Reference and Reverie Essays and Reports BY MELISSA WALSH

The Big Return

10/15/24

By Melissa Walsh

Photo by Jana Klouckova Kudrnová on Unsplash

I couldn’t stop crying during the flight home. A flight attendant asked me several times if I was okay. I let her know that I was fine; I just couldn’t stop crying.

Vraćam se kući (“I’m returning home”), I thought as I settled into my seat for the flight from Frankfurt to Sarajevo. It felt like returning to myself. To my dreams. And to my heartbreak.

I had a window seat, which on the descent exposed me to a clear aerial view of Sarejevo’s Bare Cemetery, the largest cemetery in Europe. I was still fighting back tears as I exited the plane. Then hearing the language that was once so familiar to me comforted me as I made my way through and out of the airport.

May 1989

I was last in Sarajevo 35 years ago. I departed (why is another story) in tears May 3, 1989 on a train to Belgrade, where a woman in her late sixties, a war veteran (a WWII Partisan fighter - Tito’s forces) and German prison-camp survivor, lodged me and fed me. (How I knew this woman is a story in itself.) She also cried with me. “Return,” she said (in Serbo-Croatian). “Return to Detroit. Go home, back to your parents, to your friends in America. It’s not good in Yugoslavia. Too much crisis. A lousy economy. No work. Everyone is arguing.”

But I would be heading back to Vienna, where I was living at the time. I packed for a two-and-a-half-week trip in Poland with friends. (The Poland trip is another story.) Then following Poland, I was briefly in Vienna, packing up all my things to head back to my permanent address in the States.

I couldn’t stop crying during the flight home. A flight attendant asked me several times if I was okay. I let her know that I was fine; I just couldn’t stop crying. This wasn’t normal for me. Despite all the references to crying above, I’m not and never have been much of a crier. Looking back now, I suppose that 21-year old me was having a break down.

I had been offered the opportunity to stay in Europe (Belgrade). I had written to my parents about this opportunity and how excited I was about it. I thought they’d be happy for me, and so proud of me for earning this opportunity.

But my mom responded with a letter that broke my heart. Apparently, I must have also broken hers as well, because the prose she sent me could only have been written from a pen dipped in ink laced heavily with disappointment. She and my dad did not understand why I wanted to be Europe in the first place, especially to Yugoslavia of all places. They didn’t understand how hard I had worked to earn the scholarships and grants I won to get me through earning my degree in International Studies, which included a semester in Sarajevo, a semester in Vienna, and a seminar traveling the Mediterranean. They didn’t attend university themselves, and they had no desire to travel overseas.

To appease my parents, I went and stayed for a while in their house, my new permanent address, built by my dad and brother in 1987. So it was not the house I grew up in. I got a job working at the mall (Gantos) to pay for gas and my gym membership. I hung out with high school friends, most of whom were already married with real jobs. I typed up my resume and sent it out with cover letter to scores of HR representatives, hoping for an international role so that I could use the languages I could speak fairly well: German, French, and Serbo-Croatian.

The U.S. economy was slipping (though not as bad as Yugoslavia’s, which had hit close to 3,000 percent inflation in 1989). Finding a professional job with my new bachelor’s degree in International Studies wasn’t panning out. My best offer, in 1990, was a job in the University of Michigan graduate library. I accepted it and rented a little apartment on Packard in Ann Arbor. A few months later, I landed a better-paying job at Detroit’s Wayne State University in the International Services Office. So I settled back into the guest room at my parents’ house.

I dated during this time, my parents so hopeful that I’d meet a guy as responsible and hard-working as my dad. Then we’d get married and settle down to raise kids for the next 20 years or so. “You could be a teacher with your degree, right?” my dad asked me all the time (eye-roll). “No, I can’t,” I reminded him. “I went to school to be a diplomat, to work for the State Department, or somewhere else where I can apply my degree in International Studies, and also speak the languages I know.

“You can’t do that,” my mom would chime in. “How would you raise a family?” (Me: another eye-roll.)

While working at Wayne State University, I took advantage of the tuition benefit and went to graduate school to study linguistics with a focus on South Slavic languages. This is when I hatched a plan to return to Yugoslavia: I applied for a Fulbright Scholarship to research the syntax of “Italian-type” Slavic languages at the University of Novi Sad in the province of Vojvodina, Yugoslavia. And to my great delight, I was awarded the scholarship. I would head to Novi Sad in the fall of 1992.

That didn’t pan out either. Due to the war intensifying in the Krajina region, the Fulbright was canceled. The wars in Yugoslavia waged, and I watched the news helplessly. I tried to contact friends. Letters were returned with the spine-chilling Zbog rata … (“Due to the war…”) stamp.

One responsibility led to another, and one distraction led to another. By 1996, I was working in a publishing house in Detroit as a book editor, married, and pregnant. Then fast-forward to 2003, I was a divorced mom of four sons under six.

Fast-forward to 2024, though I checked the “raised sons” box, I still hadn’t returned to Yugoslavia. But during all these years, I continued listening to the Yugoslavian music that was popular in the late-1980s: by Crvena Jabuka, Bijelo Jugme, Bajaga, and more. I still dreamt in Serbo-Croatian once in a while. And whenever I happened to hear Serbo-Croatian being spoken, I’d converse with the speakers.

Sarajevo 2.0

My Plan C to return to, now former, Yugoslavia, was to get work in an international organization once my sons were raised. That chance came this year — 2024. I was selected as an OSCS short-term election observer in Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH).

When I arrived in Sarajevo early October 2024, people seemed content, the war forgotten, a new generation leading. But for me the nightmare resurfaced — the ghosts of friends who were killed/disappeared, the unanswered important questions starting with “why” and “how,” the vanished or forgotten dreams of my generation of Sarajevans. I remembered and grieved the Sarajevo of 1987-89 that I loved so dearly — a thriving hipster scene in the heart of the Balkans.

I cringed from the happy, trouristy chatter I heard around me among follow election observers who had not known pre-war Sarajevo. Seeing women and burkas and retail signs in Arabic script made feel like I was in Dearborn, Michigan, which is a cool place, but not the Sarajevo I remembered. Sarajevo of the 1980s was thoroughly progressive and chic, sans a few old-timers living in the Stari Grad (old city) who still sported throwback Turkish attire.

Walking through the city, I slowed to get a good look at the many buildings still pockmarked from war, some curiously partially rebuilt as hybrid historic and modern single structures, the modern section being a rebuild following a mortar blast. The streetcars also were old and new. I swear that a few that I rode in 2024 were the same I rode in during the late 1980s. Some graffiti endure for decades despite chipping paint.

At the Trema Hotel, where I stayed before heading off to my monitoring assignment, I became more closely acquainted with some OSCE EOM observers. I had a compelling conversation with an Irishman from Donegal named Aiden, a seasoned EOM observer. He was as interested in learning about Detroit as I was learning about Donegal. Quite, in fact. I probably bored him with the Irish emigration stories from both sides of my family (Ballina on my father’s side and Belfast on my mother’s) that I tend to torture Irish nationals with. We fell into talking about Rwanda, where he was participated in conflict-resolution efforts during the 1990s. He said, “You realize how humans have such a capacity for evil. And you know where you really see it? Look at Northern Ireland.”

I also connected with a young woman named Megan from Washington DC, who had lived and worked in Sarajevo briefly before being evacuated by the U.S. State Department due to the COVID outbreak in 2020. Megan and I drew in Blanche, an attorney and former judge from Chicago, who had 12 OSCE EOMs under her belt.

Megan, Blanche, and I hopped on a streetcar to Stari Grad, where we wandered, landing in the baščaršija for ćevačići, pita, coffee, and a round of šljivo for the ditch. Megan was a welcome guide, as it took me a while to get my bearings again in Sarajevo. I mean, it had been 35 years! But my mind was squeezed by this excursion, the memories seeping out. And Megan and Blanche were gracious recipients of this flow memory ooze.

After Megan headed off to have dinner with a local friend, Blanche and I continued wandering, not straying too far off a direct path back to Hotel Trema, which was way daleko from Sarajevo’s Stari Grad.

I expressed to Blanche my desire to work in the foreign service, as my sons were raised and adulting. Being in my late fifties, I shared my concerns about not realizing this desire in time before the age-60 cutoff. Blanche encouraged me with her own story of passing the foreign service officer exam at age 58 and landing a job in the U.S. State Department in 2019 at 59. Blanche’s advice felt like a providential nudge.

I was wearing heals; so not long after walking through the area where Titova Ulica (Tito Street) meets the Miljacka river, we hailed a taxi. I shared with Blanche how in the late 80s, I used to meet my friends on Titova Ulica for the night out. We, Sarajevo’s young people, referred to this part of the street as mjesto sastanka ("the meeting place"). Each evening, this scene packed with groups of friends greeting each other and heading out for that evening’s shenanigans.

In those days, Sarajevo’s young people called their language Serbo-Croatian, or Yugoslavian. It’s the same language spoken today in Sarajevo, only that what one calls it has become a political statement. It’s like how the coffee one drank in Sarajevo in the 80s was called trkska kafa, or just kafa. Today, labeling the kafa as bosanska or srpska is also a political statement. Some, like me, stay neutral, calling it domaća (domestic) kafa.

Višegrad 2.0

My OSCE EOM assignment was October 4 to 8 in Vešegrad, BiH. I stayed at the Hotel Andrićgrad in the new Andrićgrad section of the city, built between 2012 and 2014 by film director and musician Emir Kusturica (a native of Sarajevo from a secular muslim family). At the section’s entrance is a statue of the Brače Sokolovići (Sokolović brothers). Inside is a statue of late Nobel prize-winning author Ivo Andrić (a native of Travnik from a Bosnian Croat family). All inscriptions are in Cyrillic only. A large, newly built, Serbian Orthodox Church sits at the end of the section, on the river’s edge. Inside it are icons recently donated by the Russian Federation. A fresco over the Andrić cinema entrance depicts Mlada Bosna’s Gavrilo Princip. Another portrays Bosnian Serb politician Milorad Dodik, with Emir Kusturica directly behind him, leading a group of contemporary men from BiH in tug-of-war.

I couldn’t help noticing many seemingly well-fed and friendly stray dogs and cats roaming the Višegrad streets. I observed locals being kind to them, speaking sweetly to them, petting them, and feeding them. But when two dogs began getting rowdy, fighting or playing (not sure), a waiter from a nearby cafe darted toward them with a taser. He didn’t hurt them with it. He only scared them off. I was sitting at a table in said cafe enjoying a beer and about choked with fright when I heard the taser/dog noises.

I stayed in a second-floor corner room with a view of the Drina river and the famous bridge over it. In the late 80s, I delighted in being in close proximity to this bridge, the namesake of the novel for which Ivo Andrić won the Nobel Prize for Literature — The Bridge on the Drina. Seeing it in 2024, I couldn’t refrain from viewing the bridge in the context of “the bridge murders” of 1992, when more than 300 Bosnian Muslim civilians of Višegrad were murdered, their bodies tossed into the Drina from the bridge.

I can’t get into the details of my election-observation activities at Višegrad polling stations. I’ll just note that Bosnian hospitality remains strong and wonderful; so this hasn’t changed from the 80s. Prior to 1992, Višegrad was an ethnically mixed community of Yugoslavia. Today, it is a Bosnian Serb (Republika Srpska) community of BiH. The Bosnian code of conduct of showing exceptionally amiable hospitality toward strangers remains, despite the wicked ethnic-cleansing of certain neighbors during the brutal war.

I will share one polling-station vignette: A car pulled up close to the entrance of the polling station (a school). Two young men climbed out of the rear to help an elderly man out from the front passenger seat. The elderly man must’ve been over 100-years old, moving with difficulty, hunched over. He was wearing a World War II-era Četnik cap. As he entered the building, he was greeted by all there with loud applause and cheers.

Wandering through Višegrad during my four days there, I noted the political graffiti I encountered, my Serbo-Croatian and ability to read Cyrillic in tact. I found it disturbing. I’ve embedded a few images of it below.

Back to the Old Neighborhood

Just as Višegrad transformed from a Yugoslav city to a Bosnian Serb city since I was last there in the 80s, so has Sarajevo transformed from a Yugoslav city to a Bosnian Muslim city, that is, apart from the Grbavica neighborhood, which lies across the river from the University of Sarajevo’s Filosofski Falkutet, where I studied in the 80s. I lived in Grbavica then, when it was a neighborhood of Yugoslavs in Sarajevo, speaking Serbo-Croatian, drinking Turkish coffee, and not talking about being Serb, Croat, or Muslim. Today, the neighborhood is part of the Republika Srpska segment of Sarajevo. It is where Sarajevans drink Serbian coffee at cafes with a view of graffiti in Cyrillic.

In the 80s, I bought beautiful clothing made in Yugoslavia and handmade crafts made in Sarajevo. I returned to the U.S. with made-in-Yugoslavia leather jacket and boots, wool sweaters and skirts, and handcrafted goods from the baščaršija. High-quality, gorgeous products.

In 2024, I didn’t see anything in BiH that was made locally or regionally. Even baščaršija goods are slapped with labels identifying them as made in China or elsewhere. Hotels and retail-goods stores are now owned by big business out of the U.S., U.K. Germany, or Austria. So not only has a shared identity and history been lost by the people of BiH, economically BiH has been colonized.

And this breaks my heart.

© Melissa Walsh

Wee Memories of an Irish American

3/17/25

By Melissa Walsh

My ancestors left behind wee clues of my Irish heritage, anecdotal evidence of hardship and sorrow absorbed, as well as strength earned by trial, transcendent justice perceived by faith, and mercy granted from hope's well.

For me, “Irish” is less adjective and more verb — a search. I dig through documents and heirlooms of my heritage like an archeologist picking and dusting to uncover buried bones and lost treasures. Seeking answers to questions I ask myself about myself, I ponder how I fell under the writer’s curse, why my preferred way to cocktail is with light sips of whiskey, why I’m drawn to songs and story fertilized with loss, and why I'm sensitive to faux affection from those unfamiliar with the misery and the miracles that are the luck of the Irish.

I look past the American practice of sporting clownish green swag on St. Patrick’s Day and into the truth of Irish perseverance. This truth rings from lovely, doleful Irish song: lyrics rich with wit and rebellion, instruments booming with pride and affection. Call me out for generalizing, but it is my experience and belief that there is no group of people that applies language better than the Irish. Poesy is their cry, and sarcasm is their love language.

My ancestors left behind wee clues of my Irish heritage, anecdotal evidence of hardship and sorrow absorbed, as well as strength earned by trial, transcendent justice perceived by faith, and mercy granted from hope's well.

I see images of ancestors fighting to survive and choosing to thrive. I remember some who were unable to believe in love or balladry, and my family grieved their fall into despair. I recall those who landed drunk or stoned, medicating inner wounds sustained by dysfunction and injustice.

Though Irish truth can be harsh, it is spirit-filled, surfacing pain to be redeemed and hinting at the possibility that a loving God permits us to endure more than we can handle alone. To thrive is to know and respond to the value of living in charitable community, finding courage to love and break bread in bona fide friendship. Lumps of wisdom and mercy emerge from the lights of joy that pop in the darkness of affliction.

My memories of Antrim- and Mayo-rooted trinkets and tales light my imagination. I reflect about the facts related to the living and dying and loving and hating embedded in my heritage and wonder about the human details — disappointments and triumphs, bias and absolution, shame and pride.

The Shillelagh

There was the shillelagh on the piano displayed as something decorative. I wondered about its past. Souvenir or weapon, or both? My paternal grandfather told me it was authentic, originating from his family.

