Der Uberkollum: Going Home

As I find myself rapidly approaching the end of my college career, it seems that each successice midsession brings with it new feelings about (rapidly becoming less and less) my homeland, Philadelphia. This reading week, despite the combined efforts of my professors, I became James Bond, and slipped through the cracks again (though the image was thouroughly spoiled by the $600 car which I was driving). There is a certain point when, during the car or bus ride home, it becomes apparent that you are indeed arriving in Philadelphia. There is a time when you crest a particular hill in I 95 south and you can faintly see the skyline. 95.7's jammin' gold comes in crystal clear, and Chacka Kahn tell you, in her own special way, that you are, indeed, in Philadelphia.

As previously mentioned, each successive time this ocurs brings with it a dynamic mix of emotions. What once meant a respite from the cruel and harsh world of Trinity comes to mean, more and more as time goes on, a reversion to a place which is home only in as much as it is the backdrop for my childhood memories. The friends that never left also seem like more of a when than a who, connected to me only by the notion of what we, as a group, once meant to each other.

Rather, what seems to draw me to philadelphia is not the specific, evolving people with whom I share friendship, but, rather, the things immutable. I find myself reminiscing more and more about the few aspects of my hometown which will not change anytime in the near future. I look forward to the skyline, to the cheesteaks, to the hoagies (not grinders, subs or heroes), downright nasty sports fans and, yes, even the mummers. It is in thiese notions which now form my cultural identity. For those of you who don't know, the mummers are a group of people who, sometime during the year, find the whiskey in them to make costumes and do a sort of organized drunken shuffle through Philly on new year's day. Almost impossible to describe if you've never seen it, the mummer's strut, or the physical act of mumming, can only be described as a sort of electric slide after tequila shots. For anyone who's taken a few to many of those rowdy mexicans, the picture might be coming into (or out of) focus.

One might be concerned for my sanity, given that my cultural identity is now linked to a parade completely unknown to the outside (civilized) world, but I now find it much more comfortable to finally have something static by which I judge my identity. When I was a younger, less analytical version of myself today, my father related to me what a shame it was that the youth are largely incapable of adopting the knowledge of their parents-- that they were destined to make the same mistakes that have been made in the generations before. More and more it seems that my father, much to my chagrin, has been proven right through the passage of time, and I find myslef becoming an unwilling participant in a life which now seems more cyclycal than linear.

Mabye I will never be able to go home. Mabye the incessant change which seems to characterize my life of late will never subside. It just seems that my level of hapiness in this college is becoming directly porportionate to my ability to accept what is and what shall be, rather than what was, though there will always be a special place in my heart for the mummers and the ugly cousin of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.