For Christmas I Got . . .
Dec. 25th, 2007 10:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tanarillAbsolutely Nothing. Instead, I spent my Christmas participating in the Detroit-Jewish tradition of Mitzvah Day, doing Worthy things and helping Good Causes.
This is the story of Chatham, the amazing Street That Does Not Know How Many of Itself There Are. It also involves the Jeffries and the Southfield freeways. And train tracks, which cannot be driven upon, no JJ, that is not an actual road, please learn to read maps.
But first, please remember something about mitzvahs. Specifically, that a mitzvah, in addition to being the karmic opposite of a sin, is actually something we are commanded to do as Jews. And yes, the commanding entity is, in theory, God. This is an instance where our religion dovetails nicely with Christianity. December 25 is just a day, to us. But we have it off because in corporate America, you Cannot Work On Christmas. So the Jewish community of Detroit (or at least, the Jewish part of Detroit that are not Black Hatters*) spend the day doing mitzvahs to help Christians who, for whatever reason, would not otherwise have a Merry Christmas.
Last year, JJ and I spent it at a homeless shelter. This year, we delivered hot meals to the elderly infirm, part of a program called Meals on Wheels. We showed up at the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Detroit (JFed) building, and from there caravan'd to the El Bethel church, where we picked up food and got maps. The general area was circled in pink, so I handed the map to JJ and set out toward the Southfield freeway, which was the closest north-south mile road to the area circled on the map, confident that he would navigate.
Wrongo.
It took me half an hour to realize that the road he wanted me to drive on did not exist. For cars. Because it was a railway. I had to stop and explain that the little crosshatches means it is a railway line and Not Useful to us. Then I stole map and marked off our route in pencil.
We still got lost, but less severely.
See, the thing is, I-96 is more or less east-west at that point, and overlies the old roadbed of Schoolcraft, which is also 4 Mile Road. It is called the Jeffries, not I-96. I don't know why. Anyway, Schoolcraft was there before the Jeffries, and when they put the interstate through, they actually cut away a block either side because it is an eight-lane freeway. Also because it is a huge eight-lane freeway, they built bridges over it every half-mile and called it a day. The map we had did not show this fact, insisting that every. single. street. has its own bridge over the Jeffries. JJ kept trying to insist that we could cross at places we couldn't because there isn't actually a bridge there.
This cost us another half-hour.
Then we successfully delivered a few meals. Yay!
And then . . . there was Chatham. The first thing about this street is that it's name is not Chatman, which was the name of the street listed with an address. We had to figure out that some person typed it in wrong. Then we had to figure out which Chatham, because there are sic of it. One of it is perpendicular to the other five. From south to north, they war divided by: ninety degree turn; the Jeffries; a school; a jog; and some random loopy segment doing its own thing off to the side. It's pretty clear that the bits separated by the Jeffries and the school used to be one road, and just aren't anymore. Likewise, the segment at ninety degrees may at one point have curved and met up with the rest of it. I'm not so sure about the loopy bit, and the jog is a standard Detroit-sucks-at-planning-and-so-the-street-moves-over-twenty-feet jog. The point is, we had to get to and search six segments of road for the correct address. I think we crossed the Jeffires eight separate times. On this one single bridge. We found the right house eventually, though.
And then we delivered the rest of the meals with no problem at all.
So it all worked out in the end, and after all that, I can rightly say that I feel Accomplished.
Tomorrow is my BF's birthday. Yes, he was born on Boxing Day. But he's also Jewish, which means that it is also Just Another Day. Only also his birthday. Then he will be the same age as me, and even though this is not twenty-one and therefore not all that big of a Thing to celebrate, it is still a Thing because he will be legal in Canadia, which of course necessitates a trip to Canadia to test this hypothesis.
>.> <.< No, I'm not planning on getting my boyfriend drunk. Whyever would you think that? [innocent stare]
*Black Hatters are the Jewish equivalent of fundamentalists. Yes, they exist. Yes, they look down their holier-than-thou noses at the rest of us for, God forbid, being friends with our Christian neighbors. Yes, they are the idiots running Israel. No, I don't approve of them How could you tell?
