STORY
A Brotherly Love note
by Kevin Clair
I think I'm in love.
Well, okay, maybe love is too strong of an emotion. It is still a feeling, though, as the philosophers have noted. And I don't know what to do about it. What do I say? How do I act? It's not that I haven't been here before, but this time it's different. It's complicated. And not only because it's a long-distance relationship; in a lot of ways, we're still total strangers to each other. We've only really hung out a few times. But you know how it is sometimes; you can spend even the tiniest amounts of time with someone, and something just clicks, and it's like you're meant to be. That's how this is.
That's right, guys: I'm pretty sure I have a thing for Philadelphia.
It didn't seem like much the first time we met. It was through New Jersey, so of course Philadelphia was bound to make a good first impression. And it has such great things going for it: Rittenhouse Square, a bunch of good colleges and universities, and all the same concerts as every other city on the East Coast. Also, Rittenhouse Square. But I was just getting over Minneapolis, the city I had only recently left for graduate school; the split was amicable, yet I pined. Everything I looked at was through Minnesota-colored glasses; the record stores were lacking because they weren't Treehouse, the movie theaters because they weren't Oak Street. You know how it is.
A short time later, I met New York City for the first time. New York tends to get a bad reputation among Midwestern kids, particularly those of rural extraction. We're taught that New Yorkers are haughty and self-important (an image they do little to deny), and anyway, what do they really have that Chicago doesn't?
The answer, of course, is "a great deal," and after a couple of visits I was as smitten as everyone else. Now that I live on the east coast again, New York is like a magnet; I've given in to its temptations on more than a few occasions in the handful of months I've been out here. But a funny thing has been happening; with every visit, I care about it a little less. Maybe it's just familiarity; maybe it loses its charm now that I'm reasonably able to navigate the subway without a map. Maybe it's my old Midwest aversion to "image," whatever that is; prolonged exposure to Williamsburg can be demonstrably hazardous to your health. But I am, above all else, drawn to places that just live, and don't want to look or act like anything. Bridgeport isn't my favorite neighborhood in Chicago just because the White Sox play in it.
And so, all the while, Philadelphia has been appealing to me. Part of it, at first, was its mere opposition to New York; if a city so caught up in being above it all deigns to deprecate Philadelphia as "the sixth borough," as if all it wants is to be New York, surely it must have something going for it. (I appreciate Boston for similar reasons.) But then I moved to Pennsylvania, and though State College tends toward Pittsburgh in these things, the nature of the town is such that it has to represent both sides of the state equally. And so I am regularly awash in Philadelphiana, from Phillies games on basic cable to Victory HopDevil in all the bars.
And it's so wonderful. I had no idea that Harry Kalas, of NFL Films fame, does TV coverage of the Phillies! I could listen to him all day long. And when he's over doing the radio from the fourth to the sixth inning, I can listen to Gary Matthews, whose affable demeanor is everything Chris Singleton aspires to be on White Sox radio broadcasts. And it's not just sports! Their presumptive mayor-elect is a class act, and they gave us a pretty excellent governor; one who, after several horrendous years of Blagojevich, I am refreshed to not have to be ashamed of. You can get Yuengling on tap at Phillies games; say what you will, but I've never had a lager I've enjoyed more. I could go on and on.
So like I said, I don't know. It's first of all completely ridiculous to be so completely besotted over a place. Particularly as I've never spent any substantial amount of time there; for all I know, it completely sucks and I'd hate it. And it does have its problems; SEPTA seems like a disaster from what I've heard, and it still has the same obtuse liquor laws that plague my life in the middle of the state. But every place has problems. The Twin Cities have the most inscrutable and absurd public transportation system I've ever seen (and I've been to Los Angeles!), yet I love them anyway.
And so here I sit, the apple of my eye some two hundred miles and several dollars' worth of Pennsylvania Turnpike away. Perhaps it will remain an affair in theory rather than in practice. In the meantime, there's always KYW at night and the Phillies on television to hold me over.