The Charmed Basement

It's not every day that you go to the Archives for some routine research and get a clairvoyant reading about your Oma that is 100% accurate...right down to the fact that she unfortunately had a colostomy bag in the last years of her life. Still ...in shock.

The Archives is a strange and wonderful and charmed place. When you are there alone in the basement, the whole place is charged with energy and presence, even at dead silence. You are acutely aware of your surroundings, and it feels as if you are not alone, though you are. It's like when you put a photo into Photoshop or iPhoto and crank up the sharpness a little bit--everything looks sharper and more immediate than normal. To me, at least.

In addition to doing research in the Archives today, Dusty D also roamed the museum, after a pleasant chat with today's docent, looking for Mystery Artifacts for the coming month. I headed first for the second-floor tool room, a place I've been a thousand times.

Approaching the tool room, Dusty D felt the same completely illogical one-microsecond flash of panic and fear that I ALWAYS feel when glimpsing the toy room to the left, on the northeast corner of the second floor. It's not because of the contents of the room, though I could do without the mannequins and dolls. It's just a Bad. Vibe. Oh, call me fanciful or over-imaginative--could be. There's not an earthly reason in the world to feel edgy around a happy room full of wonderful old fun toys and games. But if you offered this miser a thousand dollars to spend the night in there, I'd decline, thank you.

At any rate, I got some awesome M.A.'s and was delighted to leave the quiet, still second floor and traipse back down to the archives, where two friends happened to be today. Ahhh. So much better! In chatting with one, the talk led to this person (name withheld for privacy) giving me the clairvoyant reading, and I'm still reverberating from it hours later and thinking it over.

The Archives is a charmed place...

The Door to Ypsilanti's Past is Small and White

Just as the Smithsonian Museum is "the nation's attic," the Ypsilanti City Archives are "the city's basement." In contrast to the ornate splendor of the Museum building, the entrance to the Archives in the Museum basement is a modest lean-to on the Museum's north side. The door is so unassuming that I missed it entirely when I first arrived at the Museum as a new archives volunteer. The sidewalk curving around the Museum's facade leading to the Archives' door is curvy, like the Huron River behind the Museum. If a canoeist there put his boat in the river, the sinuous narrow waterway would soon open up into the comparative vastness of Ford Lake. The little curvy walkway also leads the explorer to a world astonishing--rich and wide and deep: the diaries, photographs, personal letters, location files, tax rolls, crime histories, obituaries, and artifacts comprising a city's collective memory.