Standpipe

I can recall being in Flint on only three occasions before volunteering with Red Cross Disaster Relief.  About fifteen years ago we attended a Jeff Daniels concert at the Whiting Auditorium.  It was a pretty good show.  I remember his sweet, wistful version of “Michigan, My Michigan”.  Before that, I watched my wife finish the Crim Festival of Races half-marathon run through rolling hills and leafy streets of some of the city’s better neighborhoods.  My first visit was almost forty years ago to attend a backyard barbecue at the home of a coworker.  I remember driving in past mammoth Buick City, wearing a pair of lavender pastel capri's and matching knit polo.  I got drunk as a lord in my jackass pants then drove two hours home looking like a Picasso harlequin imagined by Jules Feiffer.  Flint, when I thought about the city at all, was “Roger and Me”, a municipal abstraction a few freeway exits south of the faux-gemütlich hokum of Frankenmuth, the place where heavy southbound traffic on I-75 was relieved by the US 23 split siphoning cars off to Ann Arbor, easing my drive home from many an idyllic northern vacation.