My grandfather's father was Michael John (certainly anglicized from Micháel Seán) Walsh (my father’s namesake), born in Tullyegan, near Ballina, County Mayo, in 1865. He immigrated to the United States in 1881, when he was 16, with his younger brother John, who was 14, and his older brother, Martin, who was 19. Documentation shows that they reported their native language as "Irish" and established the affirmative for "Understands English." The brothers arrived for railroad work and eventually settled in Ionia, Michigan, a town that grew with Irish immigration. Their mother, Bridget (née Clarke of Addergoole) Walsh, (their father was called Michael Walsh) gave birth to 11 children, according to the records I can find. Census information reveals that most of the rest of the brothers' family also emigrated from the Ballina area in 1881, but not for America; they moved to Liverpool, England. By 1901, according to census records, they had returned to Ballina. A brother, Anthony, born in 1863, seems to have remained in Ballina, where he married, raised a family, and died (1939).

My great grandfather married twice. He had a daughter with his first wife, Mary (née Sweeney). Their baby, Geraldine, died as an infant. Mary died in 1911. In 1912, he, Michael Walsh, married my great grandmother, Martha (née Loughlin), who was born in Canada to an Irish immigrant father and Quebecois mother. Michael and Martha Walsh had a daughter and two sons. My grandpa, Lawrence (also called Larry or Lonnie), the middle child, was born in 1915, the year his father turned 50.

My grandpa married a girl from Ionia named Maxine (née Matthews). She was of German and Irish decent and claimed her Irish heritage as “lace curtain.” She called my grandpa’s Irish family “shanty.” My grandparents moved to Detroit, where my grandpa worked in the Grand Trunk railroad yard located about where Detroit's Renaissance Center is today. They had a daughter and two sons. My dad, the youngest, cannot recall a memory of receiving affection or discipline from his mother. He remembers his mother as a depressed and angry woman. He said that she never once told him to brush his teeth and that she was a horrible cook who cooked rarely. The kids fended for themselves for food, finding money to buy a pie or a bag of chips at a neighborhood store.

When I was a girl, I spent several weekends with Grandpa Walsh and his new wife in their home in Detroit, on Manistique Street, near Mack Avenue, where I received lessons in Irish history, namely about how the Irish suffered under British occupation. I remember listening with horror about how an Irishman could be put to death for fishing or for teaching or for speaking Irish. My grandpa used to say, "You're lucky to go to school. Remember that. My dad wasn't allowed to go to school. The British made it against the law for Irish children to speak their own language and to learn to read." And I have remembered this.

In Ballina, there is a short road (Walsh Street) and marker dedicated to Patrick Walsh, a Ballina adolescent courier who was executed by the British in 1798 for carrying messages to rebels during the Irish Rebellion. I wonder if this Patrick Walsh was a brother or a cousin of my great, great grandfather, Michael Walsh, who was father to my great grandfather Michael Walsh, or maybe better said, my father Michael Walsh's great grandfather, Michael Walsh. There are so many Michael Walshes in my ancestry. My brother is also a Michael Walsh. I wanted to name my eldest son Michael, but his father said, "Too many Michaels." I disagreed. You can't have too many Micheals. It's a lovely name. My eldest son's middle name is Michael.

The Fighting

My grandmother left the family and moved back to Ionia when my dad was 15-years old, not long after the family had relocated from their flat on Seminole Street, near Warren Avenue, to the middle-class edge of the city near Kelly Road, near Eight Mile. My grandma died when I was a tot. I'm told she met me a few times.

My dad told me that when he and his brother were little boys, they ran away from home, believing that this would force their parents to realize their love for their sons and give them the parental affection they craved. The police found the young brothers and took them to the station. When my grandpa arrived, he beat my dad and uncle with a rubber hose, while the police observed. My dad said this was the worst beating of his life, which was less severe than what my uncle received. You see, my grandpa had beat my uncle first and tired himself before beating my dad.

My dad and his older brother were the tough guys in their new neighborhood and at Denby High School in 1960. My dad said the only fight he started also was the only one he lost.

Catholicism

My dad told me my grandpa took his three children to church. “He dropped us off on his way to the bar,” my dad said. “My brother and I walked in the front door and out the back and went to the pool hall. That was ‘going to church’ for us.”

When I was a kid, my parents started attending a protestant church. My grandpa was furious. He accused my dad of having joined a cult.

I remember Grandpa's friendly way when he was happy. He liked to strike up a conversation with me about Peanuts cartoons. He smelled of whiskey when he bent down to greet me with a hug and kiss. His face was always rough with stubble. On the infrequent occasions when my mom invited him over, he always arrived with a bottle of whiskey. My mom would roll her eyes and put it in the liquor cabinet under the bar in the basement, unopened. I served myself from this stash of whiskey during my high school years.

The Coat of Arms

When I was a teen, my mom discovered a company that sold swag sporting the Walsh coat of arms. She ordered sweatshirts and glasses with the image. Once or twice a year, I wear my green sweatshirt with the Walsh coat of arms, sometimes underneath one of the Aran sweaters my mom made me.

According to their Coat of Arms, the Walshes were fighters. The arrow-pierced swan denotes the motto: Transfixus sed non mortuus, or “Transfixed (pierced), but not dead.” The red chevron references notable enterprise colored by martyrdom. The green arrows represent strength and steadfast readiness for battle. And there’s the knight’s helmet under the swan’s feet.

Today, Walsh is the fourth-most common surname in Ireland, according to stats posted on the “Ireland Before You Die” website. The Walsh clan is first known to have arrived in Ireland during the 1172 Anglo-Norman invasion. The name means “Welshman,” or foreigner. Like the Irish, the Welsh are Celtic. Yet, history brings tales of Walshes being treated as British by the Irish and as Irish by the British.

The Chest

In my childhood home, next to the piano, was an old chest used by my maternal great grandparents and grandmother when they emigrated from Belfast. They arrived at Ellis Island aboard the S.S. California in December 1911. My great grandfather had just completed a 5-year apprenticeship in a Belfast Shipyard. I have the certificate my great grandfather, whom I called “Papa,” received in November 1911 as a fully trained riveter for Workman & Clark Company, or "the wee yard." This was next to the "grand yard," or Harland & Wolff, where the RMS Titanic was built. My grandma often spoke about how she toured the Titanic with her father and mother before the great ship moved from Belfast to Southampton. She knew this because her parents told her so. She was a baby at the time. Her father also told her that he had worked on the Titanic and that he had submitted a request for trans-Atlantic passage aboard the ill-fated ship for the family of three. Who knows? He spun a great many yarns. But I can verify the family's passage on the S.S. California, because I have the ship's manifest.

Today, my mom stores afghans in the old chest that once carried the belongings of my grandma and her parents to Ellis Island. Lines from New York stopped in Detroit at the Michigan Central Railroad Depot (the former depot on Jefferson Avenue and Third Street, which was torn down in 1966). I imagine my great grandmother’s brother Billy (five years her senior) awaiting their arrival at the building and my great grandmother, Catherine (née) Donnelly carrying my grandma, then a tot, and my great-grandfather, Robert Neill, carrying the chest. (I learned that my great grandmother's given name was Kathleen (or some version of that) and anglicized to Catherine. She went by Katie, but I called her "Mama.")

The knitted goods my mom keeps in that old chest were made with the craftsmanship that continues in the female line of my Belfast heritage. Like my mom, grandma, and great grandmother, I began knitting as a little girl. I became a lapsed knitter during the years of raising my four sons, however. There was no time to be the mom I yearned to be for them as I tackled breadwinner role. I did much for my sons, but knitting sweaters for them fell away. They each have Aran sweaters made by my mom. I expect to resume knitting again soon, as my flock has flown my nest. The knitting craft remains in me, like my fondness for poetry and Celtic riffs and shortbread.

The Manifest

During my visit to the research center on Ellis Island in 2009, I learned my grandma and her parents arrived in the United States on the S.S. California from Derry on December 9, 1911. My great grandfather, great grandmother and grandma are shown as passengers sponsored by my great grandmother's father, Charles Donnelly (shown on a 1901 Belfast census as having been born in Derry and noted as unable to read and write) on 479 Congress Street in Detroit. My great grandmother's older brother, Billy, had been the first to immigrate to Detroit (1906). He was a steel worker on Zug Island. And he married the landlady from whom he rented a room. She was nine years older than him and had an adolescent son named Leland. Then he sent for his father and siblings, including my great grandmother. Three of the siblings died from tuberculosis after immigrating to Detroit — Agnes, 25, in 1916; Minnie, 21, in 1917; and Charlie, 26, a Great War veteran, in 1920.

The manifest also shows "the closest relative from whence" as William Neill, my great grandfather's father (a protestant), who would remain in Belfast with my great grandfather's mother, caring for young children, including the baby, Sammy, who was born in 1910. My great grandfather was one of 12 children.

My grandma is described on the manifest as Minnie Neill, age 9 months. The age is incorrect; she was born May 30, 1910, nine months and two days after her parents were married (August 28, 1909). My grandma told me she hated the name Minnie since she was a little girl. When she was 5-years old, she demanded to be called Mae. And as Mae she was known until she died on November 12, 1997.

After arriving in Detroit, the family of three spent several weeks living with Billy and his wife, Laura, on Elmwood Street, between Fort and Lafayette streets. After my great grandfather got a job driving a street car on Fort Street, they moved to a flat — 731 E. Fort Street, between McDougall and Elmwood. My great grandfather went to night school to earn a high school diploma, after which he landed a manager job working for Ford Motor Company. The family then moved to 1444 Hibbard Street, which was between Kercheval Street and Jefferson Avenue. Not only did the Neill family of now four — my great aunt was born June 15, 1913 — move to Hibbard, but so did several Donnelly siblings and cousins.

My great grandmother had nine siblings. She and six of her siblings were born in Bonhill, Dunbartonshire, Scotland, which is near Glasgow, where her father had work. Later, the family returned to Belfast, where the three youngest siblings were born. A 1901 Belfast census lists her occupation as "Doung Yern." She was 13 years old then. Her older sisters' occupations were "Spreding Yern" and "Year Realer." Her older brothers were laborers, like their dad. I recall as a child hearing about my great grandma having worked in a textile mill before immigrating to Detroit. The census showed me the facts.

My mom and grandma told me that my great grandmother was outspoken in her opposition to religion. And she did not attend church or pray at mealtime. However, my mom told me that when she was a little girl spending the night at her grandparents, her grandmother, my great grandmother, clandestinely led her in bedtime prayer, kneeling next to the bed and crossing herself in the sign of the Trinity. Katie Donnelly was a lapsed Catholic, but, just as I’m a lapsed knitter, it remained in her.

My great grandfather arrived in Detroit a lapsed Presbyterian. My grandma told me that, though her parents were married in a Presbyterian church in old Belfast, they did not attend church in Detroit. As my great grandmother decried religion, however, my great grandfather in later years embraced the ugly politics of religion. My grandma told me he joined a local Detroit Orangemen order, enraging her mother and her. “But he was a philanderer and they did not get on well anyway,” I remember my grandma telling me when I was a teenager.

I asked, "What's a philanderer?"

The Stories

I have few memories of my great grandparents. I do remember their accents, how they called me “wee little Missy.” I recall my great grandmother as smiling and loud and wearing a loose house coat. My great grandfather was quiet and stone-faced. I am told they each suffered from dementia when I was a little girl. I conclude my great grandmother’s was a merrier strain of the condition.

My mom, grandma, and great aunt told me many stories about my great grandmother’s wild and rebellious ways. She was an active suffragette soon after arriving in Detroit, up until women gained the right to vote in 1919. I'm unsure if she became a citizen and voted, however. I was told she “burned her bra before her time.” She never wore a bra.

My great grandmother also was a working mom, beginning with cleaning homes in Detroit’s Indian Village and later working for Parke Davis, where she retired after three decades. She also made whiskey, before, during, and following prohibition, malting barley in the bathtub in their home on Hibbard Street. My mom said, when she was a girl in the 1950s, she remembers her grandmother serving homemade whiskey to guests, rolling up the rug in the living room, and blasting Irish tunes with her mouth organ, urging all in the house to dance.

My mom told me a story, which, she said, illustrated the kind of marital relationship my great grandparents had. When she was a little girl, she went with her grandparents out to “the country,” which would be suburban Detroit today, to get farm eggs. On the way home, with several dozen eggs in the car’s trunk, my great grandmother continually nagged my great grandfather to drive carefully. “You’ll crack the eggs, Bobby.” she kept saying. As soon as they arrived home, my great grandfather stomped out from the car and straight to the trunk. He lifted each carton of eggs and slammed it down on the alley, yelling, “There you are, Katie, I cracked the eggs, like you were saying I will.”

The Stew and Scones

I grew up knowing Irish stew as mutton and potato stew, not corned beef and cabbage. It was served with what my grandma called "scones." They were really soda bread. She taught me how to make them: fried on low heat, not baked as English scones are. My grandma pronounced them as [scawnz], not [scoanz]. My son Conor loved helping make scones (soda bread) when he was a little boy. It started with a school project requiring him to bring in a food representing his heritage. When I make scones today, I think of my grandma and I think of Conor during the process of cutting the butter into the flour, kneading the mixture into a thick dough, and shaping it into triangle-shaped biscuits, which I fry slowly over 280º heat.

The Linens

When my grandma died, my mom gave me a box of decorative and touristy linen pieces. They came from the linen mills of Belfast, sent to my great grandmother by relatives there. I knew my great grandmother worked in a linen mill as a child. I knew this was awful. I knew that the Belfast mills were prone to catch fire and that those fires were deadly to many mothers and children working in said mills. I also learned that My great grandmother was scarred on her legs from surviving a linen-mill fire. So I wonder how it felt for her to receive novelty Belfast linen? When she opened a package from her homeland and saw linens, did she feel sad? Proud?

Wee Memories, Hopes

“Look, I wanted to be an individual but my ma wouldn’t let me,” says the character Erin in Derry Girls. I’m a writer, not by choice. I am cursed with the psyche and disposition of a writer. My great aunt Martha — my grandmother’s sister — called me “odd.” Frequently. My grandma, an avid reader, would wink at me and whisper, “Don’t listen to her, Missy. You’re fine.”

When I die, my sons will inherit notebooks full of manuscripts and poems I’ve written over many years. Maybe they'll publish some; I hope they'll read them. I write from curiosity. The outcome is therapeutic for me. Here and there, I send bits of my writing out into the abyss of on-spec publishing — wee scribblings of my view of the world and my discoveries, hopes, strengths, insights, heart-aches, and hang-ups.

I find few people in my world who will listen, but maybe one day my work will find readers who want to listen. The piece you've just read here is a mass of my wistful wee ramblings about my ancestors. Thanks for listening.

© Melissa Walsh

A Review Curtis of Chin's Memoir About Coming of Age in Detroit's Chinatown

6/4/2023

By Melissa Walsh

Detroiters adored Chung’s as a place of kindness.

My guess is that the only thing I had ever said to anyone at Chung’s Restaurant was, “Hi. Pick up for Melissa.”

Now three decades later, after reading Curtis Chin’s memoir about growing up at Chung’s, I wish that I had allowed curiosity to move me into initiating conversation with those who had served me there — the Chungs and Chins and the friends that worked for them. Who knows. Maybe Curtis Chin himself had on occasion handed me my carryout.

