Philadelphia Story

I’ve been missing my hometown something awful as this pandemic wears on.

This is the longest I’ve ever been away from Philadelphia — the plane tickets dated last March unused, with no plans, yet, to rebook.

(And it didn’t help to have endless memes of soft pretzels and hoagies and liberty bells circulating the Internet as this election neared its end. Don’t even utter the words water ice: I’ll dissolve into a puddle on the floor with my Tastykake Butterscotch Krimpets — Actually, can someone local mail me a pack of those?)

I am not alone in this feeling — a nostalgia that’s taken a dip towards melancholy as the light wanes and holidays approach: So many of us are aching to see our loved ones in person.

I miss my parents and brother and aunts and uncles and cousins who live in the city, or outside of the city — 40 miles West, towards bucolic hills, expansive sky and farm land.

And I miss the dead, who - though dead - are specifically dead in Philadelphia.

Not just their gravesides, but the parking lots of their condominiums. The last places I saw them alive or remember them most vividly; the farmer’s market on the outskirts of the city, the Aveda hair salon my grandmother visited for decades. 

I go to Ocean Beach, here, in San Francisco to find them — the dead matriarchs — as if some tributary from the Schuylkill River empties into a portal of the Pacific, willed by my imagination.

(Or as I might explain to my children: Just like in Frozen II, water holds memory.)

Pennsylvania contains multitudes, as we’ve all been reminded in recent days.

I called my grandmother, Mommom Ethel, in Philadelphia, after the election four years ago, from Brooklyn, where Dan and I were living with our kids; I was keeping an advice column at the time.

I received a question about healing our divided country, and I called upon my wise matriarch to help me.

But in a Jedi Mommom move, she placed the question back to me, and to my children: It was our work - the future generations to heal this rift.

Re-reading her words and our conversation is a great source of consolation for me.

And here we are.

All of us missing each other, separated by geography, separated by ideology. Separated by death.

And we still have to do it, this work, from wherever we are, wherever we’re longing to be - not yet knowing when we can rebook our flights.

I’m thinking about my Mom and my Mommom this morning: Look how my young grandmother rocked those high heels while carrying a baby on the sidewalks of Philadelphia, the city her parents and grandparents arrived at over 100 years ago, sailing from Russia to America.

I will never be able wear heals like that; I really wish I could — It would make me feel closer to her.

But I will try, everyday I will try to live by the words and actions of my matriarchs and to work towards healing these divides in our gorgeous, aching, expansive country.

Wishing you all some extra light and warmth wherever you may find it.

Prayer + Action: Be kind to yourselves and to each other.