Trip Home to Mich (5 of 5): Unashamed dogs.

When I was home, I also stopped by to see a friend at her parents’ house.

She had her poodle there, and their little runty dog kept trying to hump it, and everyone sat around in the living room and watched.

“Slip it in, Ollie!, slip it in, Ollie!”, they were like.

Trip Home to Mich (4 of 5): Impoverished county.

When I was home, the state released statistics that showed that 22% of kids in the county live in poverty.

The head of the local library told me that, and also said that she speaks up against state emergency managers all the time.

“When I studied in Czechoslovakia, people would tell me about how things were different when they had a government that they could elect.  And now that’s happening here!  You can’t tell me that that’s different, it's the same damn thing here,” she was like.

Trip Home to Mich (3 of 5): Unrestrained parents.

One day I had a ton of work to get done online at the local library, and so I was way late to some friends’ family house, who had invited me and my parents by for a late lunch of 3pm burgers.

When I finally got there at like 7pm, my parents had already been gone for around 40 minutes, but everyone was talking about all the stories my dad had told about his childhood and when my parents owned the bar.

I guess when they were refugees in Germany their hosts had a rabbit farm, and so my dad got to see rabbits skinned all the time.

Then, when he owned the bar, some customer who he had known for a while had shot a rabbit when hunting but didn’t want to skin it, so my dad took it back in the bar kitchen and skinned it for him and then brought it out back into the bar where everyone was drinking and gave it to him.

Also, when my dad and my 2 uncles were little and didn’t want to eat something, their mom (my grandmother) used to get right up in their face and would yell at them in Hungarian, “Eat it, it all becomes shit anyways!”

Trip Home to Mich (2 of 5): Divorced neighbors.

After my parents picked me up, one of the 1^st things my mom said was that the asshole cardealer from around the lake got divorced by his 2^nd wife.

“I saw him down at Meijer’s buying two pillows,” she was like.

Trip Home to Mich (1 of 5): Fired employees.

For Christmas, my one friend from high school who runs an integrated homeless-domestic violence shelter and her husband picked me up from the train station and gave me a ride to our hometown, as they often do.

On the ride up, I got the latest on the 1^st employee she had fired, who had filed a lawsuit: the woman had lost the case and decided to file an appeal, but that probably won’t be addressed by the courts for another year.

“So what’s she doing in the meantime for money?”, I was like.

“She’s had a couple part-time jobs, I hear,” my friend was like.

“Yeah,” her husband was like.  “She works down at the drycleaner sucking farts out of underwear.”

I then joked that that wasn’t really a job, since she liked it and *she* paid *them*.

Also, because of ice storms in that part of the state, power was out for a ton of people over the holiday, which I said seemed like an inconvenience.

“But no,” her husband was like, “It gives people a chance to focus on the true meaning of Christmas.”

My friend also talked a lot about breastfeeding her baby, and how unlike a lot of other mothers she’s never had anyone come up to her when she’s breastfeeding and tell her it’s inappropriate.

“How could it be?”, I was like.  “[her daughter’s name]’s mouth covers the nipple, it’s all decent.”

Then I added, “She’s like a living pastie!”.

(Black) (female) FedEx driver.

The other day I was walking to the local branch library to send out a few emails, and I was on the phone with a friend, and I passed by this (shorter) (middle-aged) (black) (female) FedEx driver with short hair that had alternating strips of blonde and black.

I saw she was wearing a lot of purple, and so I said hello, and then after I passed her, she was like, “Nice phone!”, since the rubber protective casing for my phone is purple.

“Thanks!”, I was like, and since I had just finished up my phone call, I turned back and talked to her and told her that I had noticed her purple too and that’s what had led me to say hi.

She then told me that she had been to drug stores lately stocking up on purple gloves because she noticed she was low and didn’t want to not be able to wear them if she lost any more.

“It’s not a color,” she was like, “It’s a lifestyle.”

We wished each other a happy new year as I then went on my way, and she got back in to her delivery truck.