Located on Cass and Peterboro in the Chinatown alcove of Detroit’s Cass Corridor, Chung’s was a culinary gem Detroiters prized. Many a local or Wayne State University newbie, like myself, cherished Chung’s egg rolls as the finest on-budget, tasty on-the-go meal around. Despite its location in an area famed for its crime stats and anecdotes —prostitution, drug trafficking, auto theft, arson, and murder, Chung’s served a loyal clientele for 40 years before closing in 2000 as Chinatown’s last Chinese restaurant in operation. Former patrons still remember Chung’s fondly, as demonstrated in online comments reacting to recent articles covering the May 17 purchase of the building. I suspect today’s contempo ilk of the rebranded “Midtown” would have loved Chung’s as much as we did back in the day.

I recall driving along Cass looking for a parking spot near Chung’s and thinking, “Wow, hookers do NOT look like that in the movies.” This was one of many educational doses of reality the pre-gentrified Corridor gave me. Curtis Chin and his five siblings were raised with many more Corridor truths, guided by their grandparents and parents. In Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant, Curtis —aka “number three,” the third child — brings readers into his point of view and grounds them in the lessons he learned.

“The most coveted seats were up front,” Chin shows us, “where Rve huge windows gave diners a full view of Detroit’s bustling Cass Avenue. At Rrst, I thought these diners were picking those seats for the beautiful scenery. But then I realized they were watching their cars to make sure they weren’t stolen.”

Chin witnessed the gradual disrepair of Detroit’s Chinatown and shares with us what that looked like with a child’s lens. As he and his siblings were the only American-born Chinese-American kids in the neighborhood, Chin felt an obligation to become “cultural ambassador” to help them assimilate, schooling them about Detroit’s Motown heritage and playing apologist of the practice of throwing fresh octopus on the ice at Joe Louis Arena. This early sense of self launches Chin’s early drive to figure out exactly who he is and how he fits in.

The Chin family moved to the Detroit white middle-class suburb of Troy when Curtis and his older brothers were in secondary school. However, the Chin kids continued spending more time working and studying in their Detroit restaurant than they did attending school and sleeping in Troy. About the same time, Curtis also began becoming aware of his homosexual feelings. Chin shares anecdotes of the sting of racial prejudice he and his family experienced in the burbs and the inner struggle he quietly endured as he worked to untangle his sexual identity with no one to confide in.

“One of the most important lessons I learned at the restaurant was about timing," Chin writes about coming out, "when to bring out the soup and egg rolls, when to pick up the dirty plates, when to put out the bill. Everything had an order. Nothing could be rushed.”

Though Chin candidly addresses weighty topics, he thoroughly lightens the prose with humor. The memoir's entertaining laugh-out-loud elements push the reader to keep reading. What I loved most were Chin’s stories about his parents. With compassion and wit, he shows us the great depth of his parents’ devotion to their children and the tremendous wisdom that poured from them.

I suppose that I had mistakenly assumed all those years ago that it was just the delicious egg rolls that made Chung’s so special. I understand better now. Detroiters adored Chung’s as a place of kindness. It was an oasis for students seeking a quiet place to study with a bottomless cup of tea; prostitutes needing a place to eat, freshen up, and breathe; hungry neighbors running a food tab that might not ever get paid; city of Detroit leaders looking for good, honest conversation.

“Yes, my family succeeded because of America,” Chin writes, “but America also succeeded because of us.”

I’ll stop here; I don’t want to give too much away from this outstanding memoir (release date October 17, 2023). I recommend that you read this book as soon as it’s available whether you had the pleasure of enjoying Chung’s during its 40-year run or not.

Curtis Chin did the world a good service by capturing what his family taught him so well: “Work hard. Be quiet. Obey your elders.” In other words, Chin’s memoir shows us that honoring persistence, humility, and respect for others goes a long way.

Learn more about Curtis Chin’s work here: Curtis from Detroit.

© Melissa Walsh

'Lessons in Chemistry' - About Being Part of the Solution, not Part of the Precipitate

3/11/23

By Melissa Walsh

Imagine if all men took women seriously. Education would change. The workforce would revolutionize. Marriage counsellors would go out of business. Do you see my point? ~ Lessons in Chemistry

A referee refused to shake my hand years ago while I was at the bench watching a youth hockey team warming up before a game. I was the team's head coach. I was wearing a coach's jacket. The players were little girls. He saw me and skated over.

"No moms behind the bench," he said as I extended my hand. I thought he had come over to greet me with the customary ref-coach pre-game handshake.

"I'm not their mom. I'm their coach," I said.

He asked me to show him my USA Hockey Coaching Education Program (CEP) card to prove this to him. I got my wallet out and showed it.

"Well, you know, I just don't need a mom over here screaming."

"I am not their mom. And I don't scream."

A bit later, he brought the scoresheet over and asked one my assistant coaches, a player's dad, to sign it. I took it.

"I'll sign that."

I returned the sheet to the ref. He gave me a nasty look, likely returning my nasty look at him, and skated off. I remember feeling so angry during that game. So frustrated with being treated unfairly. We were playing a boys' team and won that game. We won all but one game against the boys that season. It was the girls' teams we struggled to beat. We only won two games against them.

But the win-loss record wasn't the point for my 8U hockey players. Their lessons in hockey were about so much more — how to jump out onto the ice when it's scary, how to skate as fast as you can to gain control of a loose puck, how to get up after getting knocked down, especially when an opposing player had rammed into you on purpose and the ref didn't even call a penalty.

For me, the coaching experience became more lessons in standing up tall and keeping my mind in check after being hit with misogynic cheap shots.

To be treated with a lack of respect and not as a thinking and feeling human being stings. It hurts. It can erode confidence and surface feelings of despair and defeat. How does a woman heal from this kind of treatment?

Bonnie Garmus' novel Lessons in Chemistry is a lovely story about a highly intelligent woman finding her strength and not losing her mind while being knocked down hard — like from a two-hander slash— by old school, late 1950s and early 1960s misogyny.

Women Can Be Chauvinist Pigs, Too

When the novel's protaganist, Elizabeth Zott, Chemist, is ejected from her lab, Garmus shows us how she thrives after landing in a kitchen, applying common sense, scholarship, and good old moxie. Life is complicated. And kitchens can be discovery stations, we learn.

What sets this story into real life is how Garmus so brilliantly brings to life complicated characters: men who do bad things, men who do good things, women who do bad things, women who do good things. (Bashing men with the proverbial sweeping hockey stick is shallow and as unjust as any other form of discrimination.)

As I read a particular scene about the female HR secretary at Elizabeth Zott's place of employment, I recalled a time when I overheard two women in a rink lobby chatting about a hot topic in the news: pending legislation that would promote equal pay for equal work.

"You know, I really don't care if I get paid less than a man, especially if he has a family," one of the woman said to the other.

"Yeah, my husband has to carry our health insurance; so the premium comes out of his check. It's not taken out of my check. I don't care either," the other said.

Enter me, unsolicited and highly perturbed.

"So what if your husband dies or walks out, then would you want equal pay?" I asked the women.

"Well, I just mean that usually the man pays for everything," one said.

"I don't have a man paying for anything," I said. "And I'm raising sons into men. So what about me? You think I should be paid less than a man?"

They stared at the floor. Awkward!

"You should really start supporting women," I added. "You never know when you'll need to support yourself and your kids."

I walked away. This was the only conversation I had with these women all season. They were moms of boys on my twin sons' team. But they were rarely at the rink, because their husbands did the hockey chauffeuring and, I'm sure, the ice-bill paying.

Garmus' protagonist, Elizabeth Zott, has similar encounters with weak-thinking women, whose words were like punches to the gut when she was down.

Why Don't You Take the Meeting Notes?

The dumbest encounters Elizabeth Zott experiences are with weak-thinking men, like when men presume she's a secretary, blind to the fact that she sports a lab coat.

And yes, I know what that feels like. I've endured that stupidity many times during my more than three decades as a professional. Here's one instance:

When I was a logistics engineer, I was invited to a meeting by a group of technical writers, all men. They wanted me to take an issue they were having with a design to engineering for resolution.

Although I was their target audience for the meeting, one of the tech writers asked, "Hey, Melissa, would you mind taking the notes for us?"

"Why should I take the notes?" I asked.

"Because you're probably better at it than us," another tech writer said.

"Why would I be better at taking the notes?" I asked.

"Well, you know."

"I know what?"

Silence.

I asked again, "So why is it that you think I should take the notes at YOUR meeting?"

No response. One of the tech writers got out a pen and pad of paper and started the meeting.

No Head-of-Household Pay for You

At the risk of introducing a spoiler, Elizabeth Zott falls victim to the "you're worthy of being a parent, but not worthy of a living wage" nonsense of her era.

I'm witness to the residue from this nonsensical thinking that continued spreading like mildew well into the nineties and this century. I was bringing home the bacon for a family of five, which was at least 25 to 35 percent less bacon than what men were bringing home after performing the same work.

A common practice then was, and maybe still is, giving a woman a title like "specialist" or "coordinator" and then loading her with genuine project management duties. This way, she could be paid less while doing the work of men holding the title "project manager."

When I was working for an automotive aftermarket tool and diagnostics provider as a marketing "specialist," I traveled for work at least once a month. I never used being a single mom of four as an excuse not to travel. Not once! I wrote business cases with ROI, negotiated SLAs, wrote tool-installation guidelines, traveled out of state to meet with mechanics to promote new essential tools they were about to be required by their dealerships to purchase, traveled to California to meet with clients, etc. I felt that I even worked harder than many of my male counterparts doing the same work. I didn't leave work early afternoon to play golf, and I didn't do the two-martini lunch. Oh, and I also went to night school taking automotive technology courses so that I would understand well the work our tool endusers did.

I felt it was time to approach my director and request an appropriate title with "manager" in it. He asked me why. I listed the activities I managed and said that I deserved more pay.

"Well, aren't you a second income anyway?" he asked.

After lifting my jaw off from my chest, I said, "Uh, no. I'm the head of a household."

"Well, you get child support, right?"

"A drop in the bucket compared to what I pay in childcare, not that it's any of your business."

He gave me no new title, but a very small raise. I remained underpaid. I was laid off about nine months later when the tool program that I worked so hard to help launch launched.

Have We Come a Long Way, Baby?

So I have my gripes about experiencing unfair treatment because I'm a woman. I suppose that I was never savvy enough to reap the benefits I see other women getting: diamond ring, house, car, getting to hold their babies longer before returning to work. My life has made me familiar with all the liabilities of being a women. But these struggles cultivated in me wisdom, empathy, and strength of mind. There's hurt and anger in me, too, I admit. But I'm working on healing from it.

Lessons in Chemistry is about all of that — the growth of a quirky and intelligent woman healing from being treated as if she were a mindless utility.

From what I see in the workplace today, it seems that things are improving for women. Are they? I'm asking the younger women reading this. The millennials and gen-Zers. Tell me how things are for you. But first, read Lessons in Chemistry and learn about what we've been fighting for all these years.

"Whenever you start doubting yourself, whenever you feel afraid, just remember. Courage is the root of change and change is what we're chemically designed to do." ~ from Lessons in Chemistry

© Melissa Walsh

An Evening with Hamtramck's Rock n Roll Family

2/7/23

By Melissa Walsh

I cry with my customers. I laugh with them. I cuss with them. I drink with them. This is like a big family. It's happy at times; it's rotten at times. But whatever happens, I try to treat everyone like they were my own children. – Lili Karwowski in a 1980 Detroit Free Press article

If love is expressed by showing up and giving, then a whole lotta love filled Hamtramck’s (new) New Dodge Lounge for Mikeypalooza this past Saturday, when hundreds of Detroit rockers, locally and from out of state, arrived to help an old friend, Michael Karwowski, who is battling cancer. Alan Karwowski organized the event to raise support for his younger brother.

The connection with old friends was exceptional, magical, as is Hamtramck Rock 'n' Roll —compelling rock styles (punk, glam, garage), maybe with hints of polka, or certainly a great appreciation for polka. For decades, the uncommon, memorable sounds of the Hamtramck music scene were nourished by Lili Karwowski and her five sons. Anyone who kicked their feet to rock and polka — not mutually exclusive tastes in Hamtramck (see Polka Floyd and The Polish Muslims) — from the late 1970s through the 1990s spent much of their free time at Lili’s 21, there on Jacob, right off Joseph Campau. (For you younger hipsters, this is The Painted Lady today.)

If you’ve heard the fetching Polish Muslims song “Sophie Is a Polka Rocker,” then you know what kind of vibe I’m talking about. Lili Karwowski was Hamtramck’s most beloved polka rocker.

I wasn't able to catch the action at Lili’s in the late 70s (still in middle school) and early 80s (still in high school, even though I occasionally had a beer at Paychecks). I missed much of the mid- and late 80s away at college.

I experienced the Lili’s 21 scene of the 90s. Good times.

The venue was walking distance from my flat on Holbrook. I’d stroll over there with girlfriends whom I worked with at Gale Research; they also lived on Holbrook, where the rent was affordable for us newbie editors making under 20K a year.

We were GenXers pursuing the party, wearing our fuzzy sweaters or avant-guarde t-shirts; tight jeans, spandex, or mini-skirts with fishnet or thigh-high black stockings (cool digs found at Tobacco Road or Showtime); and platform shoes or tall boots. We applied heavy eye-liner, not just around our eyes, but also lining our lips coated with a slightly less dark shade of lipstick. We teased out our hair and shellacked it with Aqua Net. For some warmth, we might slip on an over-sized blazer, flannel shirt, or snug leather jacket. Or maybe an animal-print faux-fur jacket or coat.

I remember Lili complimenting the hipster fashionistas on their style while she sat there by the rear-side door collecting cover dollars. She was quite the fashionista herself. And I think we probably discovered our fondness for animal print from knowing Lili.

Sometimes, we arrived early for a show, as the “Ugly Hour” guys were leaving. That was how to get a good seat. This afterwork crowd might have been buzzed, but not ugly. (My partner is a former ugly-hour patron, and I think he’s mighty fine!)

The music at Lili’s, thanks to Lili’s son Art’s industry connections and ear for quality rock, hailed from the best musical talent in and near Detroit. The music was let’s-swipe-the-playlist quality. Outstanding performances. Art was lead vocals with The Mutants. So yeah, the range of music was “So American” awesome.

My Lili’s fun came to an end when, in 1998, I became the mom of three sons — a singleton and twins 13 months apart. In 2003, a year after Lili’s 21 closed, I had my fourth son.

As a mom of four boys, when the topic of Lili’s came up among friends over the years, I thought about Lili as matriarch. Her matriarchy nurtured rockers, punkers, grungers, new-wavers, and glammers for decades.

I remember how gracious she was to us with her smile and kind comments. I remember her stepping onto a chair clapping her hands and yelling in her mom voice “Stop it” to the young men looking like they were about to start moshing. There would be no moshing in Lili’s bar. But there would be generous pours of Jezy, because Lili was fun.

Marie Lidia (Lili) Danielczuk Karwowski was born in Wilno, Poland. She survived a World War II prison camp with her mother; they arrived in Hamtramck in 1952. Lili's father, a Dachau survivor, joined them later. Her parents died in the 1960s.

Lili's son Alan told me that Lili spoke seven languages, and she raised her sons speaking Polish. Many families spoke Polish as a first language in Hamtramck then. Hamtramck still was a community of Polish-speaking shops and parishes when I lived there in the 90s. Dzien dobry. Dziękuję

Saturday's Mickeypalooza was a grand event. Most importantly, it had a high turnout, which amounted to that much assistance for Michael. It also presented a stunning response of love for Michael, his brothers, and for his mom, who died December 22, 1999.

