Home away from home that was and always will be home.

Every year I return to Michigan during the weekend of the Crim to celebrate my dad's birthday and participate in a fantasy football draft for a league that I have been in since the year 2000.  In the last few years, I have started joining my friends in downtown Flint on the Friday before the Crim. I think that if the rest of the country could experience Saginaw street that night, Flint would lose a little of it's dubious reputation.  I didn't see the worst-city-to-live-in in America that night, I didn't see the auto theft capital of the U.S.  What I saw was a small fun nostalgic downtown, where you recognized every 3rd or 4th person and everyone just wanted to have a good time.  Imagine Cheers expanded over a 3 block radius.  To complete the experience, as my friends and I migrated to our last bar of the evening, The Torch, we were greeted by friendly yells and cheers by people we knew and people we didn't as we walked in (it was a group of us, so they couldn't just yell "Norm!").  Thats all I want out of a bar, friendly atmosphere and of course good drinks.  Sure there was a moment in the evening where a homeless person wandered by asking for change, but that happens about three times a night if you are bar hopping in Chicago.  I spent about half of what I spend on drinks during a night out here and the parking didn't cost me anything either.  More satisfying than the saving money thing though, was the feeling of community that I felt.  Nobody was judging anyone for how they were dressed or what kind of shape they were in.  There is this weird feeling of camaraderie like the rest of the country thinks we suck, but we know better.  Maybe that was just a good group of people I  fell in with, but it was great.

The rest of weekend was great as well.  Dad liked my gift, I saw my nephew make 3 tackles in his first football game, the draft went pretty well and I won a geeky miniatures game with a stranger at a comic shop on Sunday. But that Friday night stuck in my head the whole way home.  The Chicago area has given me a career, a home and a wife, all of whom I love, but a small part of me will always call the Flint, Mi area home.