Caveat: Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

Few pleasures for me exceed that of reading or writing while on a train.  And everyone knows my peculiar and immoderate love of all forms of public transportation.  For this reason, rather than drive into downtown Philadelphia today, I parked at a suburban station northeast of the city and took the train in.  From Bristol, in lower Bucks County to downtown is about 45 minutes.  But the ride closely recapitulates the daily commute I made for a year from Yardley (directly across the Delaware from Trenton) during my second year of grad school.  Those daily meditative rides were the highlight of an otherwise beastly year.

The frequent flashing of Amtrak express trains zooming past on the center rails.  The dilapidated strata of rowhouses like a cretaceous hillside after an earthquake, in tones of sepia and burgundy and dull tin, with organic splashes of graffiti on most smooth surfaces, like crushed dinosaurs.  And rampant green summer vegetation poking and thrusting in every conceivable place, tropically exuberant but temporary, my seasonal knowledge reassures me.

And people and cars, yelling and thumping their urban rhythms respectively, on each corner, lounging and strolling and gazing and chatting.  The city as universe.

I got off at 30th Street station.  I'd deliberately not studied at map of the area – I'd been absent for 10 years – I'd find my way. 

Kinesthetic memory is strange, miraculous thing.  Well, I'm not sure that what happened was, technically speaking, kinesthetic memory, but, it was something programmed at a seemingly subconscious level.  Without thought I wended through the station, down from the commuter platform, through the congested Amtrak lounge, out onto Market Street.  To the left, squatting between the highrises just beyond the unseen Skookle River (OK, that's Schuylkill to you purists, but I so love the way it's pronounced), is the City Hall.  But I turn right, down Market.  On autopilot, I find my way two blocks west to 32nd, cut diagonally across the Drexel University campus, cross Walnut at 34th and angle in front of the prison-esque Van Pelt library of the U of Penn, and then up the tree shrouded Locust walk through the heart of the campus, to emerge at the western end at 40th looking for that coffee shop where I did, probably, 70% of the actual work for my Master's degree.  It's gone.

But this subconscious movement had placed me there unerringly:  40th and Locust – though I hadn't recalled the address or even it's exact relation to campus.  That's what 2 years of pedestrian navigation of a fairly stable space can do for your body's memories, I guess.  But coffee was out of the question – some Mexican upscale restaurant inhabits the corner now.  I was very sad. 

So I kept west on Locust and then zigzagged down to 43rd.  Where I lived, that first year in Philly, before Michelle joined me here.  At first, walking westward from campus, I worried the whole area had gentrified beyond recognition over the last decade, but, abruptly at 42nd, the ghetto kicked in, just as I remembered it.  43rd at Baltimore is still that wonderful edgy space between student slum and REAL slum.  And there, on the northwest corner, the cheesesteak and pizza joint I used to go to.

How could I resist?  I went inside – I don't think the menu has even changed.   I mean, not in content, not even physically – aged red plastic above the counter, yellow letters.  The place doesn't seem to be run by the same family though – I have vague recollections that before it was run by a Caribbean or East Indian family.  Now it appears to be run by a very large and diverse African American family, every single one of whom were squeezed behind the counter.  They couldn't move around back there, so they just passed boxes of pizza over each other's heads and argued among themselves from where each stood.

I ordered a cheesesteak with sweet and hot peppers, just like I used to, and got some iced tea.  I watched some horrible movie on the TV with some men who had quart bottles of Budweiser and looked tired.  The TV was a flat screen, now, I noticed.  I guess some things change.  The trolleys clanged and whirred past on Baltimore Ave. outside the window.

I finished and walked out to the little park on the southwest side of the intersection.  I remembered bring Bernie here, as a kitten, on a leash – she'd actually done pretty well on a leash as a kitten.  But then I made the mistake of taking her while on a leash to see the vet at the U of Penn veterinary clinics – at around Spruce and 40th.  From then on, she behave around the leash about the way one would expect a normal cat to do.  It was at the U of Penn vet that Bernie lost touch with her feminine side.

So I walked back to campus, and found a different coffee shop on the north side, and contemplated my visit with the past.  And, incidentally, wrapped up an essay for the application for the Korean teaching job I'm pursuing, and emailed that off.

Caveat: Memory Function

I got into Philly area last night and stayed at a motel just off the turnpike.  Then this morning, being in the neighborhood more or less, I decided to first drive around the central Montgomery County area where Michelle and I used to live – for the last year I was out here, anyway.

Much to my amazement, I couldn't find my way around!  I have always had such a great geographical memory.  This was very disconcerting.  It took me about 30 minutes of zigzagging and spiraling about Upper Gwynedd / Lansdale to realize we'd lived just off Sumneytown Pike.  I subsequently began to recognize some things – the McDonalds at Valley Forge Rd, the huge Merck campus where Michelle worked, downtown Lansdale. 

But I've been reflecting on the eerie dearth of clear, coherent memories from this period.   I suppose the conventional explanation is that I've "blocked out" this period of my life.  And there's possibly some truth to that.  I have much clearer memories of the year in Philadelphia (95-96, in the apt on 43rd St) I spent alone, while Michelle was finishing her degree in Minnesota.  But what happened, here, in the following two years, with Michelle?  Am I able, or ready, to answer that question?

One thing that I know I've had a very hard time admitting to myself:  when I dropped out of grad school, after that disasterous fall semester in which I barely passed my Master's exams and received much criticism on the quality of my work from my professors – I nursed, from the very start, the idea that my inability to cope with the pressures of school were "because of" my relationship with Michelle.  I felt I'd been forced to make a choice:  Michelle, or grad school, but not both.  In fact, it was Professor Salessi (whom I respected profoundly) who said, "no puedes tener una vida personal y a la vez lograr en un programa como este. [you can't have a personal life and at the same time succeed in a program such as this one.]"

But what happened that I have only just now realized (not quite as an epiphany, but, well, on reflection, I guess) is that that was the seed of the dissolution of our relationship, because from then on I resented the choice – I felt I'd compromised beyond my will to do so.   I'd been un-willed – in a Nietzschean sense.  And however much it was the case that the choice was a true choice or was instead one that I'd manufactured to accommodate my own shortcomings and disappointments, regardless, I lost control of my life at that moment.

OK, that's heavy stuff.  And more:  from that day, I somehow decided that the only way to survive was to be (or to try to become) whatever it was Michelle wanted me to be.  And that was impossible – both for her own inconsistencies and for my own limitations.   In that ill-fated conversation several weeks before her suicide when she'd asked me if there was any way I'd ever consider getting back together again, and I said to her no, I added, "I've recaptured my destiny.  I cannot."

She therefore died in part of a broken heart, and I was the one (or one of the ones) who broke it.  But I know better than to blame myself (or not, exclusively, anyhow) – there were all kinds of scars and damage that "caused" her to depart for somewhere else ("to a world where I belong" – her words, in that same time period).  Nevertheless, these rolling, amazingly verdant hills of suburban Montgomery and Bucks Counties are crawling with ghosts, and I'll not call this part of my trip a pleasure visit, but rather a moment of remembrance.

I'll move on to remembering the happier times of the east coast, and go into the city today, visit the Penn campus, and then go make my pilgrimage to Manhattan.

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