The event attracted hundreds of rockers in their fifties, sixties, and seventies. I showed up in my leopard-print faux-fur coat and my groovy Picasso scarf, which I thought Lili would’ve liked. Most of the ladies donned something in leopard print — a shirt, scarf, jacket, or coat. Sitting at the bar sipping a Valium, I watched the crowd, imagining what these Detroit music lovers — my contemporaries from back in the day — looked like back in the day. I could picture them with younger faces, fuller and less-graying heads of hair, wearing badass leather jackets, MC5 or Iggy and the Stooges t-shirts, heavy eyeliner, dark lipstick, tall shoes, long earrings, and fresher tats and piercings. I imagined them with me three decades ago standing in the pre-show queue in the alley, having a smoke and sharing facts about the band we were about to hear.

It was the happiest reunion I’ve ever witnessed. And the music — holy kick-out-the-jams, it was fantastic, performed by musicians who graced the Lili’s stage long ago — See Dick Run, David Bierman Overdrive, Ricky Rat Pack, and The Polish Muslims. The opening comedy act by Lauren Uchalik was good ole making-fun-of-Hamtramck giggles. And seasoned Detroit DJ Kelly Brown emceeing! Picture perfect.

And it felt as if Lili was there with her beautiful smile, watching her sons and those who love them. Sto lat!

Sources: Detroit Punk Archive ; "Hamtramck's leopard-clad bar owner dies" by Kelley L. Carter, Detroit Free Press, December 23, 1999; "Punk and polka at home at Lili's" by Mike Duffy, Detroit Free Press, April 15, 1980.

Postscript: Sadly, Michael Karwowski died September 8, 2024 at the age of 62.

© Melissa Walsh

I Believe in Santa.

12/24/21

By Melissa Walsh

... new life starts in the dark. Whether it is a seed in the ground, a baby in the womb, or Jesus in the tomb, it starts in the dark. ― Barbara Brown Taylor in Learning to Walk in the Dark

It was days before our first Christmas without their dad, in our so-called “broken home.” My oldest son was three. My twin sons were two. The divorce was final the previous April. It was 2000. I grieved my marriage and the dreams that died with it. I was sleep-deprived; any sleep I could find came with crying myself into it. I was afraid for my and my sons’ future. I was in a darkness that comes with despair. Then a mysterious light broke through December 23, warming me in its power.

Darkness and Light

My church's divorce from me following my divorce from my husband made despair's darkness even colder. I hadn't stopped loving him. I did it as a last resort, after years of his lies, betrayals, apologies. I did it as a means of protecting our home and family from his addiction and the activities his addiction generated. I needed to protect our home from being taken due to his selling drugs, as an attorney in the church had told me, his advice unsolicited by me back in 1999. My pastor, whom I had confided in for counseling, had told this attorney, who also was a church elder, about my crisis.

The irony, as I discovered when the divorce became final, was that the body of church elders (men, no women) also had discussed my situation and they came to a consensus of denouncing my decision. Whatever they had used as discovery did not include speaking with me. Perhaps they concluded that I had happily filed for divorce, that I had gleefully decided to go it alone with three babes and a full-time job. I was kicked out of a Sunday morning study group of congregants my age, a group I had founded with two friends years earlier. They loved the addict more than me, I learned later.

Nonetheless, I continued bringing my sons to church each week, not an easy task walking past people I’d known for decades, who pretended not to see me, to drop the boys off in their toddler class and then walk to the sanctuary to sit alone in a pew, listening to sermons about Jesus: Jesus speaking with the Samaritan woman, Jesus' lesson of the widow’s mite, Jesus' teaching on the Beatitudes, and Jesus' humble birth to impoverished, unwed parents.

I felt like a widow grieving the walking dead. I wore a veil, invisible to a world indifferent to my loss, concealing eyes that ached from crying. One only had to look me straight in the eye to see beyond the defiant veil, and three women in the church did. They looked and saw my angst and heartbreak.

An elderly woman I had never spoken with previously but had often seen over the years stopped me in the lobby as I was leaving the sanctuary one Sunday when the divorce was still raw. She led me to a private corner in an adjoining room. She burst into tears and hugged me.

“I was married to an alcoholic,” she said.

We hugged and cried for a few minutes. Speaking through the sobs was difficult, but we understood the cry of each other’s heart. Afterward, I went to a restroom, washed my face, pulled the proverbial veil over my eyes again and went to the toddlers’ classroom to get my sons. I returned home feeling comforted.

Another woman in the church, some 30 years older than me, a woman who had been my Sunday School teacher when I was a child, called me periodically to see how I was doing and to pray with me. She gave me the opportunity to again cry with someone. At the time, she led a Sunday morning study group of married couples who were 10 to 20 years older than me; she invited me to join the group. I accepted and she led the group in welcoming me. Attending church became less painful. (About a decade or so later, the body of elders forced her to step away as leader of this group. Her only infraction was being female while leading males in Bible study.)

The third woman who showed me love was a woman my age. She was from a family of new wealth and exceptional generosity. She had been caring for a son a year older than my oldest, who was born with painful birth defects. Despite her struggle to meet her son’s needs for round-the clock care, which she was in the throes of at the time, she found the strength of kindness to bring me and my boys Love’s light. She checked on me from time to time that year. A few days before that Christmas, she popped over with her son, who handed each of my sons a wrapped gift — inside an adorable kid’s watch. She handed me a small gift-wrapped box with a tag addressed to “Mom” from my sons — inside a charm bracelet.

Out of a church membership of more than three hundred, these three women modeled Love for me, generously, humbly, discretely. Most others in the church were indifferent toward me; some were openly hostile. Eventually I walked out of that church for good, one Sunday in 2001, in the middle of a sermon about caring for widows and orphans.

After leaving the church, C.S. Lewis became my mentor on faith and philosophy. I read everything Lewis, crawling deeper into Narnia for comfort and healing.

Believing

My embrace of Lewis’ mystical universe was likely triggered by my new-found belief in Santa on December 23, 2000. Weeks earlier, the Sunday before Thanksgiving, a woman from the group I was kicked out of had asked if I would like a Thanksgiving basket — one of those baskets church ladies give to single moms as charity, with photo opp. I declined. I wanted to ask, but didn't, “If you think that I’m in such dire straits that I can’t afford to feed my family, then why haven't you spoken with me about it?”

Thankfully, during this crisis (which would be followed by more crises over the next twenty years), I was able to provide shelter and food for my sons, and childcare, which cost me about $80 per day at the time. Finding the time and money for Christmas shopping, however, was an extreme challenge.

On December 23, when I opened my front door to retrieve the mail, I found a large plastic bag on my porch. It was tied with a large red ribbon, attaching a tag addressed to my boys, "from Santa.” Inside were toys, an abundance of toys for me to wrap and tag as from Santa. My sons mattered to Santa.

I called the women from the church who had showed me love over the past several months. They swore the toys did not come from them and that they did not know whom they were from. I made other calls, to friends, to people from work, to my mom, asking for clues about this Christmas surprise. No one had a clue.

I still don't know the identity of this Santa, but I continue to carry a belief in the spirit of Love’s light in the dark that this Santa brought me. It is Santa power, mine and others’, that carried me through my incredible, wild journey of raising my sons. Santa power is Grace. What I have taken away from my journey is that God does indeed allow some of us more than we can handle alone. And therefore a responsibility rests on community to reverse the gravity of crisis with Grace's power to ease the load of the burdened.

© Melissa Walsh

'Agatha of Little Neon': A Story about How to Carry Love's Load

12/5/21

By Melissa Walsh

She had no interest in controlling her temper because she had no idea how to control her love.

The secret sauce of good fiction, as food for the soul, is didactic, curious prose sprinkled with generous pinches of empathy. Claire Luchette cooked up a soul's delight in her debut novel Agatha of Little Neon.

Yearning for Community

Agatha, a young sister (not "a nun"), narrates. She's a young woman growing self-awareness about her identity and troubled past as she serves a small community of recovering alcohol and drug addicts in a halfway house known as Little Neon. She serves with three other young sisters, whom Agatha presents to the reader from behind a veil of private pain and an emerging sense of identity that could prove inconsistent with her sisters', and the church's, religious values. This sense of herself comes into focus when she serves as a math teacher at a girls parochial high school, in addition to her service at Little Neon. She manages both roles without training in social services or education. Empathy and dedication to study and prayer seem to qualify her well as an impactful servant leader. She is mindful to pray for others; when she prays for herself, it is for understanding and loving others better.

The story is less about religion than about how dedication to loving others grows wisdom and about the strength required for profound kindness. Agatha values a practice of treating each person as valuable, as a unique human being designed for purpose. Perhaps, for her, this is the most direct approach toward achieving sacred community.

Agatha's approach is inconsistent with the conventional American dream. We know that many, or most, Americans are conditioned to laud the success of the individual, measured in dedication to one's work, paying one's bills, spending time with one's family. This American breed of individuals fence themselves into what they mark as “mine” and worship what’s locked up there — apart from holistic society, or segregated from parts of society they perceive as dangerous or in conflict with their ideal for American society. They seek to remove themselves from random bad luck by pulling their weight. To those who struggle, they say, "Just pull yourself up." In doing so, they generate what is noted by analysts and journalists as “marginalized groups,” or "broken families, or "at-risk youth," or "the homeless," or "displaced families," or "underserved communities." Their approach to community breaks it, because it is selfish, self-serving.

Those who worship the American myth of the comfortable life with a happy ending are those who marginalize the marginalized, fossilizing conditions for people labeled as such for generations. They would like to put the marginalized in a box to dwell outside the white picket fence, where they are to remain until they are no longer viewed as unsafe or unholy. They flee with their families and churches from aging neighborhoods to new havens, leaving behind empty shells of schools and churches for a neglected, broken community left behind. They seek walls to safeguard their homes, schools, and churches as sacrosanct. They determine that strangers behind these walls are unsafe and treat them that way, citing the Second Amendment.

Love Moves toward Risk

Agatha doesn't seek belonging inside those walls. Among the so-called marginalized, she finds community; she finds her best self though she struggles to bring healing even as her best self. As she moves deeper into an understanding of what it truly means to love others, the less she is able to tolerate a comfortable and happy congregation of worshippers in denial of what Love commands.

Throughout the story, Agatha reTects on her respect and affection for the four sisters' aged, no-nonsense leader, Mother Roberta. In her narration, Agatha recalls witnessing a moment when "rage shot through [Mother Roberta] and turned her electric," yet, despite "disappointments of every size and scale," she continued serving: "Now I think it had something to do with love," Agatha narrates. "The church she loved had never become what she wanted; the church she'd loved all her life was reluctant to change. She had no interest in controlling her temper because she had no idea how to control her love."

Mother Roberta is Agatha's north star for finding her way along the rocky, hilly, thorny terrain of serving others who are afraid and hurting, building emotional muscle for the unwavering strength and firm commitment that Love demands.

As the story moves and as Agatha builds her emotional muscle, her wisdom sharpens and her disappointments with the religious community increase. She sees flaws in how her peers practice Christian service, despite their obvious strengths. She discovers a mercilessness among her peers toward the men and women in crisis they were called to serve. For example, upon witnessing Right-to-Lifer protest activity at a women's health clinic, which her sisters support, Agatha narrates, "And I was thinking of mercy, how it can make gravity lift, so sinners float awhile, and every fallen leaf returns to its mother tree and is welcomed back to the branches of the living."

Contrasting with this disappointment, the reader is treated to Agatha's delight with the birth of a baby, born into poverty during a winter storm. Agatha reflects, "It's easy to be fooled by joy, to think it will never abandon you, never leave room for hunger and fear."

I believe that Agatha would agree with C.S. Lewis' thoughts on how to love others well, as prescribed in his essay, The Weight of Glory, “It may be possible for each to think too much of his own potential glory hereafter", Lewis writes; "it is hardly possible for him to think too often or too deeply about that of his neighbor. The load, or weight, or burden of my neighbor's glory should be laid daily on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken. ..."

Agatha learns how to carry Love, with an understanding of how heavy the load is.

© Melissa Walsh

Discovering Unloneliness

4/8/20

By Melissa Walsh

I embraced loneliness as a kid. I know what loneliness is. When you're at the end of your rope. I never forget those feelings. — John Prine

From my yard where I’m caring for sprouting perennials, I hear the great lake at the end of my street, beckoning me. My dog and I walk to it. We hear it shouting and watch it spitting, reminding us of its power. My dog wants to jump in. I say, “Stay. Leave it.”

The lake is still too cold. I hold onto hope that the sun’s spring strength will warm it soon. We will swim again.

We walk through our still neighborhood like ghosts. The neighborhood “Eye Spy” scavenger hunt theme this week is holidays. We walk past a jack-o-lantern, a grinch, and several easter bunnies.

Occasionally, a neighbor ghost emerges with a friendly, distant greeting, usually directed at my dog, who is renowned in our neighborhood for his athleticism. In summer, neighbors watch his outstanding jumps into the lake to catch a jettisoned stick. They marvel at his endurance as he swims back to shore over the great lake’s waves.

We will emerge from this pandemic changed in character, like the perennial buds in my yard, but each with a new color as we rise from an environment fertilized with loss and forbearance. Each person’s new color can become an iridescence in a post-pandemic landscape if living in light and receiving water.

Without dismissing real fear and grief, our time in isolation, if we are fortunate to stay healthy, is a remarkable opportunity for self-improvement. It is precious time in the sacred space of solitude — a place of prayerful reflection and listening to what we have always yearned to hear from nature and beyond. It is a place for processing and healing, a battleground where one spins strategies for confronting and defeating inner demons of anxiety, anger, and despair. It is where we set a path in our mind for moving alone into each new day. We nestle with our pets before books and television. We discipline our body with a workout and reward it with a leisurely walk and a good meal.

We seek ways to make company with our own mind. Some dabble in pandemic conspiracy rumors. Others complain on social media about forced solitude. But the strong show gratitude for each new breath and find #StayHome ways to make living more mindful and better.

Those quarantined with family, roommates, or partners find themselves on this battlefield of aloneness with others. No matter what our Stay Home circumstances are, we have this time to chase curiosity and grow knowledge. We can hone skills by practicing our chosen crafts. We can nourish our bodies with exercise and clean eating. We can cultivate richer relationships with family members, and deepen our appreciation for genuine friendship.

My Stay Home company includes my youngest son, my boyfriend, and my cat and dog. I would love to play chess with my son or boyfriend, a former past time from my youth I haven’t enjoyed in decades. Neither my son nor my boyfriend has ever played chess. With the Stay Home order extended yesterday in Michigan until May 1, this might change.

Whenever you're feeling lonely or sad, try going to the loft on a beautiful day and looking outside. Not at the houses and the rooftops, but at the sky. As long as you can look fearlessly at the sky, you'll know that you're pure within and will find happiness once more. — Anne Frank

Wednesday night, I fell asleep crying on my boyfriend’s chest for a woman I knew who lost her life to COVID-19. She died suffering and alone. I knew her as an extroverted “people person.” For her lovely gregariousness, she had been designated our office greeter, a role she excelled in. What were my last words to her? I wondered. Surely, her last words to me had been kind. Hers were always kind words.

With many others, we also mourn the death of John Prine, the singer/songwriter who taught fans how to be “unlonely.” My boyfriend had tickets for us to see Prine’s upcoming Louisville performance May 22. The cancellation email arrived Thursday.

“During our next road trip, let’s listen only to John Prine songs,” I said.

Of course, there are no trips planned, but we’re keeping the faith that there will be. We sense a new urgency in experiencing more of the world.

