Culture Shock - The 'Burbs

Okay, we moved and are kind of settled. Humming along in some semblance of a routine. But hello, culture shock!

West Philly and the 'Burbs are two very different worlds.

It's funny because I grew up in the suburbs, so it's silly to call this culture shock. On the other hand, I've never lived here as an adult - always, always lived in big cities - so there are so many things I never noticed as a little kid going about my kid-business. Some differences are big important stuff, but most differences I've noticed so far comprise little stupid stuff, like what people wear.

West Philly

Economically and racially diverse

Walk around the corner=restaurants!

Lady commuters: heels, sandals

Teeny urban gardens - cukes, thyme

Walk everywhere, actually. Can I emphasize this more?

Apartment mailboxes with teeny mail keys

Leaning out the window, front porch

'Burbs

Um...Racially diverse

Walk nowhere to get waited on. Transit and car 4eva

Lady commuters: flops, sneaks (I reject this. Flats.)

Sprawling lawns & beautiful gardens with everything

Stoops, corners, parks Porches, median strips, parks

.......................

MAIL SLOT!

Backyard! Front Porch! Back Porch!

Oh I love you both, West Philly and the 'Burbs. Is there some way I can combine you two into the perfect neighborhood? Why must I choose?

Moving Day

I love this freakin' town. I went to college here, and by the grace of God and my husband's hard work and fancy brain full of book smarts, we ended up getting to hang out here for a few years. I'm excited about moving, but packing has been sentimental. You know, "Mike was sitting over here when he got his job offer," and "remember when we put up our first adult sized Christmas tree by that window." And don't get me started on the baby memories: first sink bath, first tub bath, first food, first tossing sippy-cups off of her high-chair, etc., etc., ahhh.

Still, the process is cathartic and important. We need to move, we're moving to an awesome place with terrific family and friends, and it's been a great ride. I don't believe in "closure," but I do believe in wallowing in your thoughts for a little while as a way to help get through a busy, life-altering situation. So in honor of our big move today and tomorrow, and before we lose our Philadelphia internet forever, here are the top five things I won't miss about Philly, followed by the top five things I will miss:

WON'T miss

5. Nutty drivers

4. Our new wingnut U.S. Senator

3. Working from home every day

2. The terribly-maintained roads in my poor, neglected nabe

1. The Philadelphia Parking Authority

WILL miss

5. T-Mac and Sarge and watching the Phils on cable

4. Oregon Avenue

3. St. Mary's Episcopal Church and the fellowship of its terrific parishioners

2. Clark Park, including the delightful Farmers Market

1. All the people I've met and grown close to in the past two years. (You know who you are.) I'll see them less often but I know I will correspond with them, travel to see them sometime soon, and think of them fondly every day.

Pharewell, Philly.

Missing The Unexpected

We're moving away from Philly very soon. I'm going to miss a lot of things about the city, things that almost anyone would miss: delicious ice cream at Franklin Fountain, community and greenery at Clark Park, the allure of Penn's beautiful campus. But I realized today, coming back from a trip on Columbus Ave, that I will miss something that I often dread: Driving down Oregon Avenue.

Yes, I just said that I will miss a trip riddled with potholes, impatient drivers, and dangerous, unmarked lane changes.

Just last week I almost died when a major four-way light (Oregon and Passyunk) malfunctioned so that all of the lights were green at once. You read that right: they were all green at once. My car was halfway through the intersection, my light was green, and cars were barreling in front of me. Shortly after, the cops showed up to direct traffic, I escaped with my life and car intact, and there were no accidents, thankfully. It was a traumatic experience and I shudder even writing about it. Everything worked out, but my goodness, it was terribly scary. I came home and ranted about how dangerous it was, how that road is the most treacherous artery road I have ever driven on, and why isn't there a cross-town expressway for Southwest-Southeast Philly.