This is the story of Chatham, the amazing Street That Does Not Know How Many of Itself There Are. It also involves the Jeffries and the Southfield freeways. And train tracks, which cannot be driven upon, no JJ, that is not an actual road, please learn to read maps.
But first, please remember something about mitzvahs. Specifically, that a mitzvah, in addition to being the karmic opposite of a sin, is actually something we are commanded to do as Jews. And yes, the commanding entity is, in theory, God. This is an instance where our religion dovetails nicely with Christianity. December 25 is just a day, to us. But we have it off because in corporate America, you Cannot Work On Christmas. So the Jewish community of Detroit (or at least, the Jewish part of Detroit that are not Black Hatters*) spend the day doing mitzvahs to help Christians who, for whatever reason, would not otherwise have a Merry Christmas.
Last year, JJ and I spent it at a homeless shelter. This year, we delivered hot meals to the elderly infirm, part of a program called Meals on Wheels. We showed up at the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Detroit (JFed) building, and from there caravan'd to the El Bethel church, where we picked up food and got maps. The general area was circled in pink, so I handed the map to JJ and set out toward the Southfield freeway, which was the closest north-south mile road to the area circled on the map, confident that he would navigate.
Wrongo.
It took me half an hour to realize that the road he wanted me to drive on did not exist. For cars. Because it was a railway. I had to stop and explain that the little crosshatches means it is a railway line and Not Useful to us. Then I stole map and marked off our route in pencil.
We still got lost, but less severely.
See, the thing is, I-96 is more or less east-west at that point, and overlies the old roadbed of Schoolcraft, which is also 4 Mile Road. It is called the Jeffries, not I-96. I don't know why. Anyway, Schoolcraft was there before the Jeffries, and when they put the interstate through, they actually cut away a block either side because it is an eight-lane freeway. Also because it is a huge eight-lane freeway, they built bridges over it every half-mile and called it a day. The map we had did not show this fact, insisting that every. single. street. has its own bridge over the Jeffries. JJ kept trying to insist that we could cross at places we couldn't because there isn't actually a bridge there.
This cost us another half-hour.
Then we successfully delivered a few meals. Yay!
And then . . . there was Chatham. The first thing about this street is that it's name is not Chatman, which was the name of the street listed with an address. We had to figure out that some person typed it in wrong. Then we had to figure out which Chatham, because there are sic of it. One of it is perpendicular to the other five. From south to north, they war divided by: ninety degree turn; the Jeffries; a school; a jog; and some random loopy segment doing its own thing off to the side. It's pretty clear that the bits separated by the Jeffries and the school used to be one road, and just aren't anymore. Likewise, the segment at ninety degrees may at one point have curved and met up with the rest of it. I'm not so sure about the loopy bit, and the jog is a standard Detroit-sucks-at-planning-and-so-the-street-moves-over-twenty-feet jog. The point is, we had to get to and search six segments of road for the correct address. I think we crossed the Jeffires eight separate times. On this one single bridge. We found the right house eventually, though.
And then we delivered the rest of the meals with no problem at all.
So it all worked out in the end, and after all that, I can rightly say that I feel Accomplished.
Tomorrow is my BF's birthday. Yes, he was born on Boxing Day. But he's also Jewish, which means that it is also Just Another Day. Only also his birthday. Then he will be the same age as me, and even though this is not twenty-one and therefore not all that big of a Thing to celebrate, it is still a Thing because he will be legal in Canadia, which of course necessitates a trip to Canadia to test this hypothesis.
>.> <.< No, I'm not planning on getting my boyfriend drunk. Whyever would you think that? [innocent stare]
*Black Hatters are the Jewish equivalent of fundamentalists. Yes, they exist. Yes, they look down their holier-than-thou noses at the rest of us for, God forbid, being friends with our Christian neighbors. Yes, they are the idiots running Israel. No, I don't approve of them How could you tell?
