Finding my inner Center City
The weather since Sunday has been fantastic. Cool mornings, with barely a kiss of humidity, slide into mildly warm afternoons, perfect for sitting in the shade and reading romance novels while the kiddo runs around “super fast.” So that’s what I’ve done. We’ve taken them mornings slowly, barely managing to eat breakfast and get dressed before allotted time to do my daily chores. We’ve taken our lunch outside, too, her little feet tracking sand all over our blanket from her many trips to the sandbox, flitting back to nibble on her meal. It’s commonplace for the mornings to be cool, but they’re usually heavy with humidity, marring the feel of fall with its reminder of summer pushing into my head, making me tired and grumpy. Nora and I barely make our walks to the mailbox before I usher us inside to avoid the soup this area calls the sky. But not this week. The last couple of days have been a gift.
I’ve been walking down and pulling open the downstairs windows, letting the sharp morning air pierce my skin and my sleepy brain first thing upon waking. I’ve made cups of coffee listening to the birds and the sounds of cars on their commutes to work. The act itself has nothing to do with my past, but something about nippy air in my lungs and a warm mug in my hand has transported my mind to a time over a decade past, when I lived in Philadelphia. My first few days in that brand new city, a place I’d never seen before I’d moved, because I was brave and stupid like that, I was crashing on the couch and it was spring; the chill would rouse me to wakefulness and I would walk the few blocks to the Dunkin Donuts before anyone else in the house was awake, placing a few dollars on the counter to get my fresh coffee. Later, when I was more settled, but before I had a job, I would make tea in the cramped kitchen on the first floor of the three story walk-up. Almond tea. I’d picked it up because it smelled pretty, the round bags stacked in a decorative cylinder. I carried the empty container with me when I ran away. I’ve never had the tea since, but my tongue remembers the flavor well.
I lived in Center City for only the length of a summer. I arrived in March, left in September. I took a bus on September 10th, arrived home in Houston on the 12th, having been delayed in Mobile, Alabama on the 11th because the World Trade Center had collapsed and they’d shut the bus station down because it was located downtown and they weren’t sure if there would be more attacks. I thought it was the end of the world and I was horrified because I was eating tuna fish in a bus terminal in Alabama, hushed groups of people huddled around radios. I’m not sure why, but the televisions weren’t working. It was surreal, but that’s not what this is about.
My mind keeps going back to that space, the time in a unknown city where I was first aware that I wanted to live in the on the East Coast. I had grand ideas, back then, of being an actress, working and doing bit parts in the theater for the rest of my life. Even when I dreamed, I never dreamed that big. Too practical, I guess, for Tony awards, or (gasp!) an Oscar. I had spent time in California, auditioning and doing a play and I knew that I could spend my whole life on the stage, and that meant living in New York. But, smaller Philadelphia won my heart. I wanted to be nurtured by her forever.
Of course, like everything, I made bad choices in the pursuit of love and had to leave my city, tail between my legs back to my friends, who were willing to take me in because I had nothing. Everything I built there, my sense of community, the idea that I could be strong and independent, my ability to dream, was left behind. When I got on that bus, somewhere in my head I knew that I was giving up on acting. I knew that I was making a huge mistake, than I had made a mistake ever leaving California because I was in love with a foolish person , but I didn’t know how else to behave. Despite the dread in my stomach, I knew that staying would be a disaster, too. Because I would’ve chosen passion over sense, again, and it would have made me far more unhappy than I deserved.
Through all of the chaos, all of the heartache - falling in love with unsuitable people and places, I had writing. Furiously scribbled poetry and fragments of stories stored away so that it mattered. That’s what I told myself. “I’m living and I’ll learn and, one day I’ll make something good out of all of this.” I think I believed it, too, for a long time. That writing and words, stories half-formed from real moments, was going to be good enough for me to be okay with giving up on myself. And for a while I even stood up, reciting my poetry and rehearsing small plays, taking acting classes, a piece of me refusing to give up, but I saw other performers, better performers, with gifts that I admired, and knew that I couldn’t do the same. The little artist world I was living in was beautiful and perfect, but it was just a pocket of the world I had to live. A place I visited when the real world cast me out, reminding me that I have a flighty little soul.
I made money in the service industry, by this time already in my mid to late twenties and needing to be able to walk to work because I didn’t have a car, leaving me little options even though I had skills. It was there that I realized that people like me, young and stupid and careless, were a dime a dozen and they grew into cold, bitchy people. When my husband and I married, an arrangement we made because his father was dying and Adam couldn’t take care of him alone, I decided to put my energy into being a better person. That’s it. Not a actor, not a performer, no longer was I going to be an artist; I became a care giver and a wife, then a mother. A long time ago I read advice about going into acting that went something like, “If you can be happy being anything else, do that instead of acting.” And I brushed it aside because I couldn’t imagine being happy as anything else. I’d found my purpose on stage, bringing characters to life, embodying the words so fully I was lost. But, in my new life, I thought it was possible, so I let go.
