Return to Sender: Only You

Dear Philadelphia:

We complain about you sometimes. Often, even. But that’s what we call tough love. (If we hated you, we’d have moved by now.) Sure we sometimes find that your manners leave something to be desired, and we wish the males amongst you were more charming than crass, and we’re not that big on cheesesteaks. But there’s something about you, Philly. A certain je ne sais quoi that we can’t exactly put our fingers on. (Of course, that is the purpose of a je ne sais quoi.) It’s just that sometimes, we look around and we have to laugh, or smile, or shrug, and say to ourselves: “Only in Philly…”

For instance, we’ve recently seen the comical remnants of two automobile accidents. The first, at a busy intersection near an El stop, was a car that had evidently plowed into a telephone pole. It appeared as if all of the vehicle’s occupants had escaped unharmed, but the front of the car had literally wrapped around the pole, which was, in turn, leaning ever so slightly toward the car. We wouldn’t have been nearly as surprised by this accident had the car not remained in place for at least three days after we first saw it. The second accident apparently ended with a totaled Dodge Neon living in the turn lane near the University Science Center. Its bumper had evidently fallen off, but fortunately some Good Samaritan had retrieved it from where it was lost and had shoved it through the driver’s side window. The broken glass on the ground indicates that the window was not broken on impact, but as the good deed was done.

Before we stray too far from the vehicular phenomena we’ve observed throughout the City of Brotherly Love, we’d also like to briefly note two very different moving violations we’ve observed. Last weekend, we watched a driver run a stop sign, slam on his brakes, make a u-turn just past the intersection, and proceed to run the stop sign in the other direction. Not unusual at three a.m., perhaps, except for the fact that it was in front of a police cruiser containing two officers who were clearly unconcerned with the triple-offense. Of course, the next day, we saw a driver run a red light (actually, he was the third to do so, after the light had changed), and he was pulled over. Which he should have been. But apparently, he disagreed, because as we passed the vehicle, the driver was screaming at the ticketing officer. We don’t know how the confrontation ended (the light we were standing at changed and we were in a hurry), but our guess can be summed up in two words: billy club.

We were recently standing at one of our favorite food trucks, talking with the proprietor while we waited for our food. A man walked up to the proprietor (who, it should be noted, was a man) and asked, “Yo, you need a pregnancy test? This one’s $8 and this one here’s $230.” The proprietor laughed – at the price disparity? – and said no. “You don’t have a woman who could use it?” The proprietor insisted that no, he was all right. The gentleman then turned to us and asked: “What about you? You need a pregnancy test?” We answered that no, we were fine, to which he responded: “You sure? You can never be too sure about these things.” When we declined more firmly, he shrugged and headed to the next food truck over where, it should be noted, he was also turned down. Whereas in other cities, we’re approached about bootleg movies and fake Rolexes, we can honestly say that we can’t imagine being offered an EPT on the streets of any place but Philly.

But perhaps one of the Philadelphia phenomena that we most like to observe are the crowds that gather at Wawas after closing time. A few years ago, we discovered that nothing is better at two in the morning than a meatball shorti with provolone. Although we’re no longer mere feet from Wawa, and we don’t land there twice a weekend, we still love to people watch while we wait for the sleepy sandwich ladies to put too much marinara on our rolls. There are the drunken frat boys, the hospital employees working the late shift, the book nerds who need a sugar-and-caffeine boost to study for whatever exam they’ve got coming up, the young professionals who’ve been at work all weekend trying to close their first major deals, cops on graveyard. It’s a whole miniaturized Philadelphia, every Saturday and Sunday, a few hours before dawn. Philadelphia’s best and it’s not-so-best gather before the touch-screen ordering pads and the glass sneeze guards lined with Herr’s pretzels and Slim Jims and for just a few moments, our version of the city is perfect.

See, Philly? Every once in a while, you make us kinda poetic.

Photo Credit: USA Today