Oh, there's much to say, I think--reuniting with an old friend, experimental theater, visiting with in-laws, seders we have known--but it's too late to start on all that now.
Instead I have a question for you all--do you have a favorite city that you don't live in? I ask because I think that in our culture, at least on the East Coast, New York is supposed to fill that role, so much so that people are always moving there from elsewhere, but I think there may be more varied answers than that.
So, if you have such a city, what is it, why do you love it, and why don't you live there?
For me it's DC, the city where I grew up, and I don't live there because my neighborhood is here, in Philly. If I could still live in my woodsy, crunchy, integrated, intensely Jewish, lesbian-friendly, co-op-centered, progressive neighborhood and also live in DC, where much of my family still lives, where the houses are prettier, the gardens abundant, the parks are distributed at regular intervals, where the museums are free (and even the zoo!), where spring comes earlier and I know the street plan like the veins in my body, well, if I could take here and transplant it there (maybe in a corner of Rock Creek Park somewhere around Mount Pleasant), I would move back in a heartbeat, and disenfranchisement be damned.
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4 comments:
An interesting question. And thinking about it, I guess my answer is that whatever city I've lived in, at least as long as I lived there, was exactly where I wanted to be.
Probably I'm just too easy to please.
Not so much of a city person, am I. My ideal home would probably have most of the elements of my current home, but the landscape of where I grew up.
Glad you're back.
I am still instantly oriented and aware of my place in space when I go back home to the place I grew up -- even though I left for college at 18 and never went back for more than a summer again.
A city I love enough to wish it were home? Possibly (POSSIBLY) the East Bay, for a variety of reasons, but the housing is so expensive. Really, I couldn't live so well anywhere else but here were I do live.
Niobe, i'd say being easy to please on this one is a kind of gift. I spent two years in the Upper Midwest and felt like a sardonic, fast-talking fish out of water the whole time. I would have been much happier if I'd been able to settle better.
Phantom, glad to be back!
Jody, I didn't know you were reading! Welcome. The Bay Area is on my short list, too, along with Chicago. But DC has the space and climate of home.
Isn't it interesting the pull of the landscape of origin?
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