Confessions logo

The City is My Bones

My complex relationship with Philadelphia.

By Mack DevlinPublished 3 years ago 5 min read
1
The City is My Bones
Photo by Chris Henry on Unsplash

Though many years and more than six hundred miles have come between us, I will always feel a connection to the city of brotherly love. In the same way that my heart is part of my circulatory system, Philadelphia is a part of me.

In more ways than I can recall, the story of Philadelphia is the story of my father and my grandfather, but it is also the story of me, my partially imagined youth on Anchor and Torresdale. The time I spent in the city amounts to months; not years as I would have liked. My childhood was suburban and safe. Forty miles beyond the Tacony Palmyra Bridge, just south of Cherry Hill is where I was raised. But I grew up in constant anticipation of the weekends. Sundays came and I was ready for the city, the smell of hot tar and gas furnaces, the horse-drawn carriages, and the clang of the trolley bell.

The Levick Street gateway to the city was nothing more than an old elevated train trestle; the underside a crisscross of humming trolley cables. In place of brightly colored banners slung between the parapets were discarded tennis shoes, Reeboks and off-brands, Nikes and Chuck Taylors, and occasionally a pair of good dress shoes. The dress shoes still make me wonder. They either got there by way of a kid defying the standards of private school, punks bullying the peacock, or just a kid mad at his old man. Didn’t matter. They were the phantoms of a hard-walking life. Each shoe had a story to tell, and those are the stories I now tell myself when nights grow long and sleep sneaks further away.

Past the elevated train was the turn onto Torresdale. The intersection of Levick and Torresdale was at best a heated competition; at worst an all-out war. In Philly, unlike other more civilized parts of the world, making your turn too slow means blaring horns, curse words, and in those most extreme cases, gunshots. Tension mounts as the cross street lights turn from green to yellow. Red comes and the gas goes down with the squeal of tires and an unspoken prayer that you got through fast enough.

Torresdale to Anchor passes two parks; one in disrepair, the other with a fresh coat of paint. The park in disrepair was half-court pickup games and rubber band handball when I was a kid. The park in fresh paint was dolphins and seahorses mounted on springs, little chubby boys a-bombing little skinny girls on the seesaw, and mothers with long nails and big hair talking about nothing in particular. Despite the care given to the fresh paint playground, graffiti popped up overnight. Thinking back, I remember the big bold letters in blue and white: Ramone. On every surface worth painting, the same beautiful blue and white letters: Ramone. Some random tagger intent on making his mark, or warning other taggers to move five blocks down.

A horse used to clop down Torresdale, a stark contrast to the surrounding modernity. In the days of my father, a man and his horse used to come around once a week, the man selling horse-radish and only horse-radish. The children would run behind him and each time he yelled ‘horse radish’ they would follow with a chorus of ‘horse shit!’ Apparently, he wasn’t the only horse and cart in town, because according to my old man everything from ice to axle grease was once sold from the back of a horse-drawn cart. These days, the horse is mostly for show, something to impress the tourists.

Anchor, the part of the street where my father grew up is a narrow corridor, the sidewalks on either side of the street buckled from heat, water, the persistent root. The street itself was severely sloped on either side to prevent water from pooling and worrying itself into pot-holes. On Sunday, the street was full of cars. The neighborhood wasn’t Irish or Italian, Polish or Jewish. No particular ethnic group dominated. But everyone was Catholic. Catholic and white. African Americans lived in West Philadelphia in those days and West Philadelphia was where they stayed. There was always an unwritten law; you don’t cross over, I don’t cross over. Whatever inequity this represented, I hope it was undone in time, though it probably wasn’t.

My grandparents were smokers, so whenever our van - stacked high with all seven of us, two parents and five kids - pulled up out front, there they would be, on the porch with cigarettes in their mouths. For most of my grandmother’s life, the porch, the house, and the back stoop were her entire world. Either she would subcontract her errand running to one of the neighborhood kids or she would do without. The only time I remember her leaving is when my grandfather died. Less than a month later we were putting her in the ground next to him.

I distinctly remember the smell of the house, a smell I associate with Philadelphia. The walls, the curtains, always stained a dull yellow, smelled of cigarette smoke. From the kitchen came the smell of natural gas, propane maybe. In the alley behind the house, the smell of tar dominated but was tempered with the ammonic smell of cat urine. Sometimes trash piled high in the alleys, and on those days, no smell of tar or cat urine could overcome the reek of decaying food second baked in the hot summer sun.

The warm tar and ammonic smells are a good metaphor for my connection to Philadelphia. There are the comforting warm tar memories of Mrs. Chin’s grocery on the corner, my brothers and I sitting on the stoop flinging pennies and flicking bottle caps, Sunday dinners in my grandparent's kitchen, lame jokes and harmless knocks, and those long drives home where everyone would sleep except me and my mom, who had more patience for driving than my dad. Then there were the bitter ammonic recollections of rampant racism, lost tempers, my first real fight, and the deaths of my grandparents.

Philadelphia becoming a part of me is not the result of randomness. My paternal great grandfather, when he first arrived from Ireland, chose Philadelphia because Philadelphia was promise. Promise that begat pride. As much as I would like to fully embrace that pride, I know better. I cannot embrace it fully because I must also allow room for shame and lament.

Philadelphia is more than a memory or a map point. The city is in my bones.

Childhood
1

About the Creator

Mack Devlin

Writer, educator, and follower of Christ. Passionate about social justice. Living with a disability has taught me that knowledge is strength.

We are curators of emotions, explorers of the human psyche, and custodians of the narrative.

Reader insights

Be the first to share your insights about this piece.

How does it work?

Add your insights

Comments

There are no comments for this story

Be the first to respond and start the conversation.

Sign in to comment

    Find us on social media

    Miscellaneous links

    • Explore
    • Contact
    • Privacy Policy
    • Terms of Use
    • Support

    © 2024 Creatd, Inc. All Rights Reserved.