But today I passed Tony Luke's, the Oregon Diner, and realized: Oregon Ave has high points. It and I have had our downs, but there have been ups too.

An "Up:" the local shops and pop-up seafood stands, espousing the can-do bootstrap spirit of the neighborhood.

An "Up:" The space-saving and cool backwards diagonal parallel parking system, followed by almost no one (this car is doing it right).

An "Up:" The people. As always in Philly.

It's a bold thing to say, but I believe that the way you feel about Oregon Ave is probably how you're going to feel about South Philly, if not Philly itself. It is full of idiosyncrasies, a neighborhood frozen in time. What time period I'm referring to, I really can't say - but there's a sense of tradition, of local rules that are understood by, well, locals. There is charm, caring and fun; there is also chaos, danger and strangeness. It is warm, friendly. It is cozy. Something keeps you coming back.

Not pictured: cars parked on (on!) the median strip, pedestrians jaywalking in front of cars going 35 miles an hour, potholes, Tony Luke's and the Oregon Diner.

Oregon Ave, and Philly, have been something else: fun, frustrating, dangerous, people-oriented, and unpredictable - but it's a relationship that will last. I will miss it here but it will always be in my heart.

It's been a wild ride, youse guys.

Service

Today according to my calendar, is Martin Luther King, Jr. (Observed) Day. I really admire President Obama's national call to service on this day. It's good to remember that this is not just a day off from work and school, it's a day to remember all the good we have done and still have yet to do in this world.

Growing up, I used to do some volunteering with my family. We would deliver turkeys, volunteer at soup kitchens, little things here and there. I remember enjoying it a lot and really feeling good and growing from it.

Somehow, after I finished grad school, I stopped volunteering. One reason for that was that my job itself was pretty demanding and I felt that the job, long hours, travel and hard work for a labor union, composed an almost insurmountable load of service in and of itself. I think, though, another reason was that once I felt truly independent, I started slacking on some of the core things I learned to do when I was small: eat right, volunteer, etc. Sort of like gaining the Freshman Fifteen, but a more gradual and sinister change - I kind of stopped doing stuff I didn't "have" to do.

I also have a talent for letting any small obstacle or hindrance stop me from doing something I say I want to do. For example, last year I signed up for Philacares, a Philadelphia-wide service organization. They mismatched my name with someone else's ("Dear Barry") and never sent me any requests to volunteer. I thought, "Well, I kind of tried," and left it at that.

This spring I hope to at least do a few things, maybe through church or some kind of cleanup at the park. I'm on leave until the middle of the spring so I should be able to find something to do.

It's funny how many people pledge to do more "clean living" - eating right, volunteering, keeping their houses clean, etc. - after having a child.

Oh, screw it, this is just a blog post about how I feel bad for not volunteering. So with that, I leave you with a photograph of the afore-mentioned park, so you can see how much it loves its community and deserves love in return. The end.

Bureaucracy and Cupcakes

I love food trucks. So I started following my faves on twitter. The day I started following Buttercream, a popular and delicious cupcake truck, owner Kate Carrara's followers were alerted to a trying situation for the dessert-peddler: the cops and the City's Department of Licensing and Inspection, who had given Carrara a warning about not being able to vend in a particular spot a few weeks prior, drove her truck away from said spot in her presence. She paid $200 to retrieve the truck.

What?

It's the kind of thing that, if anyone besides cops had done it, would basically be robbery and grand theft auto.

Granted, Carrara should have made sure she was in the right place. But the bigger issue, she says, is knowing where she is allowed to vend. The city's labyrinthine maps and codes do not make this at all clear to a lay person/small business owner/anyone. In a functioning city, a permitted vendor should be able to call up the proper department, name a spot, and be told definitively whether one can vend there or not.

Unfortunately, Philadelphia has not historically been the best example of transparent city government in our great nation. Among the comments in the Inquirer story linked above: "She should have just paid off the L&I inspector...like everyone else does" - ouch. But this city, including L&I, seems to suffer continuously from stories of corruption and incompetence.

