Space, the final frontier. That’s what I need

I need space! Considering how often my (former) girlfriend kicks me out, you’d think I would have more space than NASA, but that’s not the kind of space I’m talking about here. Emotional space I got in spades.

What I need is physical space. The kind of space I had a couple years back, while still living in the pastoral northern village of Lakeview, where men are men, women are women, and cows outnumber both three-to-one.

Those who have never lived there would describe Lakeview as just one more wide spot in the road between Grand Rapids and Cadillac; nothing special. They would be right, for their part.

They’d also be wrong. Having lived there with the (former) Lovely Mrs. Taylor for nearly 15 years, I can attest to the fact there’s more to Lakeview than you see in the 67 seconds it takes to drive from one end of town to the other. (And yes, I’ve noticed the unhappy number of “formers” in my life these days—I’m beginning to think it’s me.)

Anyway, much of what made Lakeview special were the folks who lived there. Most I liked, some I loved, a few I wasn’t too crazy about. But I could say the same about most places I’ve lived.

My (former, again) neighbors, Jerry and Dave, were especially cool. I’m still “Facebook friends” with them, but we no longer invite each other to backyard barbecues, so it’s not the same. Not the same at all.

While living there, I shopped locally, ate at local restaurants, and subscribed to the local newspaper, though it was badly written and at greater editorial odds with my own political ideologies than are Mein Kampf, Das Kapital and the KKK Newsletter. But it was the local paper and I read it every week.

I miss all of it. But mostly, I miss the space.

These days I hang my hat in Detroit, and though everything is big, big, big, there’s no space in any direction. Except maybe up, and I can’t even be sure of that—I haven’t seen a star in the night sky since moving here. For all I know, there’s a dome over the city.

For 15 years I had nothing but space. Now…well, I can walk for hours in any direction and see traffic, stores and pavement. They have lots and lots of pavement. They spread pavement here like the farmers spread manure back in the town I still think of as home.

I’ll admit it took a while to get used to the smell of manure every spring. I’ll never get used to the smell of pavement. And it does have a smell, make no mistake.

Where manure smelled like life, good black earth, and Michigan potatoes, pavement smells like loss and hushed, lonesome desperation. What do loss and desperation smell like? Pavement, the sidewalk along Livernois. If I were a poet I could find better, prettier words to describe it, but I’m not, so these will have to do.

I don’t care how cold it is this weekend; I think I’m going to do a little backpacking. Somewhere with space.

More “Reality Check” online at http://mtrealitycheck.blogspot.com or www.milive.com. E-mail Mike Taylor at mtaylor325@gmail.com.