Peter and Detroit

Peter and Detroit

Peter sits by the Giving Tree, preparing stone soup while remembering the “Big O”, who’d rolled by this very spot on this very street that leads to the city.

Our city is Detroit at the river.  A place that pronounces liberty, yet a community with many, many of the challenges and opportunities present in cities all over the world.   It has its own flavor though, and tastes like a caramel-chocolate ice cream cone.

Peter is here to make Detroit the star of the show, while it waits to find and discover its new name.  In the legend of the white stone, the new name and the hidden bread or seed, the name will be found in the stone and the bread of life will be revealed to the hungry. 

So Peter sits by his pot of boiling water, by the roadside.  The white stone rests at the bottom of the soup to be.  And it is about to be made.  Just then, his good friend named The Dawn comes skipping up the road from the garlic patch.  She loves Peter.  He makes such wonderful soup and she has known him for one third of her life.

“Peter,” she calls out.  “What have you named your soup today?”

He and smiles and announces, “No name.”  For this soup waits for its new name, just as Detroit waits for its new name.  It knows it is not a fort anymore; there is nothing to protect.  Old Detroit still sleeps in its dreams of darkness and entanglements.  Or so it seems.

“I have brought you a special flower, Peter, to put in your lovely mixture.  I will be back for a taste at dawn.”  She had named herself The Dawn many years ago.  Now she leaves a pretty budding flower, along with her pleasant scent of garlic that she spreads around the worlds she walks in and this town along the way.

Peter watches her run off down the road.  When he looks into this city of the future, he sees fun – not mobs of people.  He sees transportation, not just vehicles; parks in place of sidewalks; gardens where asphalt parking lots use to lie.  Peter is seeing rivers of life and vitality flowing from everywhere and nowhere to this city by the river.  People are coming to these clean and cleansed waters with laughter in their voices and happiness in their hearts.