We could say that Carrara is planting this story as a stunt, a campaign to raise her business' profile and drum up sympathy, and, therefore, publicity. But even if she is, it's working for me. This is a woman, a small business owner, who already has a cadre of followers in a city that is notorious for bad government. Even if she's overselling the story, the mere facts are enough to make me feel that the city is more concerned about padding its coffers than helping citizens sustain their livelihoods and making Philadelphia a nice place to live.

Team Buttercream.

A Girl and Her Racist Dog (Part 2)

I have posted before about our dog, who has a proclivity for lashing out at non-Caucasian males. And, as when I posted about this earlier, Mike3550 is out of town doing some professional thing, so I feel a need to submit my typical low-brow contribution to this blog with an update on this burning issue.

Well, we moved about six months ago, and our new neighborhood is diverse like our previous neighborhood, but in different ways. It is mostly white/black. As I posted before, our dog was really displaying aggression towards Latinos (really men mostly). We did not encounter too many black folks in our previous neighborhood while walking the dog.

In our new neighborhood, she has displayed a fear of and aggression towards blacks. In fact, one day after a blizzard, we were walking down a very familiar sidewalk and an African-American man was walking towards us. Just as we got close, the dog executed a terrifying and sudden lunge bark. There is nothing like simultaneous fear, embarrassment, and oh-please-don't-let-us-slip-on-the-ice-and-crush-our-bones. I am sure that the man and I were both feeling all of these emotions, although his fear-to-other-emotions ratio was probably elevated, where my embarrassment-to-other-emotions ratio was. As usual, I yanked the pooch away and offered gratuitous apologies.

Well, I've had enough of it. It's humiliating, not to mention dangerous to let this go on. Yesterday, on a beautiful, sunny April afternoon, I decided to try something.

We live near a park where the neighborhood comes to play. It's really quite a utopian scene - children, adults, dogs of all races and backgrounds joining together to frolic in harmony. Playground, soccer, dog run. I walk my dog around this park nearly every day (the only day when she was really aggressive towards someone just walking on the sidewalk was that blizzardy day).

As we were walking, we approached an African-American man, woman and maybe eight- or nine-year-old child standing on the sidewalk. I wasn't sure what their relationships to one another were, but the way the man was acting with the child, I assumed they were father and son. The boy was smiling at the dog and said, "Look Daddy, a dog!"

My dog loves children. She will let them bang on her head and pull her skin and she will just take it. And she is equal-opportunity - no racism with children. But here was a situation I was not sure about. Historically: a black boy = good history with dog; a black man = bad history with dog.

I told them that she loves to be petted, that she loves kids but is a little afraid of adults. The dad, as I'll call him, encouraged his son to pet the dog. I made the dog sit. The dad started to pet her - not the way you're supposed to pet strange dogs, which I think is with a steady, gentle approach, and under the chin rather than over the head - but a little awkwardly over her head. I think my dog understood that I was endorsing this, so she didn't do anything weird except jump back. I explained, again, that she's weird with adults.

The son, as I'll call him, kept declining to pet her, and we started to walk away. When we were about 10 yards from them, the son said, "No, actually I want to try." I overheard and turned around. Yes. This was going to work.

I made her sit again and stroked her neck while the son patted her head and touched her neck. She was very calm. I said, "see, she likes you." He appeared to be very proud of himself. She also became more comfortable with the dad petting her, and even got distracted by some birds and looked around, relaxing.

I don't think we have solved her problem. But, just like with humans, I think what will help her overcome her fears of people who don't look like her "family" is repeated exposure to different people in a safe, friendly setting encouraged by her beloved masters. So, we need to be friendlier and more outgoing. This is hard for me, as I'm shy, but I am pleased with the tiny bit of progress we made.

Hopefully when Mike3550 comes back he will post about something smart/important.