I think about my three grown sons whom I haven’t seen in several weeks. I want them to fear the spread of this disease enough to stay home but not to live in fear. My wish is that they’ll be unlonely — that they’ll discover authors and musicians as remote friends, that they’ll spend hours each day immersed in a hobby, and that they’ll learn with the rest of us what we value most in our human relationships. During this time of isolation, I want each to invite his mind to be his friend and to appreciate each new breath.

© Melissa Walsh

The (first) 'Red Scare' and the Founding of the ACLU

1/19/2020

By Melissa Walsh

(The detainees) slept on a bare stone floor at night, in the heavy heat that welled sickeningly up to the low roof, just over their heads; they were shoved and jostled by heavy-handed policemen; they were forbidden even the chance to perform a makeshift shave; they were compelled to stand in long lines for access to the solitary drinking fountain and one toilet; they were denied all food for 20 hours; and after they were fed what their families brought in and they were refused all communication with relatives or with attorneys. ~ Frederick R. Barkley

A hundred years ago the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) was formed as an urgent response to a gross violation of the First Amendment rights of thousands by the US Department of Justice during the Palmer Raids of November 2019 and January 1920. Its first meeting was held on January 19.

Detroit is part of that story.

When I was a graduate student at Wayne State University in the early 1990s, frequently, while walking around campus, a member of a leftist political organization would hand me a flyer or pamphlet. There were (and perhaps still are) two fairly popular communist/socialist organizations in Detroit active on the WSU campus then: the Workers World Party and the Revolutionary Workers League. Having recently returned from living in Yugoslavia and traveling in other communist countries in East Europe, I would launch an ideological discussion with the person offering me the literature.

“Have you ever been to a communist country?” I would ask.

The answer was always, “No.”

I would smugly pontificate about the negatives of lining in the confines of a communist society — of one-party rule, of political corruption generating a black-market economy of corrupt haves and victimized have-nots, of the lack of free speech and free press, etc. I was young and arrogant and probably didn't give the person much opportunity to express why they were dedicated to the dream of a communist utopia. I felt I already understood the theoretical merits of wanting a society of shared wealth and equality; I knew it was an unrealistic mission.

Before walking away, I’d say, “In theory, your intentions are noble. The problem is humans are greedy and always will be.”

America’s First Amendment guardians in 1920

What I loved then and now about The United States is exactly this — the healthy pluralism of such encounters as mine on the campus of WSU, the right to have these conversations openly, the rights of leftists, and all of us, to gather and hand out literature. The First Amendment protects these rights. And our First Amendment watchdog is the ACLU, the organization born of the National Civil Liberties Bureau (NCLB), which was organized in 1917 to defend Great War (World War I) protestors and conscientious objectors. Founding members rebranded the mission in 1920 in response to the Palmer raids, viewing the activities of the DoJ as countering founding principles of the United States and in direct violation of the US Constitution, specifically the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights.

The ACLU’s founding members, per its Hrst meeting minutes January 19, 1920, included Roger Baldwin, Crystal Eastman, Helen Keller, Walter Nelles, Morris Ernst, Albert DeSilver, Arthur Garceld Hays, Jane Addams, Felix Frankfurter, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and Rose Schneidman.

A hundred years later, the ACLU’s work has benefitted us all across the political spectrum. I can’t help but believe that if it weren’t for the ACLU, the Wayne States leftists I encountered 30 years ago would not have been permitted to discuss their views with me openly. Chances are I might have been persecuted for having studied and traveled in communist countries. Events in the United States — in Detroit — a hundred years ago illustrate how injustice strikes communities without the safeguarding of our First Amendment rights.

How did Palmer’s campaign against ‘radicals’ impact Detroit?

The January 3, 1920, Detroit Free Press headline read: “2,800 reds bagged in nation-wide raids, 500 in Detroit.”

This raid followed the November 1919 round-up and deportation of radicals -- a response to terrorist activity allegedly by leftist radicals and anarchists during the summer of 1919. Scores of bombs were delivered to prominent American owners of capital, including J.D. Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan, and government and law enforcement officials in major US cities.

In 1919, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, who also had been targeted with a bomb attack that was unsuccessful, put J. Edgar Hoover in charge of collecting intelligence on leftists (“bolsheviks”) and anarchists on behalf of the Justice Department. He led a division of the DoJ’s Bureau of Investigation, which would become the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

The Sedition Act of 1918, which piggy-backed the 1917 Espionage Act, was a paranoid response to the 1917 Russian Revolution by lawmakers fearing revolt by the nation’s immigrant population, which was one-third of the population and more dense in the cities. A Russian civil war was in progress between the Bolsheviks, or the “Reds,” and royalist and capitalist allied forces opposing the Bolsheviks, or the “Whites.” The United States military became involved in operations in support of the Whites.

In response to the bombings of 1919, AG Palmer lumped together anarchists and leftists with socialist/communist leanings as domestic enemies. Of course, the political ideologies of these groups were varied. Palmer immediately targeted labor organizations as the low-hanging fruit to be prosecuted. Any member of the Industrial Workers of the World labor union became subject to arrest.

On January 2, 1920, 4,000 individuals were sought across the nation, without warrant, by US Department of Justice agents for arrest and detainment with the goal of deportation. A Detroit Free Press correspondent (no byline) called January 2 raids “the greatest roundup of radicals in the nation’s history.”

The agents detained alleged anti-American radicals in 33 cities across the country. The objective was to detain individuals thought to be leftists or anarchists (dubbed “bolsheviks”) “with the goods on,” according to the Freep, meaning agents were directed also to collect evidence of radicalism, such as communist party or labor union membership cards, linked to those detained, “upon which the department of labor might proceed with the deportation of undesirables.” Those detained were charged with aiming “to overthrow the government by force and violence.”

The Freep correspondent wrote, “Department of justice agents desired most of all to capture incriminating documents, not so much of the literature and propaganda, but papers showing the details of the communists organizations in each city.”

So what evidence did the DoJ collect?

The DoJ presented what it found: information distributed to Detroit’s black communities soliciting their joining the labor and leftist movements; a “manifesto” proposing ending capitalism in favor of founding a “workers’ industrial republic”; and incitement to join the workers of the world in revolution.

The Freep reported that the DoJ’s investigations were aimed to uncover evidence pointing to communist leaders concentrating on taking over labor union leadership. The DoJ concluded that leftist activists directed their recruitment mainly among the nation’s immigrants. Assistant Attorney General Garvin reported that he found evidence to back the claim that major leftist groups in the United States were led by immigrants and that their activities were directed by Soviet Russia.

The Freep correspondent wrote, “It is known that agents of the Allied nations have been working nearly two years among the followers of Lenin and Trotsky and their efforts have resulted in connecting links in the chain of soviet propaganda in this country and the soviet leaders in Russia.”

I’d have to dig deeper to verify the Freep correspondent’s statement. How did he come to the conclusion “it is known…”? Yet that’s how the January 2 raids were covered in the January 3 edition of the Freep.

Who was targeted?

On January 4, the Freep reported that many of the 60 “reds” arrested and detained in Detroit in November will fill “Soviet Ark No. 2,” the Kilpatrick, departing New York on January 10. The Freep also reported that the raids would continue, with an estimated “20,000 revolutionaries” sought in Michigan alone.

Among those arrested January 2 were Wincenty Dmowski, a Russian Pole and Editor of Glas Robotheszy, and Daniel Elbaum, the publications Associate Editor. The Freep called Dmowski “a well-known advocate of bolshevism.”

The Freep initially reported more than 500 arrested in Detroit January 2. Days later, it reported more that 600. Frederick R. Barkley of the Detroit News reported more than 800 detained — a figure today's historians accept.

Barkley contributed an article about the raids in Detroit in the January 31, 1920 edition of The Nation. He explained how Chief (DoJ) Agent of Detroit Arthur L. Barkey was directed “to break the back of radicalism” in the city.

More than 800 men, women and teen-aged boys were detained, without warrant, in the Detroit Federal Building for three to six days before many of them were relocated to Detroit's historic Fort Wayne. Testimony discovered by Barkley and others revealed that while housed at Fort Wayne detainees were tortured and that their spouses and children were brought in to witness their assault.

A Freep correspondent described the second night (January 3) of detainment (in the Federal Building) this way, “Dim lights barely penetrated shadows on the fifth Noor balcony of the building. From one end of the corridor, it was just possible for a straining eye to see Hgures of men as they moved about the other. And for anyone seeking to make way along the balcony passageway, it was necessary to walk with caution as prostrate forms of men were sprawled all over the floor. Some of the men lay at full length; others sat with backs propped against a wall. Some slept; others talked in a foreign tongue, and munched on stale sandwiches. Occasionally, a group here and there would burst into singing: the song, more likely than not, would be the revolutionist anthem, “Internationale.” Scores of department and state constabulary stood guard.

“So it was that more than 500 alleged enemies of the government taken in the raids in Detroit spent the night. They were unshaved, and otherwise they showed the lack of care. The dull-featured men, ranging from 18 to 60 years old, were huddled together in unlovely groups, and there appeared little more sympathy among them than was evinced for them. The occasional brave bursts into song lacked spontaneity. There was no “heart” in them.”

Barkley described the detainment in the Federal Building this way: “(The detainees) slept on a bare stone Noor at night, in the heavy heat that welled sickeningly up to the low roof, just over their heads; they were shoved and jostled by heavy-handed policemen; they were forbidden even the chance to perform a makeshift shave; they were compelled to stand in long lines for access to the solitary drinking fountain and one toilet; they were denied all food for 20 hours; and after they were fed what their families brought in and they were refused all communication with relatives or with attorneys.”

On January 5, the Freep reported 280 additional Detroit “reds” detained. In another article, the edition included an article about AG Palmer’s efforts toward enacting legislation for prosecuting “American citizens considered dangerous to the nation,” described as “the so-called parlor bolshevists, long-haired men and short-haired women who encourage agitators and promote sedition as a pastime.”

Barkley reported that detainees included, “citizens and aliens, college graduates and laborers, skilled mechanics making $15 a day and boys not yet out of short trousers,” who were “seized without warrant.” He wrote that many at the time of arrest were in a “dance or class” at The Hall of the Masses, which was where Detroit’s Communist party was headquartered. All who happened to be at the building at the time of the January 2 raid were arrested — those having a beverage in the lower-level cafe, a teenaged boy meeting a man about a job, a teacher moonlighting to support his young family. Barkley reported that those arrested were not given a change to defend themselves before their prosecutors and labeled “reds, bolsheviks, or anarchists” and detained without due process.

“Frantic wives and children haunted the lower halls of the Federal Building,” he wrote, “hoping to catch a glimpse of their men through the narrow apertures of the top-floor corridor railing.”

Barkley also reported that DoJ agents arrested 22 from another hall that they believed to be the meeting place of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). They had the wrong building. Only three of these 22 were released three days later. They went straight to Detroit Mayor James Couzens to complain. DoJ agents had seized all documents from the building mistakenly believed to be the IWW meeting place, including lists of 200 sick individuals to whom the three men were in the charge of distributing benefits on behalf of the Workingmen’s Sick Benefit and Educational Society.

During the week following the raids, Rep. Martin Davey (Democrat, Ohio) introduced a bill that would make “acts of sedition” punishable by fine of not more than $10,000 or imprisonment of 20 years, or both.

The Senate passed the “Sedition Bill” on January 10, making “preaching violence” punishable by 5 years in prison and a $5,000 fine. The bill prohibited written or oral advocation of the overthrow of the United States; hindering agents in investigating seditious acts; and displaying flags, banners, or emblems symbolizing overthrow of the government. Aliens convicted of sedition would first serve a prison term before being deported.

The above short animation, "Uncle Sam and the Bolsheviki I.W.W. Rat," was produced by Ford Motor Co. in 1919.

Criticism of Palmer’s campaign against ‘reds’ emerges

On January 7, the Associated Press reported, “A written statement issued to the press here tonight (Jan. 6) by S. Nuorteva, who said he was secretary to Ludwig C. A. K. Martens, the self-styled ambassador to the United States from the Russian soviet government, charged that agents of the department of justice had ‘actively participated’ in the formulation of communist party platform planks ‘which now form the basis of the persecution of thousands of people.’

“The statement also asserted that ‘we can prove that the chief figures in some celebrated bomb plots were agents of a similar nature,’ and that some other radical activities now said to have been instigated by Russians ‘were in reality managed and inspired by secret service agents.’”

The statement also called for a Senate hearing on the matter.

On January 8, the Freep reported that a bill introduced by Rep. Albert Johnson (Republican, Illinois) that would require government employees to report any activity deemed suspicious to rid government departments of “trouble breeders.” The same edition reported that US Secretary of War Newton D. Baker ordered the vacating of Ellis Island facilities to make room for the forthcoming processing of hundreds of so-called radicals arrested over the past week. More than 300 of those arrested in Detroit were slated to be sent to Ellis Island for deportation due to a “manifesto” agents uncovered revealing plans for a massive labor strike in the spring. Dr. P. L. Prentiss, Detroit’s Chief Immigration Inspector, called on Detroit manufacturers to make available any vacant buildings that could be used as detention facilities.

Prentiss was quoted as saying, “We have no place in which to detain these men. For the time being, all of those who have been moved from the fifth Noor of the Federal building, following their examinations, are being held at the various precinct police stations. But these are overcrowded, and, besides, their facilities are required for city prisoners.”

On January 9, the Freep reported that the DoJ reduced bail to $1,000. Yet only four of those detained could afford release.

On January 10, the Freep reported that 31 of those arrested during the November raids will leave Detroit for Ellis Island that day. Among the roughly 400 still detained, 48 had not yet been presented with a warrant for their arrest. The Freep also reported that on January 9 W. B. Colver of the DoJ testiHed to the senate agricultural committee that the raids of “reds” was the result of “frame-ups” by the DoJ. He accused leaders of the Chicago packing industry as being behind the scheme and urged regulating the packing industry.

On January 10, the Freep reported that 36 “radicals” left Detroit for Ellis Island. Accordingly, these 36 were not socialists, but anarchists, and members of the Union of Russian Workers.

“While a sprinkling of curious American citizens were jostled about on the outskirts of the crowd,” the Freep correspondent reported, “a surging mass of allies, all but hysterical in emotion of the moment, claimed as martyrs the dozens of disciples of red rule as they were hustled from the county jail into waiting patrol wagons on Raynor street.”

The 36 were bound for the Soviet Ark II to be deported with another 485 immigrants of Eastern European origin (except for one Frenchman being deported for “importing a woman for immoral purposes”). The initial Soviet Ark, or the USAT Buford, carried away 249 aliens arrested during the November 1919 raids. The ship landed in Helsingfors, Finland January 11.

Defending his campaign of raiding, Palmer, who was seeking the Democratic nomination for US President, contributed an article to The Forum, “The Case Against the Reds.”

Here’s an excerpt: “It has been inferred by the “Reds" that the United States Government, by arresting and deporting them, is returning to the autocracy of Czardom, adopting the system that created the severity of Siberian banishment. My reply to such charges is that in our determination to maintain our government we are treating our alien enemies with extreme consideration. To deny them the privilege of remaining in a country which they have openly deplored as an unenlightened community, unfit for those who prefer the privileges of Bolshevism, should be no hardship. It strikes me as an odd form of reasoning that these Russian Bolsheviks who extol the Bolshevik rule should be so unwilling to return to Russia. The nationality of most of the alien 'Reds' is Russian and German. There is almost no other nationality represented among them.”

With the goal to “defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to every person by the Bill of Rights of the US Constitution and laws of the United States,” the ACLU’s work remains litigious, non-partisan, and exceedingly necessary.

The detentions and deportations generate the ACLU’s founding.

