Meeting the Prodigal Son on Woodward Avenue...Part II

Woodward Avenue paved over the old Sauk Indian Saginaw Trail for one purpose: to close the distance between Detroit and Pontiac, for moving commerce and eventually cars from one to the other in the shortest time.  It is straight as an arrow as soon as it clears the hills north of 16 mile road, now known as Quarton Road on the west (old Doctor Quarton’s big house is just off Woodward) and Big Beaver to the east, named for a mystery skeleton that temporarily halted a widening and paving project when it was thought to be a small dinosaur.  It turned out to be a big beaver.  Even the mile roads, many renamed now, make it clear that the destination is Detroit, and anything between her and there is an obstacle to be driven past.  And that includes drivers.    

My dad used to call people who drove slowly “Sunday Drivers.”  Another wide avenue in Detroit, Grand Boulevard, was the antithesis of Woodward’s

point A to point B karma.  Grand Boulevard was designed for Sunday driving, for hitching up a buggy and getting dressed up and being seen.  But while Grand Boulevard runs north and west and then south, a Paris-style parkway from Belle Isle to Southwest Detroit around what was, in 1917, the city limits, Woodward is designed for getting from here to there.  No lollygagging.  No Sunday Driving. 

I discovered just a week after we had moved to Manresa and I had begun my daily drive to the university that the traffic lights were timed.  If a driver could match the speed of the traffic lights’ timing, every light would turn green as it was approached.   The problem was that while the speed limit was 45 miles per hour, the lights were timed at precisely 53.  I discovered that at every stoplight, there was a gaggle of knowledgeable commuters who would jump out in front of the legal pack, accelerating to the precise speed of 53 miles per hour, and sure enough, if they could weave around the uneducated or otherwise legal drivers (Sunday drivers,) it was smooth sailing all the way to Eight Mile Road, the Detroit City Limits, where the city’s own traffic lights were timed randomly.

Soon enough I had joined the elites, and by golly, I could make the trip from my door at Manresa to my door on campus in exactly 22 minutes, instead of the 30 it had taken me during my first weeks among the uneducated commuters on the three southbound lanes of Woodward.  But I noticed that riding with the 53 MPH gaggle was tense.  Every legal driver was an obstacle.  They became the enemy to me, really.  My language (yes, I was talking to myself as I tried to keep up with the lights) returned to its most colorful.  I was shocked to realize that most of the minute-long string of unduplicated profanities with which my old hockey-pro boss used to greet his friends on the pro shop phone was still part of my vocabulary.  I imagined myself in a nursing home one day, pencil-necked and wild-eyed, reeling off this explosion of expletives.  It was a scary thought.  I found myself disgusting.  

I decided to quit the Elite 53’s and stick to the speed limit, accepting the eight minutes of red lights as the cost of dignity in my dotage.  That’s when I met the Prodigal Son.  At the two-minute-long stoplights, Woodward was like the Saginaw Trail again.  I began to notice things.  As I traveled south, I noticed that the cars at the lights with me got older, duller, and noisier.   The opulence of Oakland County was being gradually thinned out by poor working Detroiters.  I began noticing the faces in the cars, especially the people to my right, illuminated by the morning sun rising on our left.  In the bright light I could make out details of their faces.  So many of them seemed worn and road-weary.  Few seemed to exude any sense of enthusiasm, any vital anticipation for getting to where they were going.  I remember seeing one particular young man in his car as he had to quickly sow down, “missing” a light turning from green to yellow, and then to red.  From behind the steering wheel of his halted car, he looked up at the red light, then reached up with his right hand and kneaded his bowed forehead.  Then he let his hand drop and slowly shook his head from side to side, some untold negative.  His shoulders sagged, his fingers hanging limp on the wheel, resigned to helpless waiting.  I remained behind him for a few more lights, feeling more and more his exhaustion.  And then hot tears filled my eyes and began to cool on my cheeks before I realized that I was thinking of the Prodigal Son. 

I gradually realized why the tears came so powerfully, as I looked, at each stoplight, from face to face, seeing them illuminated not only by the yellow sun now, but by a kind of grace, a transfiguration.  These were the beloved of God, who longed for each of them, who climbed the hill and watched for them, even as they sat and waited and kneaded their foreheads and smoked quick cigarettes with tight lips and jumped up from the light as it turned green.  This whole southbound expanse of Woodward Avenue was filled with these beloved, and God ached for each of them the way that he ached for me, and was as patient with each of them as he was with me. 

For five more years after that morning I commuted down Woodward.  I never did rejoin the Elite 53’s.  And I never again (grace, not willpower) considered any car an obstacle to my individual progress.  My eyes were drawn, you see, to the faces of the drivers, where every time I discovered a person beloved of God.  And the tears often came, not so much because I knew that they were beloved, but that they might not realize it, that they might be sitting there unaware of the crazy old man who stands at the top of the hill watching for them, longing for them.       

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.