Archive for the ‘Philadelphia’ tag
The 3six5
There’s a website I’ve been reading called The 3six5, which takes the form of a “personal journal”-style blog, but with each day of the year written by a different person. Not long ago, I saw on Twitter that they were still looking for writers and I applied to be one of the November authors. I was assigned November 18, which was yesterday. I spent my day in Philadelphia and then on the ride home to NYC I wrote my entry and submitted it. It’s posted here.
Update almost a year later:
The site is no longer there. Here’s the entry:
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Nothing is more like a thing than the thing itself, and today was a Sunday par excellence, full of redemption and history and black coffee and whiskey. With the NYC marathon canceled after Hurricane Sandy, Laura applied for—and got!—a spot in Philadelphia’s race. So I urban-adventured from New York to the City of Brotherly Love, with not enough sleep, my friend Matthew, and good cheer and cheering packed in our bags and printed on our marathon signs.
We arrived perfectly in time to see Laura just before she crossed the finish line. We bellowed and waved and bobbed our signs. She waved and smiled and filled us with pride. Beyond the finish line, she was exhausted and deliciously delirious, saying all she immediately wanted was to go shopping for a new dress. We all wandered through our awe together, then sent her on her way.
The rest of the day blurred by disturbingly quickly. Cocktails and a tapas lunch, the Liberty Bell, a horrifying collection of diseased flesh at the Mütter Museum, one knocked-back drink in an Irish pub. Stone and brick, beautiful old buildings with ugly new facades, the quiet of a weekend’s pace—the city is charming and lonely, another clear signal for Sunday.
Friendship pulses through time like blood in the veins of those horrific specimens once did. And today is just one day. Matthew is barely older than my friendship with Laura. How well do we know each other? How well do we know ourselves? I wonder if we’ll still all be friends another 26.2 years from now.
Heading east, toward the past, as the sun went down, I felt the draw of home. But the bourbon in my belly gave me a hunger for the next—next adventure west, next bite of something sweet. Marking miles and milestones makes for almost instant nostalgia. Remember that time we went to Philly to see Laura run? Remember when we crossed the Delaware, leaving Jersey behind, leaving Pennsylvania behind, in a raking autumn light? Our declared freedom itself was a perfectly Sunday kind of declaration. We found common cause in our day’s hours, and ran circles round time itself.
