The local grocery store here in the Alger Heights / Garfield Park neighborhood in Grand Rapids has seen better days.  Pushed to the breaking point by a rotten economy that's driving shoppers to pinch their pennies and buy lower-margin products and Jennifer Granholm's dramatic increase of the minimum wage last summer, they've started laying folks off and are believed to be this close (I'm holding my fingers an inch apart) to closing their doors completely.

The real story is probably that it's taken this long for Granholm's economy to come around and bite me in the proverbial backside.But we've done a pretty good job, at the De Leeuw household, of taking care of ourselves and positioning ourselves in this particular economy.  My father is an X-Ray tech and my mom's an RN.  The need for medical care, no matter what else happens in the state, does not diminish.  

One sister's taken the same route and works now as an RN.  Others in the family are at college (go Blue, go Lakers) or finishing up high school or sixth grade.  All told, four of them work at the neighborhood grocery store, three still in school cashier and stock and one, my oldest brother works as a night manager while handling the produce department to provide for his wife and eight-month old girl.  And since you're all wondering, Evie is the cutest little girl in the world.

See?

That face right there?  All of those unemployment numbers, all of those statistics, all of the bad news grabbing headlines... well, when you boil them all down they're all about that little girl and others just like her.  They're about families.  They're not abstracts.  They're lives.  

Read on...