Philadelphia

I read somewhere, and it is true, that sometimes in life, there is this one thing you desire so much that you are willing to wait for however long it takes in order to/ until you can get it_ a little like a lion in waiting.

So let’s say there is a girl you’ve always liked and wanted to approach, but the timing never seemed quite right or she had a boyfriend.
What do you do? You wait, one Facebook-click away, for the day she changes her profile status from ‘In a relationship’ to ‘single,’ and then you make your move.

Or maybe there’s a pair of shoes/ a clothing item you feel you desperately need to add to your collection, or even a trip, but you can’t afford the expense at the moment.
What do you? You wait for prices to go down or until you can afford it.

Or perhaps there’s a job, or a particular place you’ve always wanted to go to but only with a special someone.
What do you do? Well, you wait until the position/job opens or until you find that special someone.

All that to say that, since I’ve been here in Philadelphia there’s one thing I have been deeply longing for. A real Philadelphia cheese steak.

I could’ve had one already, but I purposefully delayed the moment to the very last minute. In fact, I had decided that I would not eat a cheese steak until my very last day in town.

I believed that rewarding myself with a ‘real Philadelphia cheese steak,’ (especially) after long and draining weeks of difficult work, would be a well-earned celebration of the job done here.

But today, maybe the pressure of the job was too great, because I decided that I couldn’t wait till tomorrow.

So I found a little food joint along the commercial stretch of Philadelphia’s South Street.

The name of the place is Steve’s Steak.

On the outside, it looked like your traditional/everyday street-side Philadelphian steak joints but very homelike nevertheless with its red-and-white checkered walls and stool-and-counter layout.

There was a bit of a line. But the place smelled like it was worth the wait.

When my turned came, I immediately ordered the obligatory cheese steak.

The wafer-thin “extra lean” beef meat was fried on a hamburger grill, chopped and tossed with onions and green peppers, covered with provolone cheese and slipped into a berth of chalky-tan, sliced-in-half loaf of spongy Italian bread.

As I decimated a stack of napkins, and well before I was even done with my sandwich, I came to the conclusion that if I had to choose one place irrevocably, I might choose to eat here everyday.

No joke.

It hit the spot.

Hours later, I met with Lorraine Young (check previous blog) in her North Philly house. I sat in front of a sinfully large plastic plate of spaghettis and golf ball-size meatballs she had warmed up for me and asked her what would be the one (technological) thing she could not live without. Her answer?

“My stove.”

Growing up, that’s the one thing she desperately wanted and waited for.

An electric stove.

I was done eating (and by that time, I came to the conclusion that if I had to choose one place irrevocably, I might choose to eat here everyday!), so I pulled out my recorder and asked for some explanations.

She told me she still remembers vividly the days of drudgery when a heavy and cumbersome cast-iron wood-burning kitchen stove was the main source of heat for cooking.

Back in those days, cooking was no easy task.

First you had to take down the tree; then you had to dry the logs; and finally you had to split, haul and feed the wood to the stove.

“That’s the way they did things back then.” That was 60 years ago. Lorraine was 6 years old then.

She remembers her grandmother’s wooden stove: “big dark stove,” with wide, heavy doors and knobs. She remembers her grandmother fetching the maul. But she also remembers hearing the thwack of the blade slicing open a log and thinking that she didn’t want to go through the grueling log-chopping-and-carting routine her grandmother had gone through.

Lorraine Young wanted an electric stove.

Bad.

But she had to wait. She had school to finish, daughters to feed and bills to pay before she could get her very first electric stove.

That was a big deal back then.

Lorraine’s grandmother did not even own a simple vegetable peeler or bread knife (she used an old paring knife turned into an all-purpose tool), and would probably be as dazzled by an immersion blender as by an iPhone.
But she probably wouldn’t care for any of it anyway. She’s too traditional. She couldn’t denied herself the delights of simplicity.

And sometimes tradition is just too modest and taciturn to change its ways.

Take Ethel Young, Lorraine’s mother, for example, she simply refuses to use anything else than a rotary-dial telephone. And up until few months ago, she was still using a set-top rabbit-ears-antenna TV set, often fiddling with the horizontal and vertical holds.

But for Lorraine, who grew up learning how to cook from her grandmother, her electric stove is the one thing she has been waiting for.

Just listen to her talking about it. Sheer, childlike exuberance.

And you could never guess that she was talking about a stove.

An electric stove.

Just got back from Michele Jackson’s home - it was a long day! Today, Adeniyi and I met with a cartoonist whom we hope to have illustrate a cartoon for our piece on Ryan and Michele. This afternoon I hung out with the Jacksons at home taking pictures. Spending time with them is wonderful, and probably one of the reasons I ended up staying so late (last time we were there, we didn’t leave till 12!) Michele Jackson and her son Ryan are the subjects of one of our in-depth stories from Philadelphia. They are a mother and son who have used technology to get through a lot of tough times. We’re excited to tell their story - Ryan is a friendly, techie, extremely bright teenager and his mom is one of the nicest people we’ve met in all our travels. The short version of their story is that Ryan used to get teased quite a lot at his old schools because he was so smart and eager to learn. When you go to a rough, inner city school, sometimes you’re forced to keep your intelligence to yourself and try not to stand out. Otherwise, other kids may come down hard on you for not being like the rest. But Ryan (and Michele) didn’t let that keep him back! They used technology - texting - to keep in touch while Ryan was at school, so he could always keep Michele posted on how he was doing and feeling. The Internet was also an outlet for Ryan, who found friends and ways to pursue his interests online.

