I 8 They’re

For those of you who need subtitles: “I ate there.”

I am neither text addicted, nor grammatically challenged. I don’t mind if your lips move while you translate into American Standard English.

While as a writer I am very fond of my fantastic locale, as a reader I appreciate the anchors in a story that keep me grounded. When most of the action takes place in a place that doesn’t exist, those anchors bring us back to more familiar ground.

Detroit and southeast Michigan are fertile ground for dropping anchors, although I need to be careful that the anchors I drop existed in the time and place I want to evoke. Case in point: Lelli’s.

For Michiganders (the rest of you do know that’s what we’re called) under thirty, Lelli’s is a place in the back of an upscale industrial park near Auburn Hills. That place is a shadow of its former self. Once upon a time, for a very long time, Lelli’s was a fixture in the New Center area on Woodward near the old GM building. The place was a rabbit warren of pillars and dark corners, with celebrity photos on the walls. When I ate there in the early eighties, the parking lot was a chain link prison yard paved with luxury cards. Even then, the restaurant had outlived its neighborhood.

I only ate there a few times, but those memories still burn brightly: a porterhouse steak that would’ve satisfied a grizzly. Sauce on the pasta that might’ve been made from tomato soup.

Lelli’s, like Mario’s on Cass, the Dakota Inn and the Roostertail, were Detroit landmarks. Some of them still are. Anyone who knew the city could find them blindfolded. There are other familiar landmarks like the Cass corridor, Mother Waddle’s Perpetual Mission and Wayne State University. The ruins of the Packard plant. The Woodbridge Tavern. The DIA. When I need to evoke the city, I call up my memories of those places and I am back in that time and place.

Other long-time Detroit people share those memories. If I can put the images on paper, then my readers are there with me. I hope the images are vivid enough that people from other places and times can come along for the ride and not get lost.

Rochester, Michigan holds memories for far fewer people. When I first moved there, the local tribe was mostly with GM. After the Chrysler complex was built in Auburn Hills, the crowd became for diverse. As the car business has declined the dominant culture has faded but the village at its core has not changed all that much. Some of the touchstones like Green’s Artist Supply remain, but not all. The Cooper’s Arms is now the Rochester Chop House. The D&C dime store is now Rojo (Andiamo’s if you don’t have a scorecard). Mitzelfeld’s is gone. The old library is a yoga studio. The old post office is … what day is it?

Does anyone remember that tiny Oak gas station along the railroad tracks? Does anyone remember the tracks? At least the park is still there.

As a writer, the changes form a time capsule if I can keep my chronology straight.

It’s a long way from Paris, notionally north of Eight Mile in Macomb County to Rochester. An eastsider will want to stop for gas and pack a lunch. I can usually invent an excuse to drag Frank Healy out of his comfort zone if the wilds of north Oakland County are needed to remind readers that they’re still in Michigan.

I can live entirely in my imagination, but readers can’t go there unless I invite them. I may occasionally need to lure them into a familiar place while I spring my traps.