A Return to Charm City

If this was home, I had lost my frame of reference.

The Jones Falls still roared alongside, but above it were new buildings of glass and concrete, I assume erected as a visible showing of progress. They blocked the twin overpasses -- my only landmarks upon embarking from Penn Station, and so it was after ten years away, standing on the crest of this hill in the city of Baltimore, with the line of taxis idling curbside and right in front, I was struck that I had no concept of north or south.

On my last trip I flew from San Francisco to BWI (now BWI Thurgood Marshall), visiting an old high school friend. She lived in Fells Point in a converted warehouse, and of her apartment all I distinctly remember is the empty carpeted foyer and the fact that it was almost permanently frigid, apparently the contractors not understanding the finer necessities of insulation when it comes to old, airy concrete structures on the dock. I don't believe we ventured out more than three times over the visit, once to refresh our supply of tequila, once to take a road trip to NYC. The city was icy, and on the third trip out (drinks, dinner, showing off), we got a small dust of snow, none of which stuck to the stones that constituted the street.

In hindsight I should have seen her living situation as an indicator of the changes happening. But I was dumb, a naif, and still enamored with the company and the city I was then living in. So those buildings may have been there. My cardinal orientation may have already been compromised.

Ten years later, Sophie emerged from the station and we hailed a car. As we drove down St. Paul, I regained my sense of direction and, with it, a niggling feeling of familiarity.

* * *

Before I overstate: Was this home?

I was a child of the southern suburbs, my childhood consisting of football and hockey, of firearms, shopping malls, Best Buys. The few times we would head into the city was typically to walk around the Inner Harbor, to the mall-like tourist structures built for tchotchkes and snow globes. At some point they put in a Hooters. This was a sign that things were looking up.

It wasn't until college that I really started to experience the city on my own. I would go during break, invariably using the theaters -- The Rotunda, The Charles, The Orpheum -- as my introduction, as my gateway drug. Once there, I would settle into the immediate vicinity (if there was one) and just walk. Soon enough these trips would have me forgoing the cinema entirely.

* * *

It was tasteful, the hotel room. With its beige floral print covers, its pine-finished furniture and stainless-steel lamps and component chaise longue. it was the sort of room that had the outward signs of sophistication that says it's been designed. The bathroom was not much different.

Upon entering the unit we immediately hung up our gear for the dinner, the suit and dress, and added our jackets and inspected the ironing board and iron before shutting them and moving to the rest. We were in town for a wedding banquet, and we were equipped appropriately. I threw open the blinds (ceiling-to-floor as they were). The M&T Stadium was new, but otherwise what stood in front was the sprawl of South Baltimore, the web of 95 and 295 and 695. Surrounded by the asphalt, all the houses and neighborhoods could do was squat and cower. I remembered this.

With four hours to spare, we left to explore.

* * *

What had changed? As we walked through the harbor, the tchotchkes were still lined up, but surrounding them were the fare of tonier urban tourist dens: H&M, Urban Outfitters, Five Guys burgers. We moved through them, past the old Power Plant building (still housing a Barnes & Noble), and over the inlets and piers until the Baltimore World Trade Center and the Aquarium were far behind us. Onto Aliceanna, and instead of the expected parking lots and their defending, defining fences, we saw a Marriott hotel and the looming of several hundred apartments, condos and lofts. It seemed natural for the area, the type of development the area had always wanted if it had just been given a shot. 

We made it through and to the last remnants of the warehouses, the barrier between the federal-style townhouses that marked the entrance to Fells Point proper. Fresh bakers yeast still punctuated the air, and the breeze was still saturated with the mildew from the harbor. It was in front of one of these warehouses where I had been walking to my car, and a guy asked me if I had any money. I told him no -- I was 22, just out of college, no job -- and his only retort was to inquire if I was sure, that he had a kid, that he didn't want to spend the night in prison. His tone was almost sweet, dejected.

With the storage blocks now diminished to just a few islands, nothing about this felt familiar or even similar. The old parts had been somehow changed by the progress, and they seemed a distant relic. I couldn't remember exactly where this late-night exchange had happened, as nothing around seemed to awaken that old sense of nostalgia. Without it, I was stumbling.

* * *

And then the children showed up. They were from Brooklyn, Baltimore, Rhode Island, DC. With them were the scarf-covered mothers and parents shuffling and trying to keep up. We were back at the hotel, and the NCNMO was having a meeting alongside our event. Everywhere the children scattered, running as if at recess, and their raucous-ness was obscene and shattering of the staid domesticity of the hotel. The adults tried as best they could to corral them, but the still ran through the lobby, up the stairs, bumped into planters and bistro chairs and ropes lining the front. 