Anyway, it’s late and it’s been a long day. Good night!

I wanted to see Philly.

They say the best way to see any city is to walk it. I guess there is something about going through a metropolis on foot that’s radically different from going through the same place in a car.

So I asked a friend of mine to pick me up from the hotel where I stay in Center City and drop me off anywhere close to North Philly. I was scheduled to meet several people in nearby neighborhoods, and I decided to walk from there.

I read somewhere that there is something vulnerable about walking. And I never quite understood …until today when we got to North Philly and I stepped out of the car.

Walking through North Philly (as opposed to driving or not going through it at all), you feel…naked… Fully exposed and unarmored.

But in the end, the city unfolds in a reciprocal manner: fully, without cover.

That’s when you really get to see.

I walked by people’s homes, sometimes right up to the porches where they were hanging out, cutting through backyards, close enough that I could see a woman washing dishes at her kitchen sink, smell a family’s dinner (fried fish) or strike conversations with children on their bicycles.

In a sense walking brought me closer to the city and its people.

Today, It seems that I saw the city for the first time.

And I saw it mainly through the eyes of five generations:

A nephew named Caleb.
A son named Thomas.
A mother named Phyllis Young.
A grandmother named Lorraine
A great-grandmother named Ethel.

Ethel, the great-grandmother, has seen it all.
She has seen the aforementioned apocalyptical side of some of Philly’s most notorious neighborhoods: the deserted streets; the factories, massive, low-slung structures of concrete and corrugated steel that squats among the many overgrown lots; the barren tenements that sit conspicuously above the factories; the rundown storefronts and food joints with boarded-up windows and faded price signs…She’s seen it all. That’s where she lives. No big deal.

She saw “bigger” things than that.

She saw “The Promised Land.” Ethel was born in 1919. She was among some six and half million African-Americans who left the South from 1910 to 1970 in what became know as the Great Migration. At the time technology and the mechanization of agriculture (especially the invention of the cotton picker), had made it tough for Blacks to find work in the South.
She made her way to Philadelphia in 1935 where she came from rural Virginia.

She lived in a different time and refuses to change.
She doesn’t know what Facebook is; she only uses a landline telephone that doesn’t have call waiting options (she thinks it’s rude).

At 90 years old, she is startlingly hale, hearty (she’s never drank a drop of alcohol) and independent (she lives by herself!)

She’s something of a family matriarch; she’s had 6 children.
She’s buried three children and two grandchild.
Tough.

Ask Lorraine about it.

At 66, she has seen her fair share. Good and bad.
She saw the 1960s.

I ask her about technology back then.
She smiles.

She remembers the family’s first TV. It had only one channel and it broadcasted in black-and-white. One day her father brought home sheets of colored plastic. He taped the sheets of colored plastic over their black-and-white television so that they would get “color TV.”

“Things were simpler back then,” she said. “People were happy.”
She saw the 1970s with its grimy industries and factory-fouled air. That’s when her second daughter, Phillys was born.

Phillys saw the 1990s; crime rates spiraled, while the quality of schools and services plummeted and the number of crack houses multiplied. A city police officer, she raised her only child Thomas, the way her family has always raised all its kids: with tough love.

But watching her and her son debate Shaq’s trade to the Cavs, you couldn’t tell they were mother and son. They are more like sister and brother; she had Thomas when she was 17, and now they are ‘friends’ on Facebook, have access to each other’s account, and often share updates on friends/people’s status.

“Oh yeah, My mom’s cool as hell…” Thomas is talking to me.
But he is also talking on his Nextel, using the cell phone’s push-button walkie-talkie function to carry on a different conversation. We were sitting in a cheese steak restaurant on South Street, watching Michael Jackson’s memorial and Lance Armstrong in stage 4 of the Tour de France.
At 22, Thomas is your typical college student: he has two cell phones syatematically clasped to his belt and one Blackberry he’s “always playing with”. I’m not exactly sure yet which phone is use for what…

But I will find out and write more about the Young family on my next post.

The entire family will meet at Phyllis’ house. I was invited to come and see.

I plan on walking there.

Hi, Philadelphia. Adeniyi and I have been back in town for about a week, and we’ve been searching for that one final story that will complete our time in Philadelphia. So far, we’ve had plenty of leads but are still working hard to make it happen.

Coming back to Philadelphia has been a little different this time around - the city is sweltering in the heart of summer, school is out and the streets are teaming with people. It’s hot, hot hot–but Philly in its full summertime glory is a site to be seen.

Yesterday, Adeniyi and I met with Marcie Hull and her student John. We met them the last time we were in Philadelphia. We came up with some interesting ways to tell a “generation lap” story between them. Marcie, being a teacher, was very, very helpful in working with us to come up with ideas!

Marcie and John have an amazing story to tell, and we only hope that we can do it justice.

Till next time,

Sabina and Adeniyi