Paging BobI,
In my recent post, “Once Upon a Time,” part of your reply was, “Thank you, tponetom, again. We wait patiently for your posts, here at DetroitYES.”
Being of an “insecure” nature and an obvious “philosophical hermit” [[and mate), I conjured for awhile. And then! The forces of drinking from the Fountain of Hippocrene sent me off on a spree!
If you do not know about that Fountain, look it up. It’s cute.
So, with that said, I could give you about 3weeks, 12 hours a day, on the subject of ‘alley picking.’ but that can get dull. But I just love alley picking.
Or I can regale you with simple stories of what Detroit was in those early decades.
Give me a name of a street on the east side of Detroit and I will have some anecdotes involving it.
If you are an early Detroiter, you will know what 636 Beacon Street was.

I am working on Peggy’s anniversary present [[read ‘card’) but that is going to take awhile.
Now I am going off on a different tangent. I am going to ask anyone who reads this, if they have an ambition, a dream, a flagrant imagination, a gentle notion, OR, heaven forbid, a sensible plan for retirement! Now think about that for a while. Security? Rationality? Communality? Privacy? Necessity? And yes, many other things, ending in “Y”, like in ‘why.’
To further explain: When I was 45 years old I became General Manager of the Plumbing company I was working for. Sitting behind a desk for the next 20 years would have made me a very rich, very comfortable, 65 year old executive. And I thought about it. I got stuck on the “65” part. I “chucked” it.
As it turned out, in a few short years, the plumbing business clientele evaporated..
Smartest move I ever made.
On December 1, 1973, We loaded a U-Haul truck with all of our belongings and with Peggy driving our Chevy Nova, we headed for Ishpeming, in the U. P.[[Look it up)
Our dream began. Paint Your Wagon.
37 years later, we are straining to continue and stretch that dream.
Do I have stories about those 37 years? I have only glossed over them , very lightly. We joined the other animal kingdom and every day was a treasure.
To reiterate, do you have a dream to hitch your wagon to????