The rubber hit the road last week,
some days before Christmas, when dearly beloved Anne, ma femme, displayed her
urban road-skill game by turning into a tiny cemented parking
apron off a highly trafficked road stretch in the kind of neighborhood people
these days are calling "sketchy." Even in a car as comparatively small as ours,
which can U-turn almost anywhere, I would not have chosen this improbable off-road
sanctuary to pause for a "recalculation" since a reversal of course lay clearly ahead in our immediate future.
Recalculation over: Yup, gotta go
back the way we came and turn either left or right at the numbered-road intersection of
Nothing and Nowhere-but-traffic.
Several backs and forths get the car
eventually pointed down the drive toward the a now crowded roadway, having missed
our light.
Tongue firmly between my teeth, I swivel
my noggin left and right to catch portents of doom while Anne inches
out into the traffic and waves at drivers. Drivers in Philadelphia are more likely
to be nice than elsewhere (such as New York and Boston), but even the lady who stops and waves us out eventually gives up
since the lane next to her keeps moving past us.
After we finally emerge onto the
road, heading the wrong way, a reversal of course is somehow managed and when make our way back to the Intersection of Indecision the "voice of the
machine" firmly sends us one way, the wrong way, and immediately calls for a
U-turn.
My tongue is well chewed.
Utterly dependent on The Voice in this new city,
we slowly slink our way into a West Philadelphia residential neighborhood of numbered
streets, and everything just gets friendlier and friendlier.
Having found The Street Where She
Lives (our daughter) we now hunt for the four-digit number. I point out that
the number in the hundreds column goes up by one after each intersection, so that
when we intersect 48th Street, for example, the house numbers on the avenue
now begin with 48(00), instead of 47.
Enlightenment!
Everyone's urban skills are on
display today.
Anne begins the deeper game of
looking for a parking space. And finds one -- exactly in front of Sonya's door.
Eureka! Our luck is definitely changing.
Sonya's apartment is the lower half
of a single house built as one of the semi-detached, mostly brick houses that
run throughout this large up-trending neighborhood -- up and down all those numbered streets and
tree-named avenues. The buildings strike me as structurally attractive and they're all
appropriately (and some lavishly) landscaped with ornamental grasses and shrubs.
Everything's lovely and personalized and somehow cool. Holiday lights.
Lots of independently, probably locally, owned shops, cafes and restaurants. We
explore on foot for an hour as light fades, seeing parks, streetcar tracks
where the brightly colored rail cars take you down to Central City, and an
ad-hoc corner Christmas tree lot has popped up with offerings we vow to inspect
the next day.
Our first business the following
day, a Sunday, is to explore the historic district in ur-Philadelphia, home of the Founding Documents. Lots of
history here, especially in those first American centuries and even more
pointedly in the days of the creation of an independent American nation.
But, guess what?, business is
closed. By order of the so-called President of the United States. His Phoniness
has shut down the part of the government that owns and oversees places such as
the hall where the Declaration of Independence was approved, declared, and announced
to the world.
Two uniformed personnel, whom I can
only think of as "federal cops," whatever their uniform was actually
supposed to connote. They stood behind a long ad-hoc symbolic fence, consisting of a single
chain length and lots of silly black posts, which they appeared to be guarding
-- against what or whom I cannot imagine.
Would angry hordes be expected to rush the doors
of the closed establishment and damage the sacred artifact within by banging on the portal?
Actually, the only horde around was me...
Between me and the fake-fence lay a strip of ye old cobbled roadway, created long
after the fact to lend ambience. As I approached the fence, the two officers, one female, began
waving me away as if to protect my safety from the terrors of urban traffic, of which there
was absolutely none because no driver in his right mind takes a cobbled road
when smoother roadways are available.
Somehow I'd forgotten to take my
camera along so there is no visual record of this interesting moment when I am
confronted by authority.
"It's closed," the female
guard shouts. The male one repeats this interesting news.
"I know it's closed. I just
want to look at it."
"Get out of the road!" she
calls. "You're not safe."
"I'm extremely safe," I
reply. "It's this stupid government of ours that's not safe."
Things go downhill from there.
I can't recall everything they said, or I said, but I do remember saying-shouting something on the order of...
"Maybe if we had a real
President the building would be open to the public! I'm the public! Why can't
I see my building?...
"We need a real President and a
decent government!" I added.
The uniforms are kind of staring at me, I
seem to remember, as if expecting me to throw a bomb or something, and at this point my loving spouse feels an urgent summons to rescue me
from encounters with authority. It's a recurring theme in our
relationship, from the time I ran away from an enraged fish monger pursuing me
with a raised cleaver in Boston's fabled Haymarket.
These two federal cops were not raising their cleavers, and I'm not sure I needed rescuing, but Anne is shouting
at me to withdraw from my position in a supposedly hazardous roadway while in close encounter with uniformed personnel and shouting uncomplimentary remarks about their ultimate employer, the Faker-in-Chief. And to shut up, which is probably her main point.
Naturally I accede to these words
of wisdom, since I am a well brought up citizen of these United States and am a product of a middle-class upbringing, in which I was
taught from childhood not to make a spectacle of myself.
