Sit & Write #136
Greetings, friends!
Friday is my last day at work. It's surreal to think of passing through those familiar double doors at the end of my day, and then never again. The finality of walking through snickering lacrosse players and coffee-clutching MBAs, and down Walnut Street, past the dialysis center and the mosque, to the PPA-proof side street where I've parked three different used cars now. Since moving to the 'burbs, this job has really been my only tie to the city proper. Tie is maybe the wrong word here, since I still get my health care in Philadelphia. I think I mean claim, a word with plenty of its own baggage.
When I moved from West Philly to Lansdowne in 2019, I had to console my inner teenager, who, after watching Rent exactly 1.12 times, dreamed of moving to NYC to be a writer. I loathed the flat, smooth edges of my middle-to-upper-middle-class Orange County neighborhood and moved to the Bay Area for college as soon as I could. You would think 10 years in Oakland would have di…