Like I wrote to my brother last night, it’s so familiar and so strange to be here. The hotel where I’m staying for the conference I must’ve gone past a million times as a kid – it’s one of the first things you see when you drive into downtown Pittsburgh from the airport – but I never went inside. Out my window I can see where we used to enter the Three Rivers Arts Fest (that they still have; 2010 was the 51st); it seems like the watercolorist that painted a small picture of a teddy bear with another smaller bear sitting in its lap for my brother, probably in 1964 or so, was set up right on the sidewalk over there. Last night when we tried to go to Tambellini’s (it stops serving at 8:00 on weeknights, after the theater crowd goes to their shows), we walked through a courtyard, part of Gateway Center, where I saw Earl Fatha Hines. And I realized that we went pretty much right past that alternative high school I went to, spring of sophomore year – it was on 6th Street. I walked into the conference reception and the windows look out over the place in Point State Park where I got busted for pot the first time.
This morning I got coffee at a Starbucks in Market Square – we shoulda gone to the Primanti’s there last night when Tambellini’s was closed – but I realized that when I went to Ivy School of Professional Art, it was right off Market Square – the glass castle is there now.
And this is just hanging out in downtown Pittsburgh – not what I would really call what my mom called my old stomping grounds. Saturday I’m gonna really go back to the ‘hood – walk around the Highland Park Reservoir, and back to my parent’s house from there.
View out my hotel window, towards the glass castle - basically South, I think
