City of Brotherly Love

Philadelphia came as a welcome breeze after the hot, stifling activity of New York City. Philadelphia, known as the City of Brotherly Love, is rooted in the Greek word phileo. This city’s namesake is what everyone wants, true friendship without the expectation of anything else, just being oneself. It is stronger than eros, the love of lustful lovers that is so easily swayed and turns bitter. Phileo allows weakness, celebrates strength, and recognizes the flaws but is able to see the good qualities foremost. I do not want to idealize Philadelphia as some dream city, but I will say upon getting to our Airbnb, our host had sat wine out for me, gave me very detailed directions as to get to different locations, and made both Joaquin and I feel very welcome. We felt the love. 

    After sipping a glass of wine and giving the road trip and toll bridges a good liquor cleansing from my system, Joaquin and I walked the few blocks from our Airbnb to the train station. The train ride gave me an opportunity to observe the drastically different set up of homes as compared to my rural abode in California. Houses were tall and skinny and looked as the other half of them were missing. They stood erect with no trees to shield their gangliness. I cannot tell if this malnourished state of housing represents the whole of Philadelphia or just the housing next to the railroad tracks. 

    When in the city center, Joaquin and I did the quintessential touristy things. We stood next to the Liberty Bell. People were taking selfies next to the chunk of metal and posing happily with their boyfriends and girlfriends. I was underwhelmed and tried very hard to understand the fascination with the bell beyond its famous crack and the mystery that enshrouds it. Joaquin and I chalked it off as a sound maker and went to go stand in the long line to Independence Hall. There we stood, and we stood, and we stood, and we sat on the brick, and then we stood, and finally, a tour guide led a group of  us line standers into the hall. We saw the room in which the old men who decided the foundational rules of our country sat and argued and probably told a few crude jokes, and certainly thought a string of curse words in their minds that perhaps may have slipped at some point. Most certainly they sat and flatulated, and through all that human function, human absurdity, they managed to hash out the business of the country. This was way more fascinating than the Liberty Bell. 

    The next stop on our Philadelphia adventure was the City Tavern. The servers and decor were that of the Colonial Period, and the menu boasted items that Benjamin Franklin and those of that ilk would have eaten. I cannot recall exactly what we ate for dinner, but I do vividly remember the flight of beer that I ordered. It was a meal in itself. The beers were inspired from old recipes that had been found in Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson’s archives. This beer transported me to a place where all of the aforementioned men were imbibing, eating fare, discussing our new nation, and probably a lot of other crude things considering the nature of alcohol. The flight of beer was larger than I expected, but I was able to polish most of it off, and I was in a fine patriotic spirit as we continued our stroll through Philadelphia down to the waterfront. 

    The waterfront was lovely. There were swans to pedal, a skating rink to fall on one’s ass, hammocks to swing on, food stands to consume from, and a variety of other activities. We ambled along, taking it all in, watching the colors on the water change to pink from the setting sun. It was all new to us, and being used to rugged and underdeveloped waterfronts of home, it was like a new world. A full day could be spent wandering around on the waterfront, but we just had the evening, and as it was getting dark, we headed back to the train station, and decided that Philadelphia was a place in which we needed to return.

The next day, before continuing our journey to Washington D.C., we stopped at Eastern State Penitentiary. It is a crumbling museum of crime and depravity within the city limits of Philadelphia. The floor plan is shaped like an asterisk, so that a single guard could stand in the center and look down all halls. The crumbling walls of the cells, rusty bed frames, old barber chairs are haunting. Some of the cells have been transformed by the visions of artists to reveal different aspects of being a prisoner, being part of a system, and social wrongs that are inevitably attached with the penal system. One such artist display was a multitude of recordings of inmates singing their favorite songs. Some were good, some not, but what mattered is that their voices were being heard. Music has the ability to transcend sorrow, happiness, and hope; it reflects every beautiful and ugly part of the human spirit, and we listen; we don’t always listen to the harsh words that sputter from people’s mouths, or the yearning that seeps from their eyes, but we listen to music. For the moments that I sat and listened to the different songs, I was able to hear more than a faceless statistic of those who are so forgotten that they reside behind the bars of our society. I can’t help thinking that while Joaquin and I had seen so many places and monuments to American society, here was yet another that still remains as not only a testament to the individual human desire to do wrong, but also to the collective society’s prejudices and propensity to push away an issue, lock it behind concrete, rather than rehabilitate, and do the darker, harder work of healing.  I guess this is part of the human condition. We left that day with the lingering memory of dark cells and dark deeds, but also with the ever present song of phileos as I held Joaquin’s hand through the exit doors (or more aptly, it was agape with the accompaniment of phileos).