We waited alongside a group of them as we went to go back to the room, to change for the wedding. They were antsy, and they couldn't work the packed elevator once they had all punched in.

* * *

What else was the same? The markets along Broadway still stood, although one of the sheds was shuttered and the other was decidedly more upscale, clean. "Eat Bertha's Mussels" still had its namesake establishment, although this saying was now emblazoned in white, the wall to the building painted green, and it consciously underscored the kitschiness of this sentiment. People walked around in Ravens gear, and the Hooters in the Harbor still existed, and was probably doing well. 

It was like the city was trying to dress up in its best Baltimore dress, trying to convince people that this was the same Baltimore they remembered. It was Baltimore as dressed in Baltimore drag, and because of this it was safe, it was tamed, it was a place masquerading as a home.

* * *

What, then, constitutes a home? Is the the place itself? But a person, be it a child or an adult, can move several times throughout his or her life and affix that distinction to each place as he or she goes along. This is not to say that any of these homes past/present/future are invalid. But the nature of home is to be one specific place.

Is it then the people and attachments one makes? The case can be made that siblings and parents create this sense, but ultimately one grows distant from these childhood attachments and associates with other things, people. And even throughout, these relationships are transient, and these don't seem to hurt the distinction, or at least what one may label as. Does this qualify? No, for the same reason, as it refers to a thing of specificity.

Home only ever exists as a set of impressions and memories, foisted upon a space and ineffable. As a result, and from its inception, it's already a figment. It's a curio, it's invital, it's already extinct.

This seems too harsh.

* * *

The dinner was a banquet of requisite speeches, meals quickly eaten (steak for me, chicken for Sophie), drinks arriving at a metered pace so as not to completely lose the guests to inebriation, and all the while three photographers and a videographer paced throughout the room. We had ditched the street clothes and were now in our dress, my pinstripes and her jewelry acknowledging the stately formal of the event.

We were at the New York table, the groom working in Midtown and thus having a series of connections there, and thus us, with the rest of the outsiders, talked about branding and computer code and photography, about whiskey and the service and the trip to Mexico -- which we missed. Soon the plates were collected and we all moved one of the ballrooms for the dancing, the bouquet/garter toss, the cake. Adjacent to us the NCNMO was engaged in a seminar, and the children streamed and ran all about. 

As we entered the ballroom, we did not seek the comfort of the other outsiders, instead dancing in the enjoyment of our own company.

* * *

Some quotes:

"A house is not a home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as the body." (Ben Franklin)

The majority, however, hinge on a certain sense of nostalgia:

"Home is a place you grow up wanting to leave, and grow old wanting to get back to." (John Ed Pearce)

"Home is not where you live, but where they understand you." (Christian Morgenstern)

"Home is a name, a word, it is a strong one; stronger than magician ever spoke, or spirit ever answered to, in the strongest conjuration." (Charles Dickens)

Even the Franklin quote, though acknowledging the roles of mental and physical satiation and comfort succumbs to the fault of shifting associations, of the wearing down time has on the constant: Will what stirs my mental fire at this moment satisfy me to the next? I am nomadic. I bore easily. The uncertainty does not to my tastes sate.

* * *

We stood for the elevator while the convention-goers crowded the waiting area. First one, then a second passed, both too overflowing for us to want to get on.  On the third, we finally did. The view of glass spread out to the harbor black as tar. 

We climbed two floors on our way to 14 and abruptly stopped. The doors opened up, and a boy, a string bean, entered and kept pushing the keypad, nothing happening in spite of how much he repeated.

"Do you have your keycard?" I said.

"Can you punch me up to 12?"

Sophie and I both tried, inserting our cards to unlock the floor, but it didn't take. The 12th floor roared past.

"You can't punch me down?" he said.

"You'll have to take the stairs."

He went down the hallway and out of our sight, and the two of us walked back to the room.

* * *

I have no conclusion to offer. I can issue a repetition of the statement above, albeit softer, that, as a place or time entrenched in the past of nostalgia, home only exists as a platonic ideal. Like Dickens's conjuration it's fantastical, and yet compelling and intoxicating for the concept it embodies.

And yet I have no way to reconcile the overall feeling of confusion, of loss when I first stepped off the train. Moreover, as we cabbed back to Penn Station to catch the Christmas Eve train to Connecticut, the old stone townhouses brought back a distinct recalling of walking down these street, not many years outside of my youth, and wondering what, if any possibility there might have been in the place. It looked stately enough.

I got the official kick of nostalgia, the endorphin rush of familiarity when we were in that elevator, with the boy's meandering through the hallways and the fuck-if-I-care shagginess of his request. That was the feeling I think I longed for, what I remembered the city for and ultimately the thing that I wanted to get far far away from, and it was being delivered from a child from parts unknown, but not there.