10.19.2004

from a chabon essay on pittsburgh

: "The city of Pittsburgh, as I came to understand it, first entered my life in an important way in 1971. I was eight years old, and we were living by now in the Maryland suburbs. I was in the process of becoming a baseball fan, and that year one of our local teams, the Orioles�the Brooks Robinson, Jim Palmer, Boog Powell Orioles�went to the World Series, and met the team from that frozen, unknown and unimaginable city of Pittsburgh. Right away, I noticed that playing for Pittsburgh in right field was this marvelous, handsome, graceful, brown-skinned guy. He was strong, lean, serious. He ran hard, threw hard, and swung hard, but he always looked relaxed and unruffled. He was everything an eight-year-old boy could most devoutly wish to be. I'm sure I'm remembering wrong�I know the Pirates got some fine pitching during that series�but to my eight year old self it seemed that Roberto Clemente won the ' '71 series single-handed. He got at least one hit in every game and wounded up batting over .400. From that moment, Pittsburgh began to live in my imagination as the place that I believed was the home of that beautiful, admirable man. Pittsburgh, the home of beauty. "


My younger brother, Stephen, saw Pittsburgh first, when he went with our father and new stepmother to hunt for a house in a neighborhood with the quaint and evocative name of Squirrel Hill. It sounded to me like a tidy, leafy spot. Domesticated and elegant, but home to all manner of forest creatures. I figured we'd probably live somewhere near the very top of this hill, and the squirrels would come out of the trees to eat out of our hands. Hell, for all I know I imagined that the squirrels might even be sentient and capable of speech. Anything could happen, it seemed to me, in a place like Pittsburgh.

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