The dangers of Detroit's sidewalks

Posted by jdg | Wednesday, September 13, 2006 |

We still don't have internet access yet (damn you, AT&T!), and all the posts I want to write are piling up inside my head, bottlenecked with the many hours I need to spend catching up on the last month or so in the lives of all the bloggers whose blogs I just haven't been able to read since we left California. I would kill for dialup. That's just how hard up I am.

But the lack of internet access has meant Juniper and I have just been walking all over the city of Detroit. Juniper's at that stage where she really wants to run everywhere when I set her down, but she trips all the time. Even when her shoes are actually tied. A few days ago she tripped flat on her face on the sidewalk in front of our house, with ribbons of blood unfurling from her lip and onto the shoulder of my shirt, onto our hardwood floors and throughout our kitchen. It was her worst owie yet in a season of owies. She makes this face every time she falls or scrapes anything, however mildly:

It's almost funny now, but when I first moved to San Francisco in 2001, a group of teenagers attacked me on the corner of Buchanan and Haight, punching me in the mouth, and kicking me in the chest and head while I sat on the ground. The only injury that remained after I washed off all the blood was a cut on my lip not much bigger than this:

At that time, I tried to wait until Wood got home from work to wash off the blood, because I thought it would make me look totally punk rock. Unfortunately Wood went out to grab a drink with some of her colleagues and I ended up washing off the blood before she could see it, and all I had left to show from my big mugging was a cut about the size of Juniper's there. I ended up getting the sympathy I was looking for, as did Juniper, when her mother finally looked into those eyes and saw the injury to her lip and she held her close, long and long.