Philadelphia

Philadelphia, you should have been my hometown.

It was a narrow miss. From what I understand, although I have (unintentionally) had very little contact with my extended family, they are all from here. At the end of the 19th century my great great great grandparents climbed off a boat from the Ukraine and headed here. Their daughter, my great great aunt, lived much of her long life just a few blocks from where I live now. I know much less about the rest of the lot but the relatives on both sides of my family as far back as my great grandparents lived in Philadelphia or within a fifty mile radius of it. I have never met most of these people but living here now makes me long to.

I have only lived here two years, much less time than I have spent in half a dozen other cities and towns. But within months of landing here I felt entitled to the rights of permanent residency - eagerly learning the city's history, defending it against all incoming jabs, extolling its virtues to anyone who would listen with a feverish, preacher-like urgency. I made fun of the tourists clutching their bags close as they waited in line for crappy whiz cheesesteaks at stupid Pat's. I stomped around in the freezing winter in the 2 Street Mummer's Day afterparty. I went to some baseball games and cheered for the Phillies. I ate my weight in water ice. Just now I looked into how to become my Block Captain, though I gotta tell you it is the possibility of getting the hydrant key that prompted this google search. Philly summer is truly a solid three months of swamp.

The first 14 years of my life I called Cape Cod my home. It was only after I left that I realized how wrong a fit that was. I don't know how to analogize this to anything but it was truly revelatory. Something clicked when I saw how much more comfortable I felt in a gritty city - away from the phoniness of a tourist haven and the (generally) embittered and surprisingly conservative cranky people who inhabited it year round. (please note: I've enjoyed living in places that felt pretty phony (Princeton NJ) and others that were very conservative (Georgia) - but as far as I'm concerned, the combination of the two is a lethal one) This profound uncomfortableness in my hometown was a feeling so overpowering that I never looked back. I have immediate family there but no roots of my own. I go back to visit sometimes but I've never had a pang of nostalgia for anything there.

When people ask me where I'm from I always say "Boston." I lived there for almost a decade - all of my 20s. It's not a matter of preferring to say that I'm from a city than from the 'burbs, but rather that Boston is where I think I actually grew up. It is where I had my highest highs and lowest lows; it's where I figured out what I did (and didn't) want to do with my life, it's where I met most of my closest friends, it's where I learned to love art. I know that city in a way that only someone who calls it home can - not just certain neighborhoods but all of them. I've amassed nearly every trade secret it could offer up - best hidden restaurants, cheapest watering holes, smartest bar trivia, prettiest stretch of the waterfront, coolest junk shops, and where to buy a typewriter. The family with whom I am close and the friends I consider my family all live there, or else have moved but still consider it home. Every time I go there to visit friends I am completely overwhelmed by the desire to pack up my things and move back. It's hard to face the fact that in my line of work this probably won't ever happen.

Boston will always be home, but Philadelphia will always be the kindred city that should have been home. When I was small my great great aunt Kathryn - the one who lived down the street from my current apartment - wrote me long letters about her love of Philadelphia. In her letters I learned everything I know about my family. I learned about my cousin who writes for the Washington Post (probably this guy) and another cousin who reports for the BBC. My great great aunt stayed in Philadelphia when others fled. She sent me picture postcards from the 1930s and 1940s of Phila landmarks and outlined their histories on the backs of the cards. She told me about her world travels and about why her family left the Ukraine. Unlike my immediate family, Kathryn was concerned with all the things I have come to value highest and to study - art history (she wrote incessantly about the Philadelphia Museum of Art), history, travel, languages, preservation, writing, reading. I may have only met her twice or three times in my life but I wrote and wrote and wrote to her. And when I walk through Philadelphia, and happen upon her old apartment building, or a building she mentioned in a postcard, or an antique shop bearing her last name (perhaps owned by another relative I've never met?), my sense that Philadelphia should have been my city swells until it bursts. When my fellowship is done this time next year I will not want to leave. I will try to get a job here but will end up elsewhere. I will come back to visit and marvel at the fact that I managed to leave. And I will open the hydrants with the Block Captain key I will keep.