Legal experts mindful of civil rights vigorously opposed Palmer’s DoJ activities. Though the November 1919 raids were generally accepted by the public as an appropriate responsive to bombings committed by domestic terrorists in 1919, the January 1920 raids attracted scrutiny and popular skepticism. When Palmer’s projected armed uprising by leftists on May Day (May 1, 1920) didn’t materialize, he further lost credibility and also lost the Democratic presidential nomination.

Founded on January 19, 1920, the ACLU made the case for First Amendment protection against the unwarranted arrest, detainment, and deportation of those seized by the DoJ early January 1920. Going forward into the 1920s and beyond, the non-partisan organization dedicated service in guarding First Amendment rights in the United States, no matter political or cultural agliation. The ACLU even advocated free speech rights for Nazi sympathizers demonstrating in 1977 in Skokie, Illinois, where many Jewish holocaust survivors lived.

With the goal to “defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to every person by the Bill of Rights of the US Constitution and laws of the United States,” the ACLU’s work remains litigious, non-partisan, and exceedingly necessary.

Barkley concluded his The Nation article about the Detroit raids with this thought: “The people, sound at heart and steadfast for the right when they know the truth, will someday come to demand an accounting for this slaughter of Americanism to make a Presidential candidate’s holiday.”

The people who rose to demand this accounting became the members and supporters of the ACLU.

© Melissa Walsh

The 'Never Here' Myth and Other Lessons from Sarajevo

2/2/19

By Melissa Walsh

Every human generation has its own illusions with regard to civilizations; some believe they are taking part in its upsurge, others that they are witnesses of its extinction. In fact, it always both flames and smolders and is extinguished, according to the place and angle of views. — Ivo Andrić in The Bridge on the Drina

Burek and baklava. Giant juicy black grapes and luscious red tomatoes. Old men wearing the red fez selling Turkish coffee pots in the baščaršija, "marketplace." Olympic gold-winning champion basketball players at the cafe. Stars of Sarajevo’s popular rock band Bijelo Dugme at Obično Mijesto, or “Usual Place” — a bar in the baščaršija beloved by Sarajevo’s hipsters. And the cafe bar called Broj Jedan, or “Number One," set in a well-to-do neighborhood in the edge of the valley, where the politically well-connected lived.

These are among my countless memories of Sarajevo.

While I was a student at the University of Sarajevo in 1988, nearly each evening, for sure each weekend evening, I was among hundreds of young Sarajevans walking to the “meeting place” on Maršala Tita Ulica, "Marshal Tito's Street," where those in their late teens and 20-somethings greeted each other with Vozdra—Sarajevan pig Latin for “hi,” or Zdravo, “hello,” transposed.

Vozdra, gde si? they’d say.

Particular to Sarajevo was the pronunciation of Gde si?, or literally, “Where are you?” This was slang for "How are you doing?" Sarajevan youth did not pronounce gde with the prescribed hard g and hard d, but as a soft consonant blend. So to American ears, Gde si? sounded like the name "Jessie."

When I uttered the greeting in the way of a Sarajevan youth, my friends would laugh. It was much like how I would react if a foreigner in my home town of Detroit greeted me with,” Yo, whadup doe?���

Walking to or from the meeting place, one would pass soldiers buying kolaći “sweets” for gypsy kids begging in the streets. They might take Principov Most, “Princip’s bridge” to cross the Miljacka River, where the first shot of World War I was fired. They might walk past the famous Sarajevo library or travel by street car past the yellow Holiday Inn and other modern buildings with a similar hideous and boldly modern aesthetic.

I started from 127-A Lenjinova, an apartment building in the Grbavica section of Sarajevo, across the Miljacka river from the University of Sarajevo’s Filosofki Falkutet, or School of Philosophy, where I was a student. I rented a room from a widow caring for her elderly mother and two grown sons who had finished university and were looking for work. My friends in the building included Nik, Milica, Bogdana, Nina, Igor, Goran, and Maja. They identified as Yugoslavs. Everyone I met in Sarajevo from 1987 to 1989 identified as a Yugoslav. I did not know that I was encountering a Sarajevan Yugoslav civilization in danger of extinction.

The Sarajevo unity I witnessed was not an experiment. It was not a powder keg of hate. I experienced first-hand Sarajevo’s celebration of East and West — European- and Asian-inauenced literature, music, and food. I witnessed close relationships between Sarajevan and Sarajevan, not between Croat and Serb, or Serb and Muslim, or Muslim and Croat.

These relationships were caught in the anxiety of 40-percent unemployment among those under age 25, coupled with sky-rocketing inflation. The Sarajevo that I was first introduced to in 1987 and last visited in 1989 was a vibrant community of talented and well-educated individuals who identified as Yugoslavs. They were not hostile. They did not talk about their ethnic and religious family history unless I asked them about it.

My circle of friends celebrated both Catholic and Orthodox Christmas, which are two weeks apart, Islam’s Ramadan, and communism’s May Day. They displayed Tito’s image somewhere in their apartment. They toasted each other with živeli, “to life,” or literally “(we) lived.” They laughed and added the Partisan toast of their parents who survived World War II, Smrt fascismo, slobodo naradu, “Death to fascism, freedom to the people.”

I couldn’t foresee toxic, deadly nationalism about to attack this great valley of cultural diversity and national unity within two years. But I knew a man who saw through the illusion I believed in.

“There will be another religious civil war here,” said my history professor at the University of Sarajevo, Milorad Ekmečić.

“Here in Sarajevo?” I asked.

He nodded.

“But no one speaks like that here.” I said. “You don’t know who’s Serb, Croat, or Muslim. Anyway, isn’t everyone mixed?”

It seemed to me very much like my native Detroit Eastside, where you could get an idea of someone’s heritage from their Polish, or Irish, or Italian last name, but you assumed most were of mixed ethnicity. And no one cared.

“Yes, we have a melting pot in Sarajevo,” Ekmečić said. “But the fighting will happen outside Sarajevo, and it will spread everywhere like a cancer. And it will be a religious war.”

He was right. Ekmečić was a teen during World War II. He said that in Yugoslavia, resistance to Germany’s fascist occupation became a “religious civil war” internally.

By 1991, opportunistic politicians spoke to the ethnic/religious identity of Yugoslav nationals in the language of fear and hate, awakening the dead to flaunt as spokespersons for the cause of disunity, while tapping opportunistic neighboring nations with capital for the cause of disintegration for territorial gain and political power. From history’s graveyards, these opportunities spawned gremlins and sent them to the high ground, from where they rained dread onto perhaps the most peaceful valley of the Balkans, known for higher education, champion athletes, and popular music and art.

Imagine a secessionist movement based on ethno-religious identity in the United States. Let’s say white Christians in Texas decide that Texas will secede to become a new nation. Those living in Texas are told that they can no longer identify as American. Their national identity is now Texas Christian and the language they speak is no longer identified as American English. It is now officially known as Texan — not a dialect of American English, but a separate language.

Oh, and what if the secessionist movement in Texas was financed by a foreign power? And the Texas liberation army was trained and fit-up with weapons by an ally of that foreign power? Would, after a few weeks into the fight, the United Nations recognize the sovereignty of Texas?

Imagine this scenario in the context of living in an economic depression that bred political radicalization and skewed democratic representation from political conviction into ethnic or religious identity. There are no longer center-right or center-left political leaders representing moderate American interests. How would opposing radicalized parties — based in ethnic or religious identity — respond and operate?

It would soon become mayhem of hatred in power — multi-sided hatred — with the innocent and the moderate and the peaceful caught in the crossfire as they just try to live their lives.

Emerging factions in Texas would become as deadly in the United States as Serb, Croat, Bosnian Muslim, and Albanian factions became in the former Yugoslavia. We are no different, which is why we must work toward political centrism and enlightenment (education, facts-first conviction) in the United States and ward against the destructive forces of populist, identity politics and encroachment of political influence from the outside, as happened with the foreign meddling by Russia in our 2016 elections.

By 1992, Sarajevo was flaming and smoldering — a valley of death and destruction. By late 1995, when the Dayton Peace Agreement was signed, the Bosnian Institute of Public Health had reported more than 10,000 deaths and 61,000 injuries in Sarajevo due to the siege — a city of 360,000.

“Your chances of death or serious injury were about one in five,” wrote journalist Barbara Demick in her memoir covering Sarajevo during the siege, Logavina Street: Life and Death in a Sarajevo Neighborhood.

Despite the years-long nightmare in former Yugoslavia, I believe Yugoslavs have not become extinct as a people. Yugonostalgia lives on in the Balkan Spirit — a spirit of incomparable selfless hospitality, a shared history of resisting fascism and surviving communism, a deep reverence for literature and music, a breeding ground of remarkable visual art, a saga of stunning fortitude. During the war, reasonable people held on to Yugonostalgia, or in other words, remained true to the notion that Balkan peoples can live together peacefully.

The loss of individuals I knew in Sarajevo is painful. Though time does not heal that pain, time has helped me cope with it. It wasn’t until 30 years after leaving Sarajevo for the last time that I could take the journals, letters, and photographs out of storage. It still hurts — to remember.

© Melissa Walsh

Jesus Walks into a Bar.

12/24/18

By Melissa Walsh

Socializing with a tangible Jesus spun my beliefs into collisions in my mind -- common sense battling religious guilt.

A beardless man wearing a Santa suit approaches, announcing, "Hey, Jesus. I'm going to order a water. Will you hook me up?"

Jesus laughs, eyes twinkling, as the bartender hands him his order.

"If you don't," the guy wearing the Santa suit warns, waving his finger, "I'm going to toss the water out on the floor and make you walk on it!"

I laugh with Jesus. He shoots me a wink and holds up a shot glass of clear liquid as if to make a toast.

"Happy birthday, Jesus."

The above is not a weird dream. It's my true encounter with Jesus during Detroit's 2018 Santarchy pub crawl, where Christmas costumes were mandatory and ugly sweaters strictly prohibited.

My friend's cousin, Mike, went as Jesus. And all were amazed.

Socializing with a tangible Jesus spun my beliefs into collisions in my mind — common sense battling religious guilt. Philosophical reason prevailed, allowing me to enjoy this experiment of making friends with Jesus.

The experience forced me to reflect: "If God appeared incarnate today, how would I react to encountering the fully divine in fully human form? Would it expose my pride? Or reveal my love?"

Years ago, I wrote a short story called Renaissance playing with the concept of a second birth of Christ to homeless teenagers in Detroit. But that was fiction —my imagination fabricating vagary, while taking a theological stance of God's love for the poor, connecting Detroit's poor to the poverty of Jesus' hometown of ancient Nazareth, which was described by Reza Aslan in Zealot as "a tightly enclosed village of a few hundred impoverished Jews."

The Joseph of my story is not a carpenter. He works for food.

In fact, according to Aslan, the occupation of the biblical Joseph and son Jesus was a tekton, meaning a day-laborer, or "a class of peasants in first-century Palestine just above the indigent, the beggar, and the slave."

So contrary to how Jesus was portrayed to me in Sunday school as a child, he was far from being a guy from a good town with a stable middle-class job.

We see in the New Testament detractors of Jesus' ministry asking, "Can anything good come from Nazareth?"

The biblical text also implies Jesus was illegitimate; people asked, "Isn't this Mary's son?" not "Isn't this Joseph's son?"

Americanized Jesus, who is portrayed with Euro-caucasian features, unfortunately emerged into our pop-culture as like a reality-show character, who is brought into jokes and whose name is used in cursing.

So during Santarchy 2018, I lived a scenario that rings of the first line of a joke —"So Jesus Christ, Santa Claus and a reindeer walk into a bar... ."

I learned people are attracted to Jesus' pop-star image, as evidenced by the high number of selfie requests Jesus got. People wanted to joke around with him and toast him. They asked him lots of questions.

Fully human, but I suspect not fully divine, our friend Mike played the role well, just being a good guy — kind and humble, and smiling a lot. He was curious about anyone he fell into conversation with. He wasn't rude, boastful, or argumentative. If he were fully divine, would we have known?

Jesus was magnetic, continually drawing energy of delight from crowds of partying Detroiters. Gleeful and drunken carolers on the bus dedicated each song to Jesus...

I, donning a vexing feminine reindeer costume, ubered Downtown with my friend dressed as a provocative angel, her husband decorated in a magi robe and headwear, and her cousin Mike sporting Jesus garments. Our driver presented no reaction to our outlandish attire. Without speaking, he tuned into Led Zeppelin and focused on his mission to transport us, opting for an alternate route along Kercheval. Only a true Eastsider instinctively avoids East Jefferson's many traffic lights and congestion.

We collected our Santarchy passes at Corktown's Gaelic League, where we also met my boyfriend dressed in a Santa suit, our friend sporting an elegant snowflake outfit, and her friend also dressed as an inviting feminine reindeer.

"Now I have someone for reindeer games," I said while being introduced.

Gathered, our Santarchy clique entered one of the event's many rented school busses to begin the pub crawl.

Jesus was magnetic, continually drawing energy of delight from crowds of partying Detroiters. Gleeful and drunken carolers on the bus dedicated each song to Jesus, taking his requests, wanting to know if he was enjoying the singing.

From his smile, it appeared he was.

Each pub we entered, patrons and bartenders greeted Jesus, bantering about his birthday or making jestful prayer requests.

"Can you heal me from tomorrow's hangover, Jesus?"

When ready to crawl to the next pub, our group looked at one another, asking, "Okay. Where to next?"

Then all looked to Jesus and asked, "What would Jesus do?"

But Jesus — a proponent of free will — left it up to us.

"Where ever? I don't care."

Jesus seemed to enjoy each of us and each person he met at each location.

Several commented, "You really look like Jesus."

"Thanks."

"Are you Middle Eastern? Jewish?"

"Mostly Polish," Jesus said.

Jesus was not a religious snob, leaning back and away, indignant, nose in the air, arms folded, a scowl of disdain on his face.

Biblical and other historical accounts of Jesus suggest he was not uncomfortable at a party. Jesus engaged all any where he went, no matter whom the norms of first-century Palestine prescribed as unimportant, unrighteous, unfit, or unclean. Jesus' response was consistent: grace in action and Love with a capital "L."

He engaged equally with the pharisee, tax collector, fisherman, doctor, leper, prostitute. He allowed children to approach him. He had tête-à-tête theological discussions with women. He did not patronize. He did not mansplain.

He taught love. He offered hope. To all!

Jesus was not a religious snob, leaning back and away, indignant, nose in the air, arms folded, a scowl of disdain on his face.

The only accounts we have of Jesus communicating righteous rage illustrate his contempt for religious hypocrites and opportunists, whom he called "brood of vipers." He turned their religious law upside-down.

In Gravity and Grace, 20th-century French philosopher Simone Weil described the concept of grace, which is central to Christianity — or being a follower of Christ — this way:

"All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception. Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void. The imagination is continually at work filling up all the fissures through which grace might pass."

Jesus' words were best received by listeners craving grace. His radical message stressed tapping a mysticism and transcendent sense of justice to love the unlovable and to be loved — to live out the faith of being beloved by the creator of the universe. Jesus taught, often in parables, on how to forgive and be forgiven. He showed that obedience in living out love for God and others is a manifestation of the belief in God's power and grace. Jesus called this lifestyle the Kingdom of God, and he called himself "Son of Man." (Though the Gospel accounts show Jesus clearly calling God "my father," he does not use the label "Son of God.")

Jesus' parables challenged his listeners' thinking about God's relationship with humanity — namely that God is good and redeems evil for good. Believers were urged to break from despair by putting their faith in the transcendent justice Jesus illustrated in his parables and with his very life.

