Philadelphia, My Second Home
Posted at 9:55 am on Friday, April 27, 2007, in Uncategorized, and tagged athletics, buffalo, california, sabres, syracuse.
Being all but displaced from my hometown, Buffalo (well, actually, a suburb northeast of Buffalo), my second home has become Philadelphia. I had spent time there courting my future wife after college before moving to California. My wife’s family is nearby, just over the border in New Jersey, and her sister lives in Center City Philadelphia. My brother lives in Bucks County, north of Philadelphia. My sisters are not too far away (the Bronx and Connecticut). So when I go “home,” I usually mean Philadelphia.
In Philadelphia, I’m able to hang out with my brother, possibly see my sisters, and a couple of Christmases ago, all of us, parents included, hunkered down sitcom-style in my brother’s townhouse for the weekend. My wife and I are also able to spend time with her entire family while in Philadelphia. We got married in Philadelphia. In fact, I haven’t been to Buffalo in quite some time, although a trip there seems to be looming in the future; to Syracuse, as well.
My new hometown is somewhat ambiguous. We own our home in Hercules (or, we are paying the bank to sleep there), but we initially moved to Berkeley, and that is where I work. We have both worked in Oakland, and that is the closest major city. We have spent a lot of time in San Francisco, and we love Marin. In reality, the entire bay area is our “hometown.”
That being said, I root for the Oakland teams around here. I follow the Oakland Athletics, and to a lesser extent, the Golden State Warriors (who I’d prefer to call the “Oakland City Warriors” if I owned the team, but I don’t). Buffalo has football and hockey, and I still root for the Bills and