About this column:
Voices in the Crowd is a column series that allows local residents and officials to address issues affecting the Dexter area.You don't hear too much about "house warming" parties, unless, of course, you have friends who are moving into a new or different house.Usually moving into one's first house as a married couple was occasion for one's friends and/or co-workers to get up a party, bring food and gifts, and gather to launch the new abode with appropriate presents.Most of the time, the gifts are house-rated things, like pillows, or sets of sheets, or kitchen things. If the giver isn't sure about the couple's taste, a gift card is the safest way to go.In all our house-buying days, we only had one newly built house…
Forty-one years ago, on the first Earth Day, I wrote a piece for the Detroit News, for whom I covered stories in Washtenaw County. I remember that I took a photo of the silt running into the Huron River at the Barton Drive exit on M-14. You could clearly see the soil building up into a delta where the ground water left the drain pipe coming down from just north of there. It was easy to see that it would make it difficult for canoe navigation through there if it went on much longer. In the flush of enthusiasm for saving Mother Earth in 1970, there were outcries to do something about this …
My heart breaks for Detroit. It was the city of my birth, and I lived there for my first five years. It was the city that welcomed my parents when, as young newlyweds, they came up from Oklahoma to look for jobs. It was the city where a number of my relatives lived and where my father worked. Detroit was where you went for cultural things: live theater, movies, concerts, museums, libraries, the Thanksgiving Day Parade, parks, baseball games, fine dining, Belle Isle, the zoo, and where Santa waited to learn what you wished for at Christmas. Every year for my birthday, my mother and I and a …
I don't mean to alarm anyone, but things are going missing. Every day our lives are minimized by the disappearance of items that we are used to — items that we expect to be there because they've always been there. Daily newspapers are the most obvious missing pieces. What do we call them now? Occasional papers? But there are more insidious absences out there that you will notice sooner or later. For example: Nearly every pumpkin pie recipe you can find calls for two cups of pumpkin — most cooks use canned processed pumpkin — and it used to come in 16 ounce cans. Guess what? It now comes in…
