I never get tired of this city. I’ve had the same view possibly hundreds of times: coming through the Fort Pitt tunnel and suddenly there is the city, above, below, around you. She is shockingly beautiful, Pittsburgh is.
And she is a real city, without pretension. Honest if not (Go Steelers) humble. You don’t have to look hard to find the hard edges. When I was a child, abandoned steel mills still rusted beside the rivers. Even now, neighborhoods birthed of necessity spill into one another; the gravel and broken glass from parking lots spill over the birm. And everywhere around the city’s perimeter, narrow houses of the plainest variety are stacked up on the hills. The staggered adjacent roofs describe the land’s topography. There is no such thing as flat in Pittsburgh.
We drove through at around five this afternoon: late day in late winter. The whole of it was washed in the sun’s amber light. That light shone on the buildings and on the hills. Bare trees, covering the hills and lining the road, stretched their arms. They opened their hands and extended fine fingers into the cold air. They love to be here.
I thought, as I drove, about why I love it here. Could I bring someone who does not love it and make her see it as I do? Or is this city simply my old friend, whose gifts cannot, to my mind, be spoiled by her apparent faults? Do I see this city and love its failings as I do those of a friend, because those failings are infinitely forgiveable?
Or do I love this city like I love my family: because she held me when I was very young?
The sky was cloudless. The palest transparent blue gave way by indiscernible degrees to rich yellow on the horizon, and invisible airplanes left brief white jet trails overhead. Tomorrow I will be in one of those airplanes, going far away, going somewhere I really want to go.
Still, I thought that the going might not be quite so magnificent as the staying, and I thought that someday I’d like to try again: staying in this city and making a life here. It is not such a bad idea– to live in a place like this, somewhere honest and without pretense, somewhere that has known you nearly forever.
But already I have lived here three times, and every time I have had to go away.
