Good-bye, Grand Rapids

Cancer Bitch has returned from Grand Rapids, the town where Gerald Ford is still a hero. She had many adventures there. Among them:
She found that her friend B, who invited her to Aquinas College (after she asked him to), is more nature-phobic than she is. She did not know that that was possible. She is a Fresh Air Fiend in comparison. Unlike B, she can identify common flowers and and likes bugs and worms. She especially likes to watch the beetle family. B does not. He considers nature to be dangerous partly because there are bugs. She became self-conscious about pointing out flora and fauna to B because she thought that he would think that she did not deserve her nature-fearing credentials. Cancer Bitch is mostly afraid of nature because it gives her asthma. Also, it bores her and makes her feel empty and that the universe has no meaning.
B and Cancer Bitch, therefore, walked around looking at Italianate and Romanesque buildings downtown. They also visited the outside of the only Frank Lloyd Wright building in GR. It is owned by Steelcase, one of the furniture manufacturers in town. Herman Miller is HQed there, which explains the Aeron chairs in the Writing Department meeting room at Grand Valley State University. Wright built the house for Meyer May. Cancer Bitch read the historic marker in front of the house: This house was built in 1908-1909 for local clothier Meyer S. May and his wife, Sophie Amberg. Frank Lloyd Wright designed the house in the Prairie style. It was his first major commission in Michigan. May was the son of Abraham May, founder of A. May and Sons clothing store. In 1906, Meyer became president of the store, which was the first in the nation to display clothes on Batts hangers. Meyer May lived here until his death in 1936. The house was used as a private residence until 1985. In 1986, Steelcase Incorporated began the complete restoration of the house, its interior and grounds. Meyer. Bing. Amberg. Bing bing. Son of Abraham. Bing bing. Clothier. Bing bing bing. Sophie. Bing. Her Jew-dar had sprung into action. She wanted to mention this to B but she was embarrassed at how Jew-centric she is. Though on GR campuses there seemed to be a dearth of Jews, so that being Jewish was odd enough to make Jews an *interesting, exotic* minority. As a Jewish student told her: I don't want to be exotic.
The question is, of course, what are Batts hangers and why are they important enough to be mentioned in a historical marker? And a corollary: Was May so unremarkable that his second most famous purchase was hangers for his store?
Batts, Inc., in Zeeland, MI, made wooden hangers until that division was bought out in 1999. So May bought local.

Grand Rapids, the West Coast of Michigan

(The photo to the left is not from Grand Rapids.)

I am in Grand Rapids, home of the Gerald Ford airport, which doesn't bother me half as much as the George H. W. Bush airport in Houston. I came by car with my student A, who is an alum of Grand Valley State University, and will be reading along with me there Tuesday night. If you are ever in Grand Rapids, you must go to downtown because there are lovely, pleasing brick 19th- and 20th-century buildings. That is, you must go downtown if you like old buildings. There are a number of "ghosts," those faint vestiges of painted advertisements on old buildings.

We went to dinner at San Chez Bistro and Cafe, a tapas restaurant (which brought tapas to Western Michigan) that has tall indoor columns covered with mosaics. They were done by Jose Narezo, a local artist who exhibited internationally. He died in December.

Cancer.

His paintings are all around the restaurant too.

But it is the mosaics, or *are* the mosaics that I wanted to stay and stay and look at. We went to Chartres some years ago and the cathedral was nice and everything, and the famous British guy gave the tour, and the stained glass was impressive, though I wished I'd had binoculars, and L was enchanted, but then we took a city bus to Maison Picassiette, and that thrilled me utterly. I remember the whoosh of happiness I felt just being there.


The man covered every surface of his house and property with pieces of tile and glass:

If I'd found good pictures of Narezo's columns, I would have posted them here.

If I'd found good pictures of downtown historic buildings in GR, I would have posted them here.

At GVSU, students are protesting police brutality after a sheriff's deputy shot a GVSU student in the chest while they were about to execute a search warrant. The student is hospitalized.

In Line

(On Line, for you East Coasters.)

I stopped at the Large Pharmacy to pick up two prescriptions before I leave town on Monday for the first stop, Grand Rapids, on Cancer Bitch's World Tour. I was in a hurry and there were three people in front of me. I arrived at the end of the line from the left while someone else arrived from the right. She was gracious and said I could go first. Since people were coming over in about 20 minutes, I accepted. She and her friend were talking about the grandfather of one of them. He's 88, widowed and went to a dance place. The announcer welcomed him, and two women asked him to dance. He took both of them out to dinner. His social life is better than mine, said the one who was his granddaughter. He and his wife had been in the competitive square dance circuit.

In elementary school was had square dance lessons every Friday in something called Rhythms for some reason. I remember the boys' sweaty palms and them holding on too tightly and jerking or pushing with their arms. I recall that we had a dance when we finished sixth grade and some kids didn't participate because they were Baptist. They couldn't play cards, either.

I paid a king's ransom for Wellbutrin XL because the insurance company hasn't accepted that the generic doesn't work. Believe me, it doesn't. My autumn was quite autumnal because of this.

Grand Rapids is known for Gerald Ford and Amway. I will be staying in the Amway Grand Plaza Hotel for two nights. On the third I get to stay in an old house that used to be a college president's residence.

The photo above is of the groundbreaking for the building where I'll be reading on Thursday.

**
I am up at this ungodly hour because I have been wrassling with the ungodly National Endowment for the Arts fellowship application. It was designed to frustrate the prose writers of America and lead us further into despair. You have to submit the application online unless you can prove you live 30 miles away from internet service. Thus the application instructions contain such gems as this: "If it appears that your submission is not being successfully transmitted to Grants.gov (e.g., you do not receive a confirmation screen), it is possible that your application actually was submitted.... An application may not be submitted successfully for a number of reasons, such as heavy usage on the Grants.gov system or security settings on your computer or your firewall." The government is trying to make the writers of this country go stark raving mad.