Sacred Grosse Pointe

Vernier Road in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, ends at a black metal gate. Beyond that gate is the Yacht Club. Beyond the Yacht Club is Lake St. Clair. And beyond Lake St. Clair, you can just barely the foggy outline of Canada. On that black metal gate is a yellow sign with black arrows pointing to the left and right. I’ve always thought of that sign as the beginning of the universe. In Sunday school, I imagined that the garden of Eden looked a whole lot like the Yacht Club, and that the yellow sign, identical to the hundreds of thousands of others at roadends across the world, had been there since the start of creation.

My family moved away from Grosse Pointe when I was three years old, the age when your brain goes through some serious retooling and all of your earliest memories usually get lost in the mix. But, even though my memories of Grosse Pointe aren’t any older than my memories of Waco, it’s always felt like a sort of sacred place, where all the details stand out sharper and little things like gates and roadsigns take on holy significance. Part of that might be that my grandparents’ house, where I stay whenever I’m in Grosse Pointe, is a pretty interesting place to walk around noticing things. There’s this creepy bust of a head copied from some old Greek statue in the living room, with blank eyes that seem to follow you if the light hits them in the right way. My cousin used to tell me that, instead of coming through the chimney, Santa used an interdimensional portal through that marble head to get to our house on Christmas eve. And the walls are filled with my grandfather’s paintings, oil-painted portraits with so much individuality and subtle expression that I never would have been surprised if they started moving and talking. But even the unimportant details seem sacred: the little crack in the stained glass window in the bathroom that makes it just slightly asymmetrical, the weather-clock in the hallway that doesn’t work anymore and probably never did, the exact shade of green on one of the bulbs of Christmas lights surrounding the tree that just seems so perfect. And even outside the house, the aura of importance remains. The whole town is flat from end to end, as if it was made before the world had gotten all rough and complicated. There’s a long beach of broken concrete along the shore of Lake St. Clair that has always seemed like the place where life first crawled out onto land. It’s a nice place to visit, but I don’t think I could ever live there. I couldn’t stand up under the crushing meaning.

I’m almost 500 words into this post, and I’ve just now realized that I’ve written the kind of essay that I always reject on sight when they show up in the submissions folder of the literary magazine I work for, an essay where all the writer does is walk the reader through a place personally important to them. Maybe there’s an anecdote thrown in here and there, but it’s never a narrative so much as a collection of details. And the whole way through, it’s like the writer is yelling “PAY ATTENTION, BECAUSE THIS IS ALL VERY, VERY IMPORTANT!” at bullhorn volume. And I can’t pay attention or see its importance because I haven’t lived there. If you aren’t a member of the Osler family, you probably feel much the same way about the past 500 words. You probably think that it’s hyperbole to say that the yellow sign with a black arrow pointing left and right is the beginning of the universe, even though it isn’t. If anything, I can’t summon up strong enough language for how I feel about that sign, which I guess is the problem in the first place. If I had the language to describe it, you’d probably feel it too.

This idea that my experiences aren’t universal has been bothering me for a while now, especially when we drive out to the city of Detroit. There are blocks where all the buildings have burnt and long yellow grass has grown up around the ruins so that it looks like this whole neighborhood is just some rural patch of undeveloped land where they lay down a grid of roads for some reason. Even the parts that are built up, the parts that have running businesses and people milling about on the street, feel like a sort of awkward addition to Grosse Pointe, as if Grosse Pointe is the real city and this is all just urban sprawl trying to capture some of Grosse Pointe’s essential power. But that’s not even close to the truth. Detroit is the real city, Grosse Pointe is the latecomer. And to far, far more people, the city of Detroit, even the weedy fields of burnt-out houses, are the beginnings of the universe.

I can’t help but think that it’s sad. That yellow sign is just a sheet of metal to most people, just another object. And all those people have their own sacred spaces and things that I’ll never properly understand.

But really, these details aren’t important on their own, and maybe it isn’t quite as hard to describe what it is that makes them so meaningful. The yellow sign probably would’ve been just a sheet of metal to me too, no mater how many times I saw it, except that it was the signal to that we were only a few blocks away from my grandparent’s house. And there the people I’d known all my life, the really beginning of my universe, would be waiting.