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I started writing this almost a week ago at the airport and finished it just today.

I’m on my way back home to Bloomington, and like my trip back from DC around the New Year, I spent my morning meandering through the city and navigating mass transit to get to the airport. Once again, the solitude feels especially strange after an effervescent, caffeinated few days of seeing new places, meeting new people, and all of this craziness and excitement intertwined with strange and powerful moments of intimacy. Its strange how two very different trips undertaken under very different circumstances, can feel remarkably the same.

The public transportation is crucial. Not only does figuring out the timetables and routes give one a cheap sense of accomplishment, there’s an exhilaration in the humanity of public transit. While the staff on an airplane are painfully courteous, its the bus drivers who are really accommodating. The driver on the 125 that I took from downtown Detroit to the airport seemed completely happy to stop arbitrarily between marked stops for passengers and be flagged down by a honking automobile to admit a last-minute rider, all the time being engaged in conversation with another passenger.

Detroit has a bad reputation. Images of burning buildings around Halloween, a seemingly ubiquitous feature of any motion picture about the city, come to mind. Some folks tabling for Boxcar once had their van stolen when tabling at a show in Detroit and they vehemently vow to never return. When I was younger and visiting relatives in Troy, we drove through Detroit, and I remember my father speaking of the city totally in the past tense, pointing out things that were once there. Walking around Detroit, you do get a certain sense of decay. There are vacant lots that seem to be returning to a sort of wilderness, complete with animals like pheasants, certainly not known as a bird to inhabit urban spaces. There are buildings hanging in what could be a perpetual state of partial demolition. There are other buildings that still stand intact, but whose facade of plywood hide the lifeless gaping eyes and mouths of broken windows and doors. The contraction of the city seems apparent with residents walking down the middle of broad avenues in the same way that I would walk with my friends down Seventh Street on the Near West Side of Bloomington. Riding bicycles feels anarchic – a combination of cutting across sidewalks, lots, and going the wrong way down one way streets. The car-centric culture is definitely not accommodating to cyclists, but at the same time, you can occupy whole lanes of traffic as on some streets, you only have to contend with a trickle of cars across three lanes of an avenue. Jenny, the friend that I had gone to visit, told me how public infrastructure like the power grid or the city’s trash incinerator were designed to accommodate a more booming Detroit of years past and now exist as a model of inefficiency. The street lights tell and retell this story. Jenny said that they sometimes stay on during the day, or during the summer, in times of power overconsumption, will be cycled off for certain neighborhoods. All the streetlights bear odd, shoddy plastic sleeves around their bases, deployed citywide to prevent people from tapping into their power sources.

At a first glance, the city appears desolate. But on the sunny weekend, a rarity I’m told, that I experienced, the empty lots and broad streets provide a line of site from one part of the city to most others, creating a comforting sense of wholeness, of connectedness. In the darkness of the silent buildings at night, on the clear nights, the stars shone with a light as piercing as the cold. In a sense, all the vastness and empty streets seemed to make the pockets of human energy pop with a similar potent excitement: the young families awaiting the jazz band at the art museum; the house party where the host proclaimed the next morning, still a bit drunk, “I’m in love with everything right now – if George Bush were here, I would make out with him”; the snap of fingers, percussion of applause, and chorus of boos and encouraging exclamations and the collective, long delayed, exhale of the audience at the poet’s last words at the citywide youth poetry slam; the crowds milling about at a film screening or the produce stalls of the Eastern market, and the hung-over punks spilling out of booths around the old-time band at the diner. In spite of all the space, all the emptiness, these experiences gave my days in the city a feeling of smallness and intimacy.

Certainly this is the idealized perspective of a visitor to the city, and especially a visitor who hails from a town that could, in many ways, be the polar opposite of a city like Detroit. It just feels so different to see all these people who are returning to the city where they grew up, their lives still inexorably linked with a place that’s maybe familiar, but also new because their lives are now caught all up in it. Back in Bloomington, people come and go with the month. Not to mention the rep again, but I have to explain to folks why I want to visit Detroit, and I can’t imagine some of the conversations residents have when explaining why they choose to live there. For me, not a show goes by on tour where I don’t meet somebody who wants to move to Bloomington. And it makes me think, just once in a while, I’d like to walk out my door and have to actively make the decision that I really want to be living in the town where I live. Bloomington is great, in many ways, and I’ve met a few older people who had come here decades ago and decided to stay, and I have a few friends who have bought houses and put down roots. But when someone I consider a Bloomington OG, who has history and ties and obligations to this town talks about how she’s thinking about moving to the Bay Area, its hard for this whole place to not feel a little bit fleeting.

I remember last year when I went to Toronto on tour and I had this thought, that something just felt more multi-cultural about the city and in some more real way and not the “Faculty and Staff Policy Issues Committee Convener for IU’s comission on Multicultural Understanding” (yes, someone in Bloomington has that job title, apparently) sort of way. I thought that this was a ridiculous idea until I was talking with Olivia, who lives in Toronto, and she told me that the first thing she noticed when she visited American cities was how segregated they seemed. I had the same feeling of things just being different with regards to ethnicity when I was in Detroit. The people I was around just seemed so unappologetic about who they were, and how ethnicity was a part of that, whether it was the couple walking towards the house on a Sunday morning who offered us something from the big white box of treats from the Chinese bakery, or Blair performing a poem that might be the only time you’ll ever hear Michael Jackson listed as figure of Black empowerment alongside other figures more known for their struggle than their scandal (and it all makes perfect, powerful sense). Just now, I wanted to write that I felt like I was around more Asian folks in the weekend that I spent in Detroit than I had in years. This isn’t true, because I see Rawny and Sherri all the time, but the fact that I forget this seems telling. It was just nice to share “what’s your nationality?” stories (and sadly, everybody has them) and to have them sound like inside jokes instead of something where we have to explain the punch-line. And it was startling, to run my fingers through my friend’s hair for and realize that it felt more like my own than any that I had felt since I was grabbing at my dad as a little kid. For so long, I always talked about my ethnic identity in terms of what I didn’t share (“no one at my school thought of me as different” or “I never really had to deal with much racism”) instead of the things, even the little things, that I held in common with people.

So it was a good trip, and for all its newness and excitedness, when I got back to Bloomington, the chill of the great lakes giving way to an unseasonably warm, sunny day of digging around in the back yard with Oliver, Florence, and Oona and just today, when I was talking with Sparky and our conversation seemed to cover all the ground that sums up exactly what this time of the year is- being just beyond the final death knell of some things and just ahead of the chirp and murmer of other new and exciting things, I realized that I was quite glad to be home.