This week Jane and I brought Jordan on his first trip to the Mid-Atlantic, a somewhat unexpected but fortuitous change-in-plan from an originally scheduled foliage hunt across Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. I guess the bucket list does bend just a bit, sometimes. We stayed for two nights near our old home in East Baltimore before moving on to do some sightseeing in the heart of Washington, DC. It was a genuine urban travel marathon - a proof-of-concept, if you will, for city-hopping with a toddler, entirely using public transportation. Jordan, for his part, loved the sequence of subway lines, planes, light rail and commuter trains, and shuttle buses and city buses that the week’s wandering entailed. He was thrilled by the frenetic pace of the DC Metro, which makes Boston’s T look anemic in comparison, and there were a number of toddler firsts (first giant panda sighting at the Smithsonian Zoo!) though they mostly fell flat as Jordan’s energy and patience for touring wore increasingly thin later in the week. We spent our final evening hanging out in the hotel, eating Chinatown takeout while listening to music, watching hiking videos on the TV, and jumping on the bed.
Most memorable, however, was our brief time in Baltimore, showing Jordan our old haunts and revisiting the most charming parts of our old favorite city. After getting in on Saturday afternoon and having dinner with Lindsey at Ale Mary’s, on an early Sunday morning walk, we sauntered up from our hotel in Harbor East to our old apartment building on Broadway, retracing the zigzag steps along Lombard and Caroline Streets that Jane and I walked for the better part of a decade, all the while telling him stories: “This was where Daddy got in that car accident…” “This is where Mommy and Daddy used to live…” “That’s the window where Honeydew and Charlotte sat…” “This is the hospital where Daddy worked…” (“Big Jesus is closed!” he whines all the way to Patterson Park - it being a Sunday, and Hopkins having buffed up its security measures since five years ago). We stop by the front door of Broadway Overlook (looking ever more like the entrance to an insane asylum, which it may as well be), and find the nearby spot in the sidewalk with paw-prints studded in pavement, which I wrote about in one of my final poems about the city.
In Patterson Park, I sit in on a meditation / sound bath session beneath the pagoda, and walk down the path encircling the park to locate my old favorite tree (a massive Osage orange), while Jane and Jordan discover the nearby playground, which we were all but blind to until this point in our lives. Lindsey joins us again; she treats us to ice cream at Bmore Licks, and we grab lunch at the Ukrainian Festival next door. Dinner is on the water, at Loch Bar later that night. Jordan is low-key enamorado with Lindsey, basically tells her this, calls her his (latest) best friend, and asks her to stay with us (“Can you come to hotel? Can I go to your house?”). A tradition by now: saying farewell while walking back along the water toward Lindsey’s place, under sparkling lights and through dimly-lit beautiful alleys, cobblestone streets leading us to little squares and precious places, places that beckon like an old flame, asking you to linger a moment, to stay awhile, to do anything - anything but leave.
The place - Baltimore as a whole - has lost none of its emotional valence, nor any of its charm. I still miss it dearly. However, as the years wear on, I find that the memories soften in intensity, and the grief mellows a little, becomes more rounded in its contours. So much is unchanged, still familiar, still plucks and strums at the heartstrings as it always did: the pungent Chesapeake Bay smell on any warm day between spring and fall; the character of the streets and row-homes; the free-spirited striving and deep civic pride; the underdog mentality; the sense of community that cuts across stark gaps between rich and poor, black and white. Yet there were also things that Jane and I were surprised to have forgotten, or perhaps never noticed: how hilly Butchers Hill (and my old running route) is! The businesses that survived the pandemic, and those that didn’t, or have come to town since (“Jamba Juice in the fucking harbor?!” my jaw hits the brick pavement as we make our way downtown toward the station). The taverns and pubs (essentially all of Fells) that we spent our twenties assiduously ignoring, yet somehow feel wildly nostalgic about. And most of all, the people and their lives and stories that have continued to course through time (Lindsey among them), unfolding in parallel to our own double-enveloping lives. On our train ride out of the city, we point out to Jordan the place in West Baltimore where Route 40 passes an old used-mattress store, courses beneath the train tracks, and enters the city, the skyline visible straight ahead to the east, the boarded-up row-homes neatly arrayed on either side. This was the very spot where Jane and I first drove into the city, with less than five miles on the odometer after leaving the Toyota dealership and making our first grocery purchase across the street in Catonsville. Thirteen years - come and gone, just like that, seemingly in a flash. The car, still in good condition with just over 60,000 miles on it, now dutifully parked in Brookline; and us here, reliving our earliest memory with it.
Change and stability, grief and hope, love and longing. These are the dual lenses that have coloured my perspective of our home city, our departure from it, and all that has transpired since 2020. The emotions have been like stains that refuse to come out of the fabric. Lindsey asks over dinner if things feel any different this time, and I realize that they do. Now I see it all through a seventh lens, which despite its newness is somehow more wholesome, more integrated than any vision I’ve been able to achieve on my own: the eyes of a two-year-old boy. A boy with a growing sense of self, who plays with friends of every creed and color, who cares about the world and (once in awhile, amidst the roiling emotions and self-centeredness of toddlerhood) displays incredible flashes of empathy with and respect for people, places, animals, and plants. Who delights in the telling of stories and the making of memories. Who fearlessly expresses himself in a way that his fully-grown, supposedly-attuned adult father could only aspire to (a few days later: “I feel sad!” “Why do you feel sad?” “Uh… because I miss Lindsey ai-yi!” “Why do you miss Lindsey?” “Because I love he!” [sic; he’s still working on pronouns]). Even if there were nothing else I could take from this tangled, complicated, beautiful thing called parenthood, I will always be grateful for this: that Jordan has finally given me something resembling closure on the Mid-Atlantic, on the experience of building and sweeping away a life in Charm City. I wrote in a poem during that final, pivotal year: “… how time heals things slowly // if you’re ready, and // you let it.” Time, and a toddler, evidently.
In the hotel room the night before our flight back to Boston, Jordan (who recently got his annual flu shot pre-trip) climbs up onto a swivel chair and announces that “Nurse Doctor Jordan Yeh” is going to give me a “shop.” When I ask what the hell a shop is, he says “藥藥 - Yào yào (baby talk for ‘medicine’), making me roll up my shorts. He pokes me in the thigh with a pair of used chopsticks and makes a “krr-sh” sound effect that I can only assume is a syringe injecting. “Owie, 痛痛 - tòng tòng (hurts!)”, I say in Chinese. “You’ll feel better soon,” he says in English, patting my leg as if applying a bandage. “You always do.”
