I was on my way home from the U.S. Capitol on Thursday when the news arrived on my car radio - the city of Detroit was filing for Chapter 9 bankruptcy, the largest-ever municipal bankruptcy filing in United States history.
As I pulled into a neighborhood parking lot to pick up one of my kids, I couldn't help but daydream for a minute about my youth in the Motor City, thinking about the city where my father was born and the hard times that just never seemed to end.
Even back then to an innocent kid living just about a mile outside the city limits - not far from 8 Mile Road - Detroit was clearly in trouble.
Every morning as I delivered the Detroit Free Press on my bicycle, I got to read the latest troubles for Mayor Coleman Young, as city leaders desperately looked for ways to spur new growth and overcome the scars of the 1967 riots that hit the city.
Going into the city with my parents always left me with an unsettled feeling; there was the time that someone was murdered in the parking lot of the Olympia Stadium when my father and I had gone to see the Red Wings play, or the time my dad had to yank a guy out of the family car a few blocks from Cobo Hall - my father had left us back at the arena, but when he got to the car, there was someone trying to steal our ride home.
And yet, despite the down side of the city, it was home to my Little League baseball years, where I followed Mark Fidrych and the Detroit Tigers, and learned to love radio by listening to J.P. McCarthy, Ernie Harwell and Paul Carey on WJR - and some loudmouth coach of a local college basketball team named Vitale.
On the northwest side of the city, you can still find the house my grandfather built - my dad recalls living in a tent in the teeth of a cold Detroit winter while his father worked on their home.
I went by the old house in 2012 during the Michigan Primary; Mitt Romney had an event at the Royal Oak theater not far from there - it looks like America.
And it was America, with a healthy, working middle class spurred by the auto industry. But over the years, the auto industry went the wrong way, and Detroit headed the wrong way financially as well.
Before rushing to the airport to leave Detroit last year, I also went by my old neighborhood for the first time in many years; I had lost touch with all of my friends from way back in the 1970's; just some photos here and there, and one great video where I hit a home run in Little League and my father drops the movie camera to watch the play.
I had looked up one childhood friend on the internet and saw that he was still in the neighborhood, coaching a Little League team and struggling to stay afloat in an area that had been battered repeatedly by economic troubles.
But while my friend Dean was surviving, just a mile down the road, the city of Detroit was shrinking at a furious pace - the population dropping by 25 percent in a decade - as several hundred thousand people have simply left.
If you have met anyone from Michigan in recent years, you might have heard the stories, too - otherwise good people unable to sell their house in Detroit or other areas of Michigan, a cycle of economic pain that seemed difficult to break.
And in Detroit, the signs were everywhere of an urban collapse, with blocks of empty houses and major economic issues in every corner of Detroit.
Plus, a mountain of red ink.
While the automobile industry still helps Detroit, it's nowhere near what it was when my grandfather worked on the Ford assembly lines around World War II.
And it's nothing like it was in the 1970's and 80's when my father worked for Henry Ford as well.
Driving home, with my middle boy jabbering away in the back seat, the voice on the radio kept talking about Detroit, about how the city owes as much as $20 billion to its creditors, and how officials want to pay that off at pennies on the dollar.
"Detroit's bankruptcy to set off pitched battles with creditors, pensions, unions," read the headline on the web site of the Detroit Free Press, a paper that only prints now a few days a week. No kids are delivering it seven days a week in the snow any more on their bicycles.
Detroit may never be what it was when the assembly line was at its peak, but something has to change when you see statistics like one that says 40 percent of the streetlights in Detroit don't work.
Now we'll get to see whether bankruptcy can actually breathe new life into it - or not.
One thing is for sure - the old way of doing things didn't work out so well.
