My (Home) Town Monday, Philadelphia

My “Home” Town Monday, Philadelphia

Four years ago, my parents moved to Detroit to be closer to us and I became permanently estranged from Philadelphia. To go there and stay in a hotel would seem too strange and its very familiarity makes a visit uninviting.

I left Philly in 1970 when my husband (he was 25 and I was 22) took a position at a university in Detroit. But until my parents joined us, we visited Philly every year once or twice, spending many of our vacations in Ocean City, New Jersey, some in Rehobeth, DE.

Because of those annual visits, I was able to hang onto the things about Philly I loved. You know what they are: cheesesteaks, hoagies, Tastykakes, the Reading Terminal Market, the Art Museum, South Street, the riverfront, New Hope/Lambertville (where my husband grew up), Chestnut Hill, Fairmount Park, the Barnes Collection, the Jersey beaches, Pennsylvania Dutch country, Irish potatoes, the Phillies...and people that say merry to rhyme with hurry and not hairy. Ever once in a while, someone sends me a tin of Tastykakes or I pull out the recipe for Irish potatoes (candy) and make them, but it’s not the same. I've lost Philadelphia.

My family has deep Philadelphian roots. My maternal great, great grandparents, immigrating from Ireland and Wales, met and married in Philadelphia in the 1870s. A miner, he soon died from black lung disease. Destitute, his wife sent her two young sons to live at Girard College. One son, my great grandfather, became an attorney and eventually Philadelphia’s city comptroller. He lost his job when he foolishly paved his own street first in around 1900.

My maternal grandfather was an architect and worked for Charles Z. Klauder, the firm that designed many area buildings and the Cathedral of Learning in Pittsburgh.

My father was one of nineteen children, raised in Sellersville, PA. His father supported this brood as a cigar maker in a small factory. The Nases have lived in that area for over two hundred years, undergoing five changes in the spelling of their name. Leave the area and you will never find the name Nase again. Recently, my brother traced the name back to the 1400s in Alsace Lorraine when it was spelled Nehs.

I grew up in the area then known as West Oak Lane—on Gilbert Street. I went to a terrific elementary school— Pennypacker on Washington Lane, then Leeds Junior High School and finally Germantown High School for a year. My grades fell in tenth grade and my parents, who could ill afford it, sent me to Philadelphia Montgomery Christian Academy where my grades improved and I stopped hanging out on street corners. I briefly was "saved."

And then I left Philly. And then my brother left. And then my parents left.

No matter how long I live in Detroit, I will always be from Philadelphia. It’s the kind of city that leaves its mark. It’s rough and tumble, its sports fans expect too much, it’s too humid, it has the scariest highway in the world, it’s not as glamorous as New York, or as architecturally interesting as Chicago, or even as cool as Boston or San Francisco, but it still feels like home. It is home. I just can’t go home anymore.

Check out more My Town Monday posts at Travis Erwin's blog:http://traviserwin.blogspot.com/