I have shirked my duty as an EverydayCitizen writer. I did not write anything last month. Nothing at all. This month I must write extra to be less shirky.

Frankly, I'm not sure where November went. I remember Turkey.

October. October I remember. I was hanging up Halloween decorations with my son, I watched a lot of scary movies, we went trick-or-treating with our kids and some friends...

...and then we had Turkey and cranberries...

And then it was December.

An old couple lives next door. Now just the woman. The man has passed on, leaving her alone. Few children come through our neighborhood on Halloween, so most people don't bother to stock much candy, but every year the woman sets aside a special bag of treats for my children on Halloween -- mints from restaurants, chocolates from hotels, waste not want not. The sort of thing, when you get older, starts to seem odd, like the people on the block who give out nickels or dental floss for Halloween. Apples. The air in the bag of candy, clearly a collection of sweets the woman accumulated over the course of the year, smells like her house, bit of cedar and a hint of Listerine...an antiseptic smell. One wonders if she accumulated the candy all year with the thought of handing it to my kids.

It's odd.

And it's sweet.

And on Halloween, it's my kids' first experiences with the kind differences of neighbors.

I love Halloween.

Before I get up early in the morning to fly to Baltimore I want to write a post here in Everyday Citizen for my first time...I think I'll write something about a restaurant I went to in Downtown Muskegon several days ago. But before I do that, I need to tell you that Downtown Muskegon, most of it, was bulldozed to the dirt just five years ago.

To the dirt. Piles of rubble and bent steel and large piles of sand and dirt.

Plowed under.

Gone.

But before I discuss that I need to go back a bit further to when the downtown was enclosed back in the 1970's. They built a roof OVER the downtown. Like a mall. But with a roof over the building tops. And doors placed around the edges. I think the idea was to make a "downtown" type of "mall" type of thing that would be pleasant to use all year round. Even in the snow. Or something like that.

And going back just a little further, occupying the shores of Muskegon Lake, which happens to be the largest harbor along Lake Michigan, occupying the shores of Muskegon Lake just a stone's throw from the "Mall-Downtown" hybrid were factories. Foundries.

The city was a manufacturing town not too long ago. Still kinda is.