Darwin and I exchanged glances.  Earlier?  They were barely open as it was!

The festival was also split up and spread all around Albion. On the main street were a few booths for local organizations and businesses, along with a stage where local acts played every so often.  The food sellers were three or four blocks away, down at an area normally reserved for the farmer's market.  The beer tent was similarly a few minutes' walk away.  A carnival with kiddie rides and games set up in a small park, also distant from the main street.

This mystified Darwin and me.  Why split up the festival?  Festivals depend on crowds that themselves draw more crowds.  A scattered festival has an empty feel.  Darwin later learned that the food sellers all wanted to be in the farmer's market, so the festival let them be down there.  I pointed out that the stage was usually empty, and there should be an act there every moment the festival is running.  The food sellers should be set up on one of the nearby side streets, and the carnival (which should also have rides for teens and adults, not just small children) should be on another side street.  The parade, which interrupts the festival on Saturday morning, should be moved to Friday afternoon, to kick everything off.  The festival needs more booths, especially artists, crafters, and other merchants, instead of focusing on local organizations.  It also needs activities that take advantage of the river--a rubber ducky race, canoe floats, rafting.

Well, next year . . .

The following week, the city held a special welcome reception for Darwin, and they wanted me to come, too.

Now that this is all settled, I can write about it publicly.

You can look it up in the papers, and the papers usually have chunks of it wrong.  Here's what happened:

Darwin's police chief in Ypsilanti left, which meant Darwin had to hire someone new.  He farmed out the initial selection process to a company that deals with such things. They winnowed through the applicants and turned a handful back to him for interviews.  One of those was a lieutenant in the Ypsilanti Fire Department.  The Ypsilanti city charter specifically prohibits the council from having input in hiring practices. That's the sole responsibility of the city manager.  But more than once council member illegally let Darwin know they wanted the internal candidate as the new hire.  The internal candidate, however, was absolutely not qualified for the job. He didn't have the required education background, and he additionally had failed to complete course work he had promised to do years earlier.  Darwin also found irregularities in his application.  Meanwhile, a candidate from Livonia applied who had the education, background, and experience the job required.  Darwin offered him the job.  He accepted and signed the contract.

The internal candidate was black.  The Livonia candidate was white.  The councilors who were pressing Darwin to hire the internal candidate were black.

The city council, in a hastily-called closed meeting, told Darwin that he could either resign or be fired.  Officially, he resigned, but we all know it means they fired him.

Darwin and I were both extremely upset.  The city I had lived in for twenty years and which Darwin had come to love had fired him for racist reasons.  I've now become so angry at the council that I can't consider living in Ypsilanti again.  It also ended our friendship with the city's mayor, who refused to stand up for Darwin.  I can't stand the sight of her, and she should hang her head in shame.

However, Darwin negotiated a separation settlement from Ypsilanti. The council resisted at first, but in the end they knew that if Darwin sued them for discrimination and for violation of contract, they'd lose, and badly.  So they handed it over.

Darwin started a job hunt right away.  Several weeks went by, but he got no nibbles from the applications he sent out.  He was getting worried that fallout from Ypsilanti was following him, despite the fact that he had fielded several phone calls from people in city management who told him flat-out that everyone in the municipal community knew Ypsilanti had treated him badly.  I told him the lack of calls arose from it being summer time--too many people on vacation to get much done.  Still, he worried.

In the meantime, he hung around the house.  This was strangely difficult.  I love Darwin deeply, but having him home every minute was strangely wearing.  It did mean we could eat supper at a decent hour (Darwin often gets home after 7:00 PM, making it difficult to eat together), but he was a relentless presence around the house, and it wasn't something I was used to.  I began to understand stay-at-home wives who spent their entire marriage alone during the day in an arrangement that made everyone happy until the husband retired and found himself not knowing what to do with himself all day at home.  Such husbands are notorious for following their wives around like lost puppies, driving everyone nuts until a new equilibrium is established.  Darwin didn't follow me around all summer, but he was indeed around all the time, and neither of us quite knew how to respond to that.

Darwin applied at some places in our general area.  He also applied at places farther away, and even some that were out-of-state.  One city in Connecticut expressed a great deal of interest in him as a candidate, and they were enthusiastic to the point that we were eyeing houses and working out logistics, and then suddenly all contact with them ended.  Weeks and weeks went by.  Nothing.  They hadn't hired anyone else, either.  (Several months later, they finally hired an internal candidate, but they still never contacted Darwin again.)

Our plan, if Darwin got a job far away, was that he would move to the new town and I would stay in Wherever until Max graduated, since he's in his senior year.  Then I would take an early retirement, sell the house, and move out with him.

The summer passed slowly.  I went on the exchange trip to Germany and returned.  Still no interviews or offers.  Right around the time Darwin was getting seriously unhappy, he got a call to interview in Albion.

More coming . . .