The year was 1977.

“I was twelve or thirteen, and I had been begging my dad to go pheasant hunting,” Scott began.

He told me he thinks of this story every time mid-October rolls around.

Pheasant hunting season is short, so time was of the essence. After a long work week, his dad made good on his promise and loaded up the truck with their hunting gear bright and early Saturday morning. The two headed to Grand Blanc, where Scott’s uncle had a farm. They set out walking through the pasture into the woods, where the temperature was hovering around freezing.

“It was very overcast, and the atmosphere was unsettled.”

Scott had his eyes peeled for pheasants, but his dad seemed to be singularly focused on the clouds…

My dad was laid off this week at 62. A white collar guy from an otherwise blue collar family. At a time when the face of white collar jobs for the non-college educated is AI, not seniors with a high school diploma. 

A real time traveler, my dad has often told me tales of The Great Before, when a scrappy young screwup from Pontiac could somehow parlay a middling foray as a free jazz saxophone player into a successful career in the field that at that time was considered the future. Between gigs, he was just industrious and interested enough in what would become personal computers and the internet. In fact, he scored his first job in the tech industry in 1989 at Ford Motor Company because he had simply used my uncle’s Macintosh computer. That’s hard to imagine these days, but he hit it all just right. He started out when people were learning the language of computers, and he’s seen it through to this era when computers have learned to speak the language of humans. He’s now a Senior Programmer in age and experience, as I like to tease him…

You came to me from out of nowhere

You took my heart and found it free

These are the opening lyrics to my paternal grandma Helen’s favorite song, “Out of Nowhere.” The jazz standard would’ve been nearly everywhere in her young life, recorded by everyone from Bing Crosby to Charlie Parker, and making its way into the soundtrack of countless films of the era. This must’ve brought some consistency to the transient life of a latchkey girl who was constantly moving apartments with an often-distracted mother who had escaped into Detroit from Canada after years of abuse on the farm where she was sent to work along with her oldest siblings by their destitute family back in England.

Helen was not wanted; she was an inconvenient fact of life born well-before birth control or lines of credit made life as a single woman viable. In the 1950 census Helen is listed as “sister”—her mother did not want her male suitors to know she had a child, thus ruining her ticket into stability and security. I sometimes think about the cruel practicality of knowing you are the reason your mother cannot afford rent, the resentment, codependency, and felt duty to care for her into your twenties. Helen found herself both unwelcome and obliged to stay and labor—just like her mother before her…