Requiem for Pontiac

Another cyst erupted on the ailing corpus of Southeastern Michigan.
The hospital my brother Bryan and I were born in closed yesterday. It used to be called Pontiac General. 800 or so people lost their jobs. Poor people who already have a tough time getting medical care will now find it harder to transport themselves to a hospital. Meanwhile, new hospitals are spring up like mushrooms after a hard rain on the fertile soils of the affluent outer ring communities like West Bloomfield and Gross Pointe.

Just as stock markets rise and fall over regular intervals, just as human beings are born, live their lives and die, this year has really questioned my fundamental belief in this area. Pontiac isn’t in Detroit, it’s roughly 20 miles away but they have a lot in common. Pontiac holds a special, bittersweet place in my heart, and not just because I was born there or raised fifteen minutes north of the city in Lake Orion (I think they’re calling that Orion Township now, but no one did when I was there).

I went to high school there for two years at Pontiac Catholic. It’s now called Notre Dame Prep. I’m told it's good now. In 1988, I lead a minor defection of some of the brightest Lake Orion students back to Lake Orion’s public high school (Go Dragons) after my sophmore year there because the teachers were too busy with discipline issues: fights, coke dealers, thuggery, and the like. I got called to the principal’s office a month or so before the end of school. I thought I was in trouble for something dumb I did or said. Rather, he pled that I would convince the Chris Bzdoks of the world to not leave. I told him he failed us and that I was becoming dumber at his school. I was.

Pontiac saw a minor resurgence in the late 1980s and 1990s for having one street with a bunch of hipster bars on it. Like downtown Detroit, it was a cool area that comprised about one percent of the land mass, and yet people had the shortsightedness/gall to call it a “comeback,” meanwhile four blocks away from these tiny enclaves of bars and restaurants were endless blocks of decreptitude and shamefully abysmal high school graduation rates. 20 years later, Pontiac, regrettably, is mostly still an insolvent dump. North Oakland Medical Center's closing downtown is another sign of the same.

Notice that I don’t say “Michigan” is failing. Even though the current recession is hammering the entire country, the West side of the State is not faring anywhere nearly as poorly as the Detroit region. Hell, people in Kalamazoo can send their kids to college for free. How crazy is that . . . free college at any public university or college in the State.

I want to be optimistic about this region. The people here are really nice for the most part. Homes are affordable. There’s a ton of recreational opportunity, our parks are good, and we have the best city water in the U.S. (really, try the tap water everywhere that you go). But our enemployment rate is the worst in the country, our anchor industry is getting absolutely smoked right now, and many smart, affluent young people are leaving in droves (no, make that Civics) for places like Chicago, North Carolina, Arizona, Texas, etc.

Maybe North Oakland Medical Center closing means nothing. But in its dying, I know for certain that my children will not and cannot be born there.

To end on a lighter note, my dear mother Patricia shared a room with another young mother from Pontiac who also had just given birth. My Mom said, “So what did you name your baby?”
“Urethra.”
Stunned, my Mom said, “Oh . . .”
“Yes, well, I heard the doctor say that name and I thought it sounded pretty.”

I guess it could have been worse.