An overdue letter to Pittsburgh

Dear Pittsburgh and greater Allegheny County:

I owe you a bit of an apology.

No, don’t get your hopes up.  Mr. Harpool is not going to become one of those young hipster-ish types who moves into one of your up-and-coming neighborhoods, helping to counterbalance the continual outflow of talented young professionals from your decidedly unique urban environs.  You are still far too old, far too lacking in diversity, far too provincial in nature, far too dreary and far too cold during far too much of the year for me to consider claiming you as my home turf once again.

But all things considered - and largely my point of writing today - is to note that you were an exceptional city for the graduate school years of my life.  Affordable, liberal, educated, urban – in many ways, you epitomized most of the things that I have always searched for in my communities of choice.  What’s more – truly far more important – is that you were so different.  Short of my brief forays outside of the United States, you were the most dissimilar, as compared to my life experiences in general, environment to which I had been exposed, and as a result you forcibly broke me out of ten million different comfort zones at the precise time in my life when I was desperately attempting to cling to any shard of normalcy and continuity that I could find. 

In the routine and quasi-staid middle-class frenzy of my New York life today, I can almost forget what 2008 was like.  The year when, seemingly all at once, my mother died, I finished undergrad a year early and left behind all that which was familiar to me after three magnificent years in Gainesville; the year that I finally achieved a career in my dream region of South Florida – only to uproot myself a few months later to a city and region with which I had no familiarity; the year, due to the intense academic pressure at Carnegie Mellon, which brought me to the brink of dropping out of grad school during the most academically challenging semester of my life, all as the first ever serious relationship of my life began to fall apart and I experienced our country electing its first African American President.

 

Pittsburgh, you were an integral part of that chaotic, deranged, euphoric, hellish year.  You were at the center of that year when my very existence was redefined from the ground level up.  And looking back now, I realize that I would not be the person that I am today - not even close - without your influence, without your challenges, as I underwent those traumatic, tumultuous changes.  For you see, every bit that I suffered within your confines – and let us never forget that the suffering you imposed upon me was immense – I also grew.  I built character in a manner, quite frankly, that the cities and circumstances in which I had previously conducted my life had never forced me to.

In short, I do not consider it hyperbolic in the least to state that the years I spent in Pittsburgh were the most important, most transformative, and most rewarding of my life.  Pittsburgh, you may not be my favorite city – indeed, you never will be – but you were, beyond a doubt, the city that changed the trajectory of my life in a manner unlike any place before.  After all, if you need any proof of the veracity of my statements, which region of the country did I finally end up inhabiting?

So I without hesitation swallow a bit of my pride and offer up this apology.  To you, to your residents, to Carnegie Mellon University, to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, perhaps to a certain extent even to the entire Northeastern United States.  For the childish lack of appreciation.  For all of the curt remarks.  For all of the petty bitterness, the prickly condescension, the juvenile concentration on climate. 

In brief, call it an apology for not having realized the amazing experience that you gave me until after I had left your bountiful hills behind for a land of vapid sunshine.

Better late than never, I think you would agree?