Fish Flies, Summer Sweeps and Anonymous Christians

Those there fish flies in Saint Clair Shores and my home in Harrison Township, Michigan.

They come with Summer's debut June 21st in time for the sweep of the parking lot and space near my garage, my balcony, and my grateful front porch that I relish. 

After all,  front porches, like the big one we had on Arcola Street, near Lynch Road and Van Dyke, where my six siblings and I grew up with mom and dad, Chipper, our dog, and various other pets, pigeons, rabbits and chipmonks, our harem of Detroit  East Side friends captured with a glass quart-size bottle over their hole in Mt. Olivet or Forest Lawn Cemetaries, not far from home.  The railroad tracks on Mt. Elliott, near the Plymouth and Chrysler Assembly Plants where my two brothers, the late Lucas, Bob and I worked, served as recreation for us.  So did the neighbor's pigeon coop on Tappan, across the alley.  I tagged along with my brother, and was caught raiding their coop as I tried to escape to the safety of our home before the Detroit Police came to give a lesson on stealing.

Water in, and chipmonk(s) out.  That's how it worked at the cemetary as we worried about salt guns freezing our feet still as the cemetary workers ran to catch us. It seems they never did, however.

My parents made us scrub our big, two-floor aluminum-sided and wooded-railing porch that I thought went with World War II.

So evaporated neighborliness when anonymity of attached garages and front porches left builder's plans and designs of how to live independently and with little engagement from one's neighbors.

In fact, I can leave my garage without contact, besides a wave perhaps to a passer-by, as the anonymous Christian Jesuit, German theologian, Karl Rahner, addressed in ecclesiology, or church psychology class at Saint Mary's College, Orchard Lake, MI., back in 1967-71, where I went.

Yet, in the Harrison Cove condominiums where I reside, certain neighbors engage next door when I'm watering the colorful plants, walking my Bichon Frise dog, Woof, or, sweeping summer's fish flies that seem stuck on staying on the garage door.

Couple those crunchy flies that the Wall Street Journal noted weeks ago with a front-page story, with cobwebs and other creepy creatures, and, one's sweep gets energized for a quick finish of the grunt work that few Americans relish these days, sad to admit.

Fish flies.

Spiders.

Dust, dirt and those unbaptized, yet anonymous Christians Father Rahner spoke about who were not formally initiated into the Church with the Holy Spirit and water poured over each one, although they lived out their days on earth like Christians should with neighborliness.

Kind of like moving over for those "friendly" fish flies who appear all over the roads for me to roll over and feel the crunch under tires.  Not to mention the dirt I live with until company are coming and I need to clean up the sidewalks of the dirt and other debris that piles up like the mound that made its ways into Grandma Clara's Cheboygan, MI., farm decades ago when one of my sister's swept it up into one pile.  Grandma was upsets, and asked:  "Who brought that dirt in the house?"

We either learn to live together, or, we die alone, as the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., warned.

We do.

We will.

It's summer.  And, time for a sweep, fish flies, and engagement with neighbors, even "nosey" ones.