My country's so-called leaders,
however, let the record show, make unedifying spectacles of themselves whenever they open their
mouths. Still, I suppose there is nothing much I can accomplish by insisting on
my First Amendment rights to a couple of federal cops, who presumably are still getting paid.
Damn, I should have brought my
camera.
The rest of the
day in historic downtown Philadelphia is wholly pleasant, adult and
gratifying. We ever learn some good history about the early days of the
independence movement from a volunteer in historian in another building --
happily not owned by the federal government.
Called Carpenters' Hall, it's the site of the First Continental Congress. It took place in 1774, a time -- our volunteer told us -- when the delegates were looking for ways to temper their dispute with
British authorities. They penned a long list of grievances, and hoped for
what today we would call "a dialogue" on how to repair relations between the colonies and the 'mother country' and
removed some of the causes of a rift that threatened to grow larger. Under the belief that the King was
sympathetic to their position, and that the biggest problems stemmed from acts of
Parliament, they sent the petition directly to
him.
But the king simply ignored their petition, and did not reply.
Carpenters Hall, we learned, originally a meeting place for the Carpenters Guild, was also leased for other uses. Benjamin Franklin used space there to set up the first American post office, the first
lending library, and first 'fire insurance' incorporation so that neighbors
could help one another after a serious loss of property from fire and know that they
would receive help in turn if it happened to them.
When the Second Continental Congress convened in 1775,
again in Philadelphia, they met in the larger building now called Independence Hall. Relations between the colonies and Great Britain during this time, especially in Boston, where the port was closed and the city occupied by armed soldiers. By the time the delegates finally took a vote on independence, acts of war had already taken place: the battles of Lexington and Concord,
and then the bloodbath of Bunker Hill. I would have been happy to discuss these points with the two cops in the front of that hall in a civil war, but they simply wanted to make the problem (Mr. Public me) go away.
The Carpenters Hall guide also suggested a few historical attractions to us that would be open, including the
Museum of the American Revolution (which we didn't make) and the historic
Christ Episcopal Church (more about that below).
My advice is to the inquiring tourist. Always talk to the
guides, volunteer or not. They know stuff. And don't bother with the uniformed,
weaponized arms of the State. they don't know shit.
We three celebrants declared our own independence from our previous family
custom that evening by acquiring a modestly sized Christmas tree at the little
corner lot, carrying it on foot with a two-person carriage-technique back to Sonya's apartment,
and inserting it into the stand. We trimmed it that evening with an
interesting red and white motif consisting of stringed popcorn garlands and a box of copious and variously
patterned red balls, plus and a few oddballs such as the orangey-tan "matzoh ball."
The next day we visited the nation's oldest surviving botanical garden, Bartram's Garden, located on the banks of the Delaware River,
and offering a good view of the city skyline (photo above). A famous botanist
named John Bartram founded it in 1728. A National Historic Landmark, the garden is looked after by the
John Bartram Association today. Which means, of course, you can get
married there.
The site includes some lovely
old buildings, closed naturally for winter, some planting grounds where hardy herbs
and vegetables were still growing -- the cabbage and cauliflower family plants were still green; and Sonya found a single flowering pansy-- and also a medicinal garden of
healing plants, a boardwalk trail that takes you down to the riverside, and
specimen trees including (according to a sign) the oldest ginkgo tree, an Asian
import, in America.
It was fun to prowl around there and
walk the trails in the dead of winter, and the place must be amazing in summer.
That brings us to Christmas Eve
(just one more day until "The Twelve Days of Christmas" begins).
Since we had glimpsed the interior of Christ Church downtown and found that it was not only a
beautiful church but reminded me so much of the church I
attended as a child and of the decades of Christmas Eve services we attended there with my mother, I decided we should go there for Christmas Eve service. I understood that the early timing (5 p.m.) meant this was a family service. Still, I thought, Episcopalian churches always have good
music.
Well, there was some music, but more
essentially, the business was built around a pageant. High points: The famous
mismatched couple spend a night in a barn in the company of animals, the narrator tells us... long
pause while the one-year-old set is rounded up and brought to the manger scene
in their woolly sheep costumes. I don't know if I've ever seen so successful a sheep costume (or any sheep costume) before. They
are memorable. One little girl, so costumed, wanders down the aisle with her lambkin ears
flopping until some keeper (as in the New Testament parable) is dispatched finally to go
after her. Stars are introduced; white shift, tinfoil on stick. Angels intrude,
twitchy little girls with glittery headpieces and wands and other angel-gear.
The shepherds, two slightly tubby seven-year-old boyos, miss their cue. Repeat cue. They
miss it again... "Hey, guys..."
A friendly chaos of nursery school
types lightly supervised by their gentle keepers ensues as some more parts of the famous story are
read -- the choir sings softly behind -- and certain members of the congregation
-- late comers, we're leaning over the front row of the balcony (having been
delivered initially by our Lyft driver to the wrong Christ Church) -- and nearly
falling over themselves in laughter -- a conceivably bad idea in balcony seating -- in pure amusement over the spectacle.
Different, but fun.
I don't know what the national
reputation makers are saying these days, but personally speaking, Philadelphia
may be our new 'fun city.'
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