And this has served me well, except, the words never went away. Stories and people swirl through my head; I write as I clean, or watch Nora play. I find myself unable to follow conversations sometimes because characters are living their lives just to the side of my periphery. The last few days, with the weather so reminiscent of spring in Philly, I can’t help but feel that time has gone back and I can make a different choice. I can get a piece of that girl back; the one who was so brave she moved to a city where she knew no one, worked as an assistant manager at a high fashion boutique, even though she didn’t know the first thing about clothes, because she believed in dreams, in herself. In the future. She had hustle. And she is me.
I’ve been walking down and pulling open the downstairs windows, letting the sharp morning air pierce my skin and my sleepy brain first thing upon waking. I’ve made cups of coffee listening to the birds and the sounds of cars on their commutes to work. The act itself has nothing to do with my past, but something about nippy air in my lungs and a warm mug in my hand has transported my mind to a time over a decade past, when I lived in Philadelphia. My first few days in that brand new city, a place I’d never seen before I’d moved, because I was brave and stupid like that, I was crashing on the couch and it was spring; the chill would rouse me to wakefulness and I would walk the few blocks to the Dunkin Donuts before anyone else in the house was awake, placing a few dollars on the counter to get my fresh coffee. Later, when I was more settled, but before I had a job, I would make tea in the cramped kitchen on the first floor of the three story walk-up. Almond tea. I’d picked it up because it smelled pretty, the round bags stacked in a decorative cylinder. I carried the empty container with me when I ran away. I’ve never had the tea since, but my tongue remembers the flavor well.
I lived in Center City for only the length of a summer. I arrived in March, left in September. I took a bus on September 10th, arrived home in Houston on the 12th, having been delayed in Mobile, Alabama on the 11th because the World Trade Center had collapsed and they’d shut the bus station down because it was located downtown and they weren’t sure if there would be more attacks. I thought it was the end of the world and I was horrified because I was eating tuna fish in a bus terminal in Alabama, hushed groups of people huddled around radios. I’m not sure why, but the televisions weren’t working. It was surreal, but that’s not what this is about.
My mind keeps going back to that space, the time in a unknown city where I was first aware that I wanted to live in the on the East Coast. I had grand ideas, back then, of being an actress, working and doing bit parts in the theater for the rest of my life. Even when I dreamed, I never dreamed that big. Too practical, I guess, for Tony awards, or (gasp!) an Oscar. I had spent time in California, auditioning and doing a play and I knew that I could spend my whole life on the stage, and that meant living in New York. But, smaller Philadelphia won my heart. I wanted to be nurtured by her forever.
Of course, like everything, I made bad choices in the pursuit of love and had to leave my city, tail between my legs back to my friends, who were willing to take me in because I had nothing. Everything I built there, my sense of community, the idea that I could be strong and independent, my ability to dream, was left behind. When I got on that bus, somewhere in my head I knew that I was giving up on acting. I knew that I was making a huge mistake, than I had made a mistake ever leaving California because I was in love with a foolish person , but I didn’t know how else to behave. Despite the dread in my stomach, I knew that staying would be a disaster, too. Because I would’ve chosen passion over sense, again, and it would have made me far more unhappy than I deserved.
Through all of the chaos, all of the heartache - falling in love with unsuitable people and places, I had writing. Furiously scribbled poetry and fragments of stories stored away so that it mattered. That’s what I told myself. “I’m living and I’ll learn and, one day I’ll make something good out of all of this.” I think I believed it, too, for a long time. That writing and words, stories half-formed from real moments, was going to be good enough for me to be okay with giving up on myself. And for a while I even stood up, reciting my poetry and rehearsing small plays, taking acting classes, a piece of me refusing to give up, but I saw other performers, better performers, with gifts that I admired, and knew that I couldn’t do the same. The little artist world I was living in was beautiful and perfect, but it was just a pocket of the world I had to live. A place I visited when the real world cast me out, reminding me that I have a flighty little soul.
I made money in the service industry, by this time already in my mid to late twenties and needing to be able to walk to work because I didn’t have a car, leaving me little options even though I had skills. It was there that I realized that people like me, young and stupid and careless, were a dime a dozen and they grew into cold, bitchy people. When my husband and I married, an arrangement we made because his father was dying and Adam couldn’t take care of him alone, I decided to put my energy into being a better person. That’s it. Not a actor, not a performer, no longer was I going to be an artist; I became a care giver and a wife, then a mother. A long time ago I read advice about going into acting that went something like, “If you can be happy being anything else, do that instead of acting.” And I brushed it aside because I couldn’t imagine being happy as anything else. I’d found my purpose on stage, bringing characters to life, embodying the words so fully I was lost. But, in my new life, I thought it was possible, so I let go.
And this has served me well, except, the words never went away. Stories and people swirl through my head; I write as I clean, or watch Nora play. I find myself unable to follow conversations sometimes because characters are living their lives just to the side of my periphery. The last few days, with the weather so reminiscent of spring in Philly, I can’t help but feel that time has gone back and I can make a different choice. I can get a piece of that girl back; the one who was so brave she moved to a city where she knew no one, worked as an assistant manager at a high fashion boutique, even though she didn’t know the first thing about clothes, because she believed in dreams, in herself. In the future. She had hustle. And she is me.
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