Why don’t you move?

That was all the letter said, but it was enough. It was a familiar tune, one I'd played and whistled a few times myself. Why didn't I move?

Friend’s of mine already have homes in West Bloomfield, Farmington Hills and beyond. Heck, I wouldn't mind camping out in the Southfield Public Library, which has fireplaces and ramps, plenty of computers, puppets, a cafe selling gourmet baked goods and an outdoor fountain terrace, And if I lived in Tecumseh, I'd spend as much time as possible in the British Pantry & Tea Garden Cafe, sipping mango passion fruit or royal plum tea.

I've also fantasized about fleeing to Chicago, where I could dine on the blues and gorge on art. Faced with a $220 million budget gap this year, Chicago didn't panic and start whacking off the arms and legs of all its arts programs. Instead, the Windy City made history in December by becoming the first city to conduct a successful nationwide eBay auction.

In two weeks, Chicago raised about $243,000 by auctioning off everything from a vintage Playboy Bunny costume to the chance to throw a dinner party catered by Oprah Winfrey's chef. Someone paid $7,600 to dye the Chicago River green on St. Patrick's Day. Someone else plunked down $21,000 to hold a wedding inside the historic Chicago Cultural Center. The auction money will fund several cultural programs.

But I'm not moving to Chicago - or to Tecumseh or Southfield.

For whatever confused tangle of reasons, I'm a Detroiter.

Over the years, I've grown accustomed to living in a city that is constantly dancing with disaster and returning from the dead.

My Detroit is a clashing chorus of contrasts, the old bumping shoulders with the new. It is town houses springing up in the shadow of bottle-strewn ruins. And it's a family playing a radio on the porch of a house that's the only structure left on a block of waist-high weeds.

It's a perfect cheese omelet from Zef's inside the sleepy-eyed Book Building on Washington Boulevard. And it's a passenger trying to pay his cab fare with a can of potted meat.

It's a city where nearly all the ethnic festivals look alike and celebrate the same thing - the flow of dollar bills from hand to hand. And it's a place where men and women with fishing poles yank their dinners and their summertime joy from the river's blue mouth.

It's a city where thieves will steal your tires and try to sell them back to you. And it's a city built by Southern migrants and European immigrants and now being rebuilt, in part, by sewing, cooking, art-dealing, grocery-selling and hair-braiding West African entrepreneurs.

As I've said so many times before, this is a city where some people spit out bullets and others sweep them up, a town with enormous problems and equally large opportunities. Still, I can’t imagine finding any other place that would feel like home.

No, I'm not moving - not now and probably not ever.

I just hope I'm not that last survivor whose job it is to turn off the lights.

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Betty DeRamus' column runs Monday, Wednesday and Friday and Metro. Reach her at (313) 222-2296 or bderamus@detnews.com.

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