Though Jesus' message convicted many to live better, it did not aim to punish "sinful" or non-believing listeners by invoking guilt, as the sermons by too many mansplaining, illiberal, reactionary religious leaders did then and do today.

Religious guilt is a weapon used by those who know the Bible without knowing Jesus Christ, prominent 20th-century Christian philosopher C.S. Lewis would say.

According to William O'Flaherty in The Misquotable C.S. Lewis, Lewis warned against using the Bible to intimidate. Responding to a woman's letter to him in 1952, in which she asked if the Bible is infallible, Lewis wrote:

"It is Christ Himself, not the Bible, who is the true word of God. The Bible, read in the right spirit and with the guidance of good teachers, will bring us to Him. When it becomes really necessary (i.e. for our spiritual life, not for controversy or curiosity) to know whether a particular passage is rightly translated or is Myth (but of course Myth specially chosen by God from among countless Myths to carry a spiritual truth) or history, we shall no doubt be guided to the right answer. But we must not use the Bible (our fathers too often did) as a sort of Encyclopedia out of which texts (isolated from their context and not read without attention to the whole nature and purport of the books in which they occur) can be taken for use as weapons."

Lewis' friend J.R.R. Tolkien convinced him decades earlier that Christianity is the "true myth," leading to his conversion from atheism to becoming the renowned Christian apologist and writer.

Guilt disher-outers among American Christians preach an exclusive, arguably fiercely non-Christian message that Christians ought to isolate from "the world," supporting homeschooling to protect Christian children from "state-run schools" and "secular teachers" with a "politically correct agenda," or to build walls to keep "illegals" out, or to exclude "the gays" from services so as not to support "the gay agenda."

Jesus would call out this misguided drive for purity as foolish. He would oppose the behavior of these fools as anti-Christian, anti-Love. He might call them a brood of vipers.

In her book Permission Granted, Christian author Margot Starbuck puts it this way:

"The original injunction to purity was meant to keep God's people from becoming so much like the world that we were no longer salt and light in it. Our eventual sterile detachment would mock the divine intervention. Rather than propelling our salty, light-bearing movement into the world, we've used 'holiness' as a warrior to protect us from the world."

Jesus Christ, who did not protect himself from the cruel world that crucified him, never called his followers into detachment from the world to achieve holiness.

Jesus saw all, knew all, called all to engage with him — from the disenfranchised and vulnerable to the wealthy and powerful — with acts of love, intelligent discourse, and stories illustrating that in the kingdom of God, which he, the Son of Man, came to bring, transcendent peace and justice reign, and that through him all worldly troubles will be redeemed mystically and miraculously in what is seen and unseen.

Like our friend Mike, the real Jesus at the Santarchy pub crawl would engage anyone with or without a cocktail seeking to know him. He would validate each person's essence and challenge each person's reasoning. He would know each one and make himself known to them.

What might be seen by Jesus, would be the bitterness and loneliness of same party people. Jesus would be the down-to-earth, intelligent, and witty mystic in the party community.

I asked the Santarchy Jesus, "Did you know that in the New Testament, when 'you' was used, most of the time it was plural 'you,' as in 'you guys' or 'you all'?"

He nodded, looking into my eyes, his eyebrows pinched with curiosity, urging me to continue.

"Yeah, so like when it says in the New Testament your body is a temple, it's really 'your' plural and body is singular."

"Interesting."

"Yeah, Jesus spoke to community as being one, prescribing 'You all need to love each other.'"

Virtue is not mutually exclusive to vice. Virtue is not a list of don'ts. Rather, virtue and vice are habits — good and bad, respectively. And virtuous habits can rise powerfully in an environment of bad habits, because it is committing to virtuous acts that makes us peacemakers in a world skewed by vice.

People liked being around Jesus at a party because, even if he didn't turn the water into wine, he always brought in the makarios.

In Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes, authors E. Randolph Richards and Brandon J. O'Brien explain that the "blessed are" phrases of Jesus' sermon on the mount are misinterpreted. The Greek word in Matthew's account of the Beatitudes for "blessed are" is makarios, which has no direct English translation. They said Bible translators struggled to find the word for feeling all at once "happy, content, balanced, harmonious and fortunate" and concluded "blessed" as the best fit.

"The English language prefers clear subjects for its verbs," they add. "So the missing puzzle piece in the Beatitudes is, How is one blessed? What goes without saying in our culture is that God blesses people. Consequently, we often interpret this verse to mean, 'If you are a peacemaker, then God will bless you.' But this isn't what Jesus meant. Jesus meant, 'If you are a peacemaker, then you are in your happy place.'"

Richards and O'Brien conclude, "Maybe the reason we North Americans struggle to Find makarios in our personal lives is because we don't have a word in our native language to denote it."

Finding makarios is not a matter of winning a battle in a dualistic perception of the world as true or false, right or wrong, sober or drunk. People liked being around Jesus at a party because, even if he didn't turn the water into wine, he always brought in the makarios. Whether you believe Jesus as truly an incarnation of the fully divine and fully human or you believe him merely a great historical figure, all can agree in his virtuous humanity. Jesus' makarios would be magnetic at the bar, the party, strip club, homeless shelter, work meeting, university student center, line in the grocery store, picnic, middle school band concert ... anywhere.

So as a woman at Santarchy 2018, who was raised in America on Christian guilt, I had to shake off any sense of hanging out in bars with a guy dressed like Jesus as blasphemous. I had to acknowledge said guilt as manufactured from the poor theology of conservative mansplaining that aimed to twist my sense of logic and seduce my heart into slandering certain vices and overlooking others. I had to shake the temptation to lift petty religious rules and American-bred Christian-girl hang-ups above the law of Love.

Jesus loved relationships over rules and clearly modeled in the recorded history of his life that following rules or pursuing loving relationships are often mutually exclusive. His Love for a person practicing virtue or vice is unchanged. And that's not cheap grace. It's the full humanity of Christ being full divine.

1 John 2:6 reads (NIV): "Whoever claims to live in him must live as Jesus did."

What would Jesus do if his friends invited him to a pub crawl? He'd go and he'd engage with Love.

As Santarchy 2018 ended with the 2 a.m. closing of the bars, my boyfriend in the Santa suit and I, his reindeer date, ubered home after saying good night and Merry Christmas to our friends: the wise man, the angel, the other reindeer, the snowflake, and Jesus.

We found out later that our snowflake friend, who had not ubered to the event, felt too tipsy to drive her car home. She said fortunately Jesus was there to take the wheel and get her home safely.

© Melissa Walsh

Permeable Behavior

6/21/2028

By Melissa Walsh

If honor is a force in history transcending any sense of entitlement Americans perceive as rights to comfort and greed, then America may win a few meaningless battles against those seeking asylum here only to lose the war to virtue.

Missing in our nation, top down, is the notion that bad behavior is permeable in community. Bad behavior spreads through attitude and policy like yeast in dough or like a cold virus in a workplace.

Good behavior also spreads, despite and countering unethical laws and rules. The civil rights movement is an example of good behavior spread by brave, committed people, who gave up safety and comfort for collective honor. During the centuries of slavery, Quakers and other courageous abolitionists illegally, but morally, aided fugitive slaves.

A good person is more concerned about right relationship with others than legal prohibitions countering compassion.

“Whole people see and create wholeness wherever they go; split people see and create splits in everything and everybody,” wrote Franciscan friar Richard Rohr in his book Falling Upward.

If we were a whole nation, we would welcome desperate families teeming our borders. But we are a split nation — split well beyond partisanship and disputing the very cause of America.

Are we a nation of comfortable individualists or a nation valuing reason, charity and justice with the aim of collective honor?

“Whole” people lost to “split” people in Nazi Germany. So did those in Sarajevo during the early 1990s, where I attended university in the late 1980s. I was eyewitness to the early infection of the virus of hate contaminating former Yugoslavia.

I’m witnessing the same strain of virus here in the United States, as citizens and political leaders feel encouraged to blame the weakest among us shamelessly, detached from personal moral accountability and collective honor.

So in recent weeks we’ve received reports about detention centers holding children taken by our government from parents fleeing to safety from the instability in Central and South America. We’ve heard from detention center workers that they are forbidden to comfort distressed children as young as those still in diapers.

We witness nefarious policy defended by the U.S. Attorney General with irrelevant biblical references. Why would our Justice Department support attacks waged against the tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free?

If honor is a force in history transcending any sense of entitlement Americans perceive as rights to comfort and greed, then America may win a few meaningless battles against those seeking asylum here only to lose the war to virtue.

History will reflect the truth of this president, who views socio-politics as one big real estate “deal” and holds children in detention as collateral to gain leverage on a border-wall vision. Deplorable is not harsh enough a term to describe this warped sense of political maneuvering.

Political players applying a moral compass, such as former first lady Laura Bush, are speaking out. But if other good citizens are silent, there will be more harsh treatment of the most vulnerable among us by this administration and more blemishes in American history.

Meanwhile, imprisoned children remain detained, barred from human comfort and from even knowing the welfare of their parents. They suffer and wait with the view of a sign with Donald Trump’s image and a quote, “Sometimes by losing a battle you find a new way to win the war.”

Another vainglorious leader in history said it this way, “Arbeit macht frei.”

© Melissa Walsh

Beer-League Prospects

5/15/2015

By Melissa Walsh

No kid is going to say, "I love hockey because I might get a college scholarship."

Ask your kid, or any hockey kid, why he/she likes, or loves, playing hockey.

Now, first keep in mind that there are kids who just "like" playing hockey; and there are kids who totally "love" playing hockey. There are kids who play hockey as a pastime; then there are kids who are hockey players in the core of their being, who view themselves as hockey players. For these kids, hockey is an organically grown passion, not amusing recreation planted by mom and dad.

I would wager that the responses to this question would be similar among all hockey kids, whether they like or love playing hockey. Chances are — and this is just my educated guess as a hockey mom, youth coach, and rec (beer-league) player — that every kid would say something to this effect: "I like/love playing hockey because it's fun."

When asked to elaborate about the "fun" aspect, every kid would add something like, "It's fun because I play with my friends." No kid is going to say, "I love hockey because I might get a college scholarship." Or "I love hockey because I want to be an elite player and I want to undertake the grueling path of becoming a top draft pick, giving up most of my social life as a teenager."

There were 160,618 USA Hockey-registered adult players for the 2012-13 season, an increase of about 5,000 from the previous season (stats for 2013-14 not yet released). Hockey Canada cites over 40,000 registered adult recreational hockey players. Just like the kids, adult hockey players play hockey to have fun with friends. It's also an awesome workout. And there's beer-drinking and chatting in the dressing room after, the hallowed place of hockey teams.

Whether an adult plays elite pro hockey or in a beer league, the motivation to continue to play is the same. All play for the love of the game and camaraderie of the club. If an NHLer loses the love for playing the game he loved as a kid, it will be tough for him to do what's required to stay on that elite roster. Even as a fanatical lover of the game, it's strenuous to stay on the roster. If he continues to love playing even after retirement from pro hockey, he'll end up playing where so many of his childhood hockey-playing buddies ended up - in the beer leagues. Or he'll join a regular drop-in with other A players or alumni club.

Parents who think paying for youth hockey is an "investment" toward their kid's college tuition or career stardom would be better off putting the money in the bank to accrue interest.

What a hockey parent buys her kid when submitting that ice payment is a fun, meaningful experience. There are also those priceless lessons in humility, work ethic, playing for team, and honing will-to-win instincts. Each hockey player, whether a kid or adult, must always own his/her hockey experience, not the person signing a check.

Hockey parents support beer-league prospects, which is pretty darn special. It's the gift of hockey memories and the investment in fun and friendships that will last a lifetime.

© Melissa Walsh

That Rapscallion Heart of a Boy

4/24/2011

By Melissa Walsh

We (mentors of boys) must learn to live in the moment with them as they, in the here and now, discover who they are and will become.

My mother’s quest to understand boys recently prompted me to re-read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn while traveling with my family over spring break. I’m so glad I did. As a mother of four “rapscallions,” the experience of re-reading the adventures of Mark Twain’s “rapscallion” Huck Finn was an epiphany.

Huck’s narration reinforced for me how critical it is for those of us mentoring boys to nurture patiently and boldly a boy’s “rapscallion” instincts into the sense of noble purpose he’ll require for his rite of passage into manhood. Twain provided several mentors for Huck, from the widow who sought to “sivilize” him to Aunt Sally who nearly lost her sane mind caring for him and Tom as they executed their “elegant” plan to rescue Jim. And just as Huck’s pap was the antithesis of a father’s love and respect for a son, Jim became the man- hero Huck and Tom needed.

My Prst reading of this great classic was as a high school student. I must not have gotten much out of the story back then, because I didn’t remember much about it. But now having re-read this story as a mother of sons, recognizing more clearly my calling to raise boys as the most important mission of my life, Twain’s prose echoes in my mind each time I feel that urge to scream at the top of my lungs, “Boys, what are you doing?!!!! What were you thinking?!!!!”

Three of my four sons are about the age of Huck and Tom, early adolescence. And because we live very close to the middle school, I often Pnd myself hosting half a dozen or more adolescent boys in my home after school. Arriving home from my day at the oTce, I step over the mound of large shoes kicked off near the doorway, holding my breath for the stink of course, and head straight to the kitchen to bake scores of pizza rolls and stir a fresh pitcher of kool-aid.

Sure, adolescent boys don’t smell great, they track in mud, they’re loud, they eat a lot, and they’ve destroyed many things in my home, “by accident” of course, but I’m so glad to know where they are and what they’re up to. And it’s been fascinating to observe them up close. Soon they’ll have driver’s licenses and be lost into the world. Yet though I fully appreciate how precious these American sons are, their squirreliness leads me to feeling from time to time quite “looney,” just as Huck described Aunt Sally after the spoon prank. (I identiPed strongly with the character of Aunt Sally.) Instead of aiming to “sivilize” them, as Huck accused the widow of aiming to do, I send them outside into the suburban wilderness of manicured lawns and blacktop or insist that they work off the testosterone spikes with the free-weight set in the basement (a worthwhile investment for any family with adolescent boys).

Increasingly, I grow a deeper fondness and empathy for boys this age. I enjoy their child’s curiosity coupled with their rather mature conclusions about the events and people around them. I smile noticing how their total height has yet to fall into proportion with their long, lanky limbs and large feet, like six-month old Xoppy-eared pups awkwardly scurrying about on oversized paws. Re-reading Huck Finn enhanced my appreciation for adolescent boys, as Huck’s narration of his journey invited me into the heart and mind of an adolescent boy. I learned that an adolescent boy’s rationale and motivation are more dependent on what he senses in the present and less on what he visualizes for the future, though ironically so much of what the boy discovers in the now shapes the man he will become.

We (mentors of boys) must learn to live in the moment with them as they, in the here and now, discover who they are and will become. I’m convinced that adolescent boys do not discover their identity and purpose by pondering it, but rather experiencing it. They actively pursue discovery of their identity and purpose through hands-on exploration and action-packed challenges.

In The Wonder of Boys, educator and therapist Michael Gurian concluded that American parents and mentors are failing boys by not supporting them properly during adolescence, a period of life he dubs “the hero’s journey.” According to Gurian: "Our culture has robbed boys of the hero’s journey in myriad ways. Some among us have feared its warrior extremes and thus tried to teach boys to deny their need to perform and compete. Some among us, seeking to utterly destroy the male sense of role, have taught boys to avoid protecting and providing, to avoid that piece of their heroism. Some among us, too busy to help boys become the hero each needs to be, have neglected our elder responsibility. Most of us, feeling unheroic ourselves, have avoided looking into a boy’s eyes and seeing his desire to be a hero."

