Summer in the City
While I was at my workshop at Bard, I met a guy from Massachusetts who is a major fan of The Wire, like we are, and we instantly trading trading favorite episodes and actors, and I filled him in on some of the Baltimore-related backstory. I also told him what we always say, “If you can watch The Wire and still want to live in Baltimore, then you are a true Baltimorean.”
But truth be told, I often feel ambivalent about our decision to live here. Some of the problems of American urban life anywhere– crime, rats, drugs–seem to me magnified and multiplied in Baltimore, much more than anywhere else in the country (except probably Detroit). What other city has been part of a Supreme Court case about the right to invade a property infested with legendarily tenacious rats? One week, a five-year-old girl gets shot on her own street, and the next week, two police officers are ambushed while trying to arrest suspects. Where else do drug dealers borrow legal tactics from white supremacists?
And yet, we continue to live here. We go to Artscape, America’s largest free arts festival, and make art projects and hear music and see thousands of city-dwellers of all colors around us. We go to the science center and learn about bubbles and the city seems so beautiful on a warm summer day. We plant flowers in front of our houses, we laugh and sigh about a city that against all odds continues to redevelop and regenerate, where an Baltimore-raised actor from The Wire has spent decades passing on his love for theatre. We have one of the highest murder rates in the country, but also one of the best hospitals in the country. We have long been a city of privateers and thugs, of national anthems and local tragedies. It is an accomplishment to continue to love a place with so many contradictions.
We continue to stay, because we can’t imagine leaving. And that makes us true Baltimoreans too, I suppose.
- Posted in: all about me
Did you grow up in Baltimore?
I find that I feel kind of rootless myself. We both grew up on Long Island (NYC suburb) but moved around a bit and now have been in the Providence area for 6 years. I like Providence, but it’s not home-home. I don’t talk like a Rhode Islander. I don’t know everyone the way RIers do (any random meeting of two strangers will yield at least 2 people they know in common). I don’t boat/sail/fish (yet).
So I envy you your feeling of being a true community member of the place you live.
No, I didn’t grow up here– I went to college right outside the city, then moved here with my husband, who has lived here since he was seven. His roots here are still much deeper– the random meeting turning into many connections holds true here too, and he is always running into people he knew in elementary or high school or college! So I think some of my community-feeling is vicariously through him. It would be very different if he hadn’t grown up here– Baltimore can be an insular city, and Providence may be the same way.