Essays
My Bridge
from phillyskyline.com
5 September 2008
There are places and things in life that retain an emotional charge, a sensitive energy. The greatest for me is my grandparent’s house in Trenton.
I still smell my grandmother’s rosewater, the musk of the kitchen (not her kitchen, she didn’t cook), the thin, grainy decline of their bedroom. I feel the satin of the couch, the crumbling driveway beneath sneaker feet, the roots of the massive, languorous European Beech (my grandfather would say the governor had wanted the tree for the Capitol but it was too large to move).
These were seventies days; I wore a shirt with a frog on it, Swim Camp ’77. That was the year my grandfather died, the day after Elvis, a few days before my father’s 40th birthday. I remember the day, too, waiting with my sister Nancy on the worn carpet of their bedroom floor while everyone else was at the hospital, and my grandmother’s fierce expression and her arms crossed as she left the car and came inside.
I remember too, the sound of the bridge, the Calhoun Street Bridge between Morrisville and Trenton, as we drove back home. The buzz and jostle beneath car wheels. It was the most familiar sound perhaps, 15 miles an hour and the tight squeeze and the little guard shack that once in a while would be renovated — aluminum siding and a window unit to match the times — and the merge ahead onto route 29.
My dad has taken the bridge every working day since his dental office opened in 1967; for me as a kid it would mean a day at the office with him, a visit to the grandparents, or to my other grandmother, my father’s mother, whose funeral limo ride across the bridge I recall now; how many times had we driven her back home, across the bridge, after dinner?
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