Mitch Albom

That's what I look for in any column.

That's what I look for in any movie or any screenplay or anything that I write is how can everybody relate to what I'm writing today?

Well, I didn't write to try to contrast it.

I wrote kind of like surfing on the wave of the city.

And I could feel, because I lived there, how we felt about

And, you know, in Detroit, we don't mind calling ourselves we, you know, how we sort of felt about our teams and how we felt when they were successful, how we felt, for example, when the Red Wings won the Stanley Cup and the next two days later they had a big parade and two of their players and one of their staff members were involved in this terrible car crash when the limo driver was drunk and they were never the same again.

You know, one became a paraplegic.

And and how we felt about that, you know, and the shock.

And so I would try to reflect the emotions of the city.

But I also would dive into a lot of those moments that you're talking about and those neighborhoods that you're talking about and.

Often, Tanya, and if you were there, perhaps you remember, I would write a series every winter called Dreams Deferred.

And they would be about athletes who were cut short or had their dreams cut short because of something that happened in our city.

Or, you know, be it a drunk driving incident, a bullet, a shooting, a crash, something like that.

I remember one about this young man who was a very promising athlete.

high school basketball player.

And all of a sudden he stopped coming to practice at the height of his, you know, success.

He just stopped coming and then he stopped coming to school.

And the coach went out to, you know, find out why.

And he found out that his mother was a crack addict and that when he would go leave the house, the dealers would come to the house and

And sell her drugs and she'd get high again and couldn't get out of it.