Travel

The Temple

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My idea of a “fancy night out” wasn’t entirely determined by period movies. A good chunk was my parents.

Growing up, my parents would occasionally fancy themselves up for special occasions and go out. My older sister was left in charge, $60 was left in the foyer for Dinos (or Michelli’s if we want pizza that night instead of subs) and my parents would head out. My father actually owned a tuxedo and one of my clearest memories of those times was my dad in a matching cummerbund and bowtie, with a chained ribbon around his neck and a smaller version on my mom’s.

As I got older and I ingested more media, visions of what one actually did in a tux and pearls clarified beyond “go off and leave me with my sisters.” Images of Thomas and Martha Wayne getting dolled up for the movies seemed old fashioned because that’s common and casual these days. Going to a concert also didn’t feel appropriate because I’d been to or seen rock and folk concerts. If there was a tuxedo in that crowd, it had to have been either a prank or a prop.

The opera or symphony, however… THAT felt like the kind of thing you dressed up for. The period pieces were definitely old-timey, but the buildings still exist and walking into one makes you feel like you ought to dress the part.

A photo of a music hall, taken looking down at the stage from the very back, highest row.
The Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall
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The Uncanny Valley by the Sea

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I still try to work out when I travel. It’s a reliable routine, and forces a little structure even on to my time off- a “whatever else goes on, I need to do this” task. In the case of my trip home, that means it joins a lot of food-centric tasks:

  • Hit up a Wawa
  • Hit up Dinos- get a Dino’s Special Italian, send pictures back west for instructional material to those who would put mayonnaise on such a sandwich.
  • Smuggle Yeungling beer and Tastykake pie back in a suitcase.

Priorities are important, all.

I’m staying near my old hometown, and the easiest gym to get into is the Jewish Community Center that my parents are still members of. It’s where I went to summer day camp as a kid, and where we went to enjoy the pool in summer. My dad handed me his access card and said, “When you get in there, report back and tell me where everything is. I haven’t been in there in a bit, and they’ve moved stuff around.”

“All things change and we change with them,” but that change is not always radical. It can be slow, in bits and pieces. When it’s a place that you remember being the whole world to you when you were young, what’s changed and what’s remained don’t always mesh in your brain.

IYKYK
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Home Brew

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It’s perfectly understandable to me how haunted houses can exist. We have the idea of “ghosts in the machine,” “Artistic DNA,” and omnipresent-but-unspecific “vibes”- why not “ghosts in the interior design?” Ghosts that can follow a person or people from place to place, creating the sense of where they’ve been before, and writing an intangible living atlas in the frontal lobes of Those Who Know.

The house where I was raised is a minimum hour drive away and five-plus years back in time from being swiftly and silently bulldozed. My parents now live in an ivory tower of an apartment, nineteen floors above center city Philadelphia. They brought some of their favorite decor from their old house was well as my Bubba’s similarly-leveled house, and have moved into an apartment roughly a twentieth the size of where we used to all live together.

Ghosts in the decor, then, is the only way I can explain spending a few days in the cluttered but cozy guest room and walking out the door in the morning expecting a staircase to the right. It’s the only way I feel like the living room of the Philadelphia high-rise has a piano and fireplace in it that I can feel but not see in their decor of wood, white, cream, gray, and Judaica.

Everything about our old house is there, tucked under the carpet or back in a closet, felt but not seen until you cross the threshold out to the hall. Then I am most certainly in Philadelphia.

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The Old Men and the Seafood

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I started out the door with a simple idea- “Find a place with food and a beer, sit down, do some writing, come home and hide from the sun to edit.” That’s always the plan for at least one of my days off. Brilliant blog posts, scintillating wit, and scathing social criticism don’t just fall out of the sky, you know.

I love my wife, my cat, and my friends very much, but I’ve also had a lot of time (and put a lot of work into) enjoying my own company. That’s why, at some point every weekend and even on vacation, I try to make a point of getting out on my own and putting some pavement under my shoes.

What looks interesting?
What are people talking about?
Where are the workers going on their breaks?
Where are the old men drinking?
Are there cooks out and about? Where are they?

That’s how you hear about the best stuff in any given city. You have to go find it.

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We Don’t Need Permission to Be

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The winery where I work has an excellent view. It’s a major selling point as far as our clientele goes- people can look down on the valley over vineyards and woodland while sipping a glass of wine and take it easy. It’s a magnet for photos and set dressing when weddings and celebrations buy out some space.

When I arrive to work early in the morning, that view is usually all mine- but I don’t take advantage of it at all. I have work to do.

That’s no one’s fault but mine, of course. I get in early because that’s when The Baker shows up. I get the most space and most access to the ovens for a limited time before the rest of the kitchen rolls in mid-morning to afternoon, and I need to get to work.

So I show up early, knowing I have work to do, but I always want to walk out on the patio where the guests sit- where I absolutely don’t belong during business hours (and in fact would prefer not to be)- and just soak up that view for a moment. The stillness. The vastness. My smallness. The soothing balm of scale and insignificance to start the day, and keep with me while I obsess over rolls, bites of cake, and bits of chocolate that manage to mean everything to me… and absolutely nothing at all.

I never do, though. I have work to do, and I don’t get paid- OR pay- to enjoy the view.

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