I'm missing something even living out here. I don't really know how to make friends, although any real friends of mine tend to come about over a slow laborious process, only realizing at the very end how much we mean to each other. The guy at the other end of the bar lastnight looked like someone we knew, but we couldn't put our finger on who. He drunkenly gave us directions to an underrated but entirely fantastic view of the city, he said, just under the top of Twin Peaks.
On the way home we stepped over the gutter punks and swept by random miscreants until Trav picked me up and slung me onto his back and ran, laughing the whole way with a jar of peanut butter in one hand and a loaf of bread in the other. Late night runs to the grocery store never get old, no matter how old you are or what city you're in. Despite this, our typical beautiful evening in jolly San Francisco, there is a hole.
I try to think of a comprehensive list of all the things that I miss, and I can't. They are too numerous and when I try to put my finger on them they slide just out of reach like bubbles of mercury. I'm constantly haunted by the memories of Baltimore, welcome or not. The oppressive heat and the stench of bus fumes and squashed rats under your tires. How the beautiful purple haze covers the city in an August summer sunset, how your tank tops stick to your skin as you watch the ducks paddle through the murky water in Fells Point. I miss the pounding sun in Patterson Park and all of the hard-working but tired shopfronts in Highlandtown, how the city comes alive in bursts of orange and yellow sodium lights at night. All of the mediocre dives with soggy pizza and fried things, blasted to oblivion in bluish fluorescent bulbs after midnight.
Even the tender budding yuppiness of Canton, broken murals in East Baltimore, hopeful hipsters in Mount Vernon. I remember all the spring evenings I would drive (just drive) when I was in college, savoring the cool, sweet weather that lingers only for a couple of weeks before the heat begins. I dare say I miss being tested by the ghetto thugs, waving for my attention and catcalling as I walk down the street. You just don't get that here in the Castro, do you?
Most of all I miss the broken old buildings, and having the luxury of saying that this-and-that is such an overrated abandonment. Right now I would gladly visit even the most frequented haunts of Henryton or Rosewood. There are no abandonments here, not like they are out East. After driving seven hours each way recently just for the hell of it, I regret not taking that 3-hour drive to Pittsburgh more often to see the jewels that truly mattered.
There was a time that I loved Baltimore, way back before the ennui and bitterness hit. I loved the cobblestones and the formstone and the fact that Baltimore has nearly always been fueled by the toils of the hardworking blue collar residents of the steel and shipping industries. I loved the smell of the flowering acacia trees those brief moments in late spring and the dogwood, magnolia and cherry trees in every park. I loved waking up to snow, and being able to complain how badly Marylanders handle the threat of cold. I was so proud of Pigtown and how the city kept its chin up. Even the constant humbling of the massive Johns Hopkins Institutions made me a glutton for pain. Dan Rodricks was my personal hero, Kevin Cowherd my fluffy laugh. But I never took advantage of those years to document what made Baltimore so much more.
I'm glad that I left. We only get one life and I would be smothered living in one place for all of it. But taking these roots we've grown, severing some and carefully wrapping others, is one of the most difficult and painful processes I have ever experienced.
