I have grown to think of most suburbs as nowherelands, even though I live in one. They grow like mushrooms: without direction and almost always without history. Sure, there are Catonsville’s twenty-one steps and Dundalk’s orchards, but the rest are simply a pattern repeating itself, filling in all blank spaces with a semirandom spatter of bagel shops, shoe stories, Giant supermarkets. It’s impossible to navigate any of them without a map because there is no up or down there, simply more.
At least this was how I felt this morning, navigating through a series of them for a conference I dare not describe, both to keep my own job safe (oh this economy) and to keep whatever reader interest this blog has managed to scrabble together. It was early morning and I’ve run out of friends who live off 495 whose couches I could sleep on, so I took the back way, through long traffic light upon long traffic light. When I drove home, I abandoned all pretense to hypermiling, floored it up 95 until I reached the gently sloping offramp to MLK.
I have never really thought of Baltimore as beautiful, either, but it was to me as I coasted down the ramp. I saw landmarks: the Bromo-Seltzer Tower, Ravens Stadium, the cluster of modest skyscrapers in the Inner Harbor that ring the dome. At last I felt as if I was somewhere again. It was not as beautiful as a real city, a New York or even a Philly, but it really was beautiful.
Maybe I should start calling this home, I thought to myself.
I’ve lived here now five years, three with Wendy. Love (true love, even… am I allowed to call it that? is it safe?) has a way of obliterating all the small details that would bother you otherwise — that, and having to hop three jobs in six months. But I’ve only lived here. I’ve never really felt like I belonged here.
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