So what would Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) think about how we’re raising American boys today? I suspect he’d be disappointed that beer commercials have become the premier medium for conveying a manning-up message, that drinking alcohol is prescribed for manliness. I also suspect Twain would be appalled at the pervasiveness of ADD diagnoses, labeling typical “rapscallion” qualities as disorders and then drugging the Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer out of our boys.

A great truth that Mark Twain so brilliantly presents in Huck Finn is that adolescent boys are, at their core, seekers. We ought not so readily label them dysfunctional, criminal, at-risk, or hyperactive misPts. Every adolescent boy is a sapling of a man-tree living in the moment of discovering what kind of tree he was designed to be, each wanting to grow up tall and straight and each wondering what kind of fruit he was created to bear. Adolescent boys take risks to discover their courage, wrestle with one another to discover their strength, tease one another to discover their propensity for wit and humility, and roam the neighborhood to discover independence. We, their mentors, must be there for them to enable them to discover their virtues freely and responsibly on the hero’s journey. We must be present, discretely holding our breath while stepping over their shoes. We must live in the questions of discovery with them, actively listening, respectfully advising, and unconditionally loving them as they experience the joys and struggles and endure the consequences of the hero’s journey.

Mark Twain said, “There comes a time in every rightly constructed boy’s life that he has a raging desire to go somewhere and dig for hidden treasure.” Well said. Let’s embrace the rapscallion that is at the core of a boy and support it, not tame it, into becoming a man on a good mission.

“A boy remains a boy until a man is required,” warned Daniel Boone’s mother. Indeed, let’s remain close to our adolescent sons as they meet requirements for manhood. As we patiently and boldly nurture them with a concoction of equal parts love and respect, let’s remember to listen up, laugh it up, and lighten up.

© Melissa Walsh

Detroit Music and Things that Start with 'D'

3/15/2005

By Melissa Walsh

It's there in the clamorous frenzy of the MC5's Kick Out the Jams and the cool jazz of the Jones brothers; there's no escaping it in the pounding bass of Motown or the industrial throb of Detroit techno: the rhythmic din of the assembly line. ... The influx of jobseekers brought gospel, folk, blues, country and jazz along. The resulting stylistic traffic jam of white and black music created a rich, blues-based Detroit music, which along with the auto industry, was — and is — our worldwide passport. — Susan Whitall, in The Detroit News

NOTE: I wrote this piece more than 20 years ago. – Melissa

One particular D-word captures Detroit’s history and culture best – drama. Life in Detroit, the good and the bad, is rich in the emotion that rides struggle and achievement, yearning and hope, making it fertile for creativity. It’s no coincidence then that Detroit is known internationally as an important music city. It’s as if Detroiters seek to discover a soundtrack for the drama they live daily, gathering the city’s physical and spiritual sounds and building them into a decorative backdrop like glorious graffiti.

A Detroiter, I imagine the soundtrack of my life. My birth into an autoworker family in 1967 was surrounded by the social anthems of Seger’s “Heavy Music” and Franklin’s “Respect.” As a child, I frolicked to Wonder’s “Superstition” and Grand Funk’s “We’re an American Band.” My earliest memories of fear include watching in confused horror televised news images from Vietnam, and the protest ballads of Marvin Gaye were in the air.

Various Detroit musicians accompanied my discovery of drama as a teen and young woman. Rocking with Seger, Ryder, and Nugent or praising our maker with the Winans, the Commissioned, and Thomas Whitfield, I let myself move to the city’s pulse. Witnessing the great experiments of May, Atkins, and Saunderson or grooving to the smooth cries of Baker or Was and Was, I understood the blessings inherent in a culturally rich city like Detroit. In the 90s I whooped it up with the Detroit Cobras, Demolition Dollrods, Gangster Fun, and Bootsy X and the Love Masters and let my mind wander with the emotional compositions of Breech, Discipline, and Majesty Crush. Of course, in my Detroit-life soundtrack I hear, with the masses of fans around the world, the latest famous descriptive musical renderings of Detroit’s drama, that of Dombroski, White, Ritchie, Mathers, and Craig. The soundtrack to my Detroit life continues to grow from artists on the Detroit scene today who are ripe with the hope of breaking their sound throughout and beyond Detroit, up-and-coming talent like the Von Bondies, Aquarius Void, Bantam Rooster, Blanche, and dozens more working from Detroit’s heritage.

Disappearance

Though Detroit is freely tagged as America’s music city, most of Detroit’s finest musical artists are taken for granted locally and overlooked nationally. Today, as I continue to follow Detroit’s rookie and veteran talent, I am well familiar with the many accounts of spectacular Detroit artists who could not break out of a small urban clique. As a seasoned music patron on the Detroit music scene, I fight back cynicism of the earnest artistic efforts I encounter and wonder at the disappointing hit-or-miss reality of success or failure Detroit musicians must acknowledge. I’ve witnessed scores of hugely talented musical artists vanish from the stage – artists with more or equal talent to the relatively few Detroit artists who have made it to the limelight.

A feature article in the twenty-fifth anniversary issue of the Detroit Metro Times entitled “Where the Hell Are They Now?” reported on Detroit’s legendary local musical artists of the 80s and 90s who had dropped out from public view. Speaking to the general project of developing the article, the writers explained, “We [sic] learned one not-so-obvious absolute. The artists [presented] here –some whose music might not have aged as well as others – had at least some odd, Detroit-specific purity in their craft, whose phrases and images construct their own time and place but with the eerie timelessness and unchanging scent of factory exhale, scorched motor oil and blue collar fret.”

D-Word Determiners

As a patron, I can speculate on the base factors for this hit-or-miss reality. As a writer, I too face elusive success. Based on my own artistic experience and what I’ve observed over the years about the career challenges of Detroit’s musicians, I have organized my thoughts in two D-word lists: one summarizing the factors behind the commercial success and mass-popularity of a few; the other summarizing the factors behind the obscurity and commercial failure of most.

Let’s first look at my D-word list of failure factors:

Disastrous Distribution – The local labels, as well as the indie labels that Detroit artists sign with out-of-town, have monumental distribution hurdles, even in the Amazon age. Publicity continues to drive distribution realities. Outside the automotive industry, Detroiters are really bad at delivering a lucrative sales pitch for their goods. What’s more, artists are notorious as poor salespeople. Most devastating to music distribution, however, is the frustrating reality that labels are prone to become defunct, taking any visible opportunity for their signed artists out with them.

Discord – The following is a typical experience for the Detroit music fan: You follow a talented musical group in Detroit. You follow this new-found listening pleasure venue to venue for months or years, the venues becoming progressively more crowded with fans. One night, you find yourself close to the stage; so at the end of the performance you take the playlist as a souvenir, certain that this group will make it to the big stage one day soon. After all, their recent CD-release party was fabulous. Then, sadly, you discover an article in the Detroit Metro Times reporting the group’s breakup, often due to a root D-word factor – inter-group relational dysfunction.

Dependency – Like many creative people, many of Detroit’s talented folk become trapped in dependency – dependency on drugs or alcohol, dependency on a bad romantic relationship, dependency on peer and media reviews, dependency on a poor manager or label. For many artists, dependency blocks the path of creative freedom toward the goal of artistic success.

Detention – Unfortunately, several locally celebrated, Detroit-based musicians have landed in prison, usually due to one of the first two dependency problems listed above. Others have anger issues. Obviously, prison time breaks the momentum of building a music career.

Danger – Detroit’s real and perceived danger threatens the promotion of Detroit’s rising musical artists. Up-and-coming musicians are, for the most part, struggling financially. Musicians often find themselves on dark streets after club hours toting expensive equipment; they’re a vulnerable group in America’s second most-dangerous city. If their equipment is hijacked, they could be out of the music business for a while.

As far as perceived danger, many potential fans in the suburbs are overly fearful of venturing into Detroit’s bustling venue districts, such as Woodward Village, the Cass Corridor, the Warehouse District, Hamtramck, and the Michigan and Trumbull area. Danger-hype should not deter music lovers from smartly and safely visiting the scene’s mainstay venues.

Next, is my D-word list of success factors:

Drive – Paradoxically, the artist must possess an acute sensibility to emotion and passion while donning a thick skin to deiect the darts of criticism and hard luck. Any artist striving to break out of America’s poorest city to reach the national stage must remain driven and dedicated, despite criticism thrown from local reviewers and curses cast from miserable, green-eyed peers.

Destiny/Dumb Luck – Depending on your spiritual viewpoint, the reader may cite the being-at-the-right-place-at-the-right-place factor as either “destiny” or “dumb luck.” Though plenty of talented Detroit musicians have remained driven and hard working for years, even decades, most have not managed to deliver their sound to the particular audience that can hoist them into the limelight. Reaching the right audience – namely, suits from big labels or an active and powerful fan-base – depend upon a fate-force beyond the realm of an artist’s effort.

Dollars – Rumored throughout the music scene is speculation that certain Detroit musicians with minor or major success were born with the silver spoon. Accordingly, some perhaps funded their daily living and music-recording expenses with a family trust-fund. It goes without saying that money finances opportunity. When money’s no problem, a musician can study his craft privately under a master, he can spend more hours in the studio tweaking his sound, he can hire an experienced producer, he can purchase marketing schemes and tools, and he can get his name on event V.I.P. lists and network with the privileged and powerful. I am not suggesting that Detroit’s well-off artists who realized their commercial dreams are not talented. Nonetheless, what impresses me most in the Detroit music scene are the rags-to-riches, seemingly providential developments of loyal, underdog, hard-working Detroit musicians who climb to artistic and commercial success without a financial boost from the family stock dividends.

DJs – Getting a DJ to like you is a coup for a struggling Detroit musician with little-to-no money for publicity. Naturally, many area DJs are excited about Detroit’s music scene, and several offer forums for local artists to promote their work. For example, 88.7-FM (89X) DJ Vince Cannova’s “Homeboy Show,” broadcast each Sunday from 10 to 11 pm, is one important and sought-after outlet for area musicians to play to a rock audience that may not come to the downtown and midtown clubs to see them perform live. The radio personalities of WDET-FM, Wayne State University’s public broadcasting station, regularly feature local artists, interviewing them live or programming their songs into their comprehensive national playlists. “Detroit’s First-Lady of Rap,” Smiley has a radio show on WHTD-FM that gives airplay to local rap and hip-hop artists.

Discipleship – A dictionary definition of “disciple” is “an active adherent, as of a movement or philosophy.” Musicians with disciples have a better chance of getting noticed outside their local fan-base than those who do not. The legendary Iggy Pop and the MC5 grew from a revolutionary base and later drew a popular following. Bob Seger has maintained a baby-boomer working-class base. Alexander Zonjic plays to an aging yuppie base. The Winans minister to an evangelical base. Kid Rock developed a north-of eight-mile, young gen-X base. White Stripes impressed a back-to-basics rock/ blues, hipster base. Eminem captured an angry-young-poet base. And Detroit Techno’s Derrick May, et al., as well as Detroit industrial-punk’s legendary Shock Therapy collected a huge German-national base. I could go on and on. Interestingly, some of these trailblazing artists found themselves in a position, decades after their peak-performance heyday, to license their works to advertising companies for commercials and movie studios for soundtracks. They can thank their loyal following for these lucrative residual ripples that enable them to retire more comfortably.

Description

Scores of talented musicians playing the venues and festivals of the Detroit music scene are little-known, even locally, outside of their peer crowd. Yet, despite all the little-knowns who ought to be well-knowns, Detroit itself is internationally known as a great music city in several genres, including rock, blues, jazz, and gospel. Consider, for example, the Music Institute, which birthed the genre of Detroit Techno; the Hip-Hop Shop clothier, which supported the rapping calesthetics of Eminem, Slum Village, and Jay Dee; or Detroit’s famous St. Andrew’s Hall, which is recognized as a must-play American venue for any rock band on its rookie national tour.

Not only have many Detroit musicians gone from the ioors of crowded Detroit dives to the national stage and international spotlight, but Detroit’s many concert venues, large and small are critical stops on musical artist tours of all genres. Detroit’s musical grassroots are esteemed by fans from around the world. And from time-to-time the scene is dotted with art-loving celebrities working, playing, and listening shoulder-to-shoulder with Detroit’s unknown and little-known creative people. Detroit’s gospel artists are arguably the finest in the world. Music experts hail Detroit blues, jazz, and rock creations as perfecting the blending of the revolutionary with the familiar. In addition, Detroit’s opera and classical music base is thriving, healthy enough to support the expansion of Detroit Symphony Hall to the Ford Symphony Plaza and Michigan Opera Theater’s newly reconstructed home, Detroit Opera House, which is the cornerstone of downtown’s sophisticated Harmonie Park. (Note the D-essence of MOT’s 2005-06 season moniker, “Desperate Divas.”)

How appropriate it is that Detroit’s main music export of the past ten years runs with an industrial heartbeat, reiecting the city’s history of attracting émigré industrial workers from abroad and the American South. A vast array of musical style and tradition was, as a result, threaded through Detroit’s social experience. Take the popular Detroit rock group Immigrant Suns, which celebrates ethnic heritage in rock anthems that include rearranged melodies from European national music. Or consider the decades-long fun, Yankovic-style rockers the Polish Muslims, who, even before Weird Al Yankovic, parodied rock lyrics accompanied with Polka revised riffs. The innovation of Detroit’s freethinking musicians in all genres is directly linked to Detroit’s sizable immigrant heritage and the great influx of Southern whites and Blacks to Detroit’s factories over the span of the twentieth century. These iniuences pervade everything about Detroit society today. Detroit’s skilled musicians are both nostalgic and trailblazing, a delicate chemistry that stirs the listener’s emotions and nurtures sensibilities on social issues. Detroit’s musicians are eager to showcase the city’s struggle-shadowed beauty and pain. The Detroit music scene is where they freely run to a stage to blast what they know to be true. They all are inspired by another D-word – dream. Like education, creativity and faith, a dream cannot be stolen.

Discovery

The central reason for my writing this essay is a D-word – discovery. Success for Detroit artists can only follow the discovery of listeners. Yet I know anecdotally that the music lover traveling to Detroit’s venues encounters a paramount obstacle – it is extremely dfficult for the outsider to navigate Detroit’s music scene. The result is that Detroit’s diamonds remain underexposed in the rough of Detroit’s urban terrain. Publicity campaigns for Detroit’s cultural opportunities fall far short of being comprehensive and useful for the music-lover traveler. The only way for a music pilgrim to find his or her way through Detroit’s music scene satisfactorily is with the guiding assistance of a native Detroiter familiar with the city’s dives and hotspots off the narrow, underdeveloped path of Detroit tourism.

Though the world has embraced the genres this great music city has manufactured, many music lovers remain ignorant of the who and where behind the construction of these genres. With new industry in Detroit, then the aim ought to include getting Detroit artists, and the dedicated venues that feature them, fixed in the radar of music lovers everywhere. Non-Detroiters are aware of Detroit’s musical genre-manufacturing history. But what they should have available to them is community and information leading them on a musical field trip of a one-of-a-kind American city whose current political head is widely dubbed as “the hip-hop mayor *.” Music lovers from around the world require a virtual guide through Detroit’s dynamic music scene and all the D-words it includes – desire, deliverance, dread, desperation, discernment, demolition, déjà vu, delight, dazzle, diversity, and of course doo wop.

* A reference to Kwame Kilpatrick, Mayor of Detroit at the time of writing this essay in 2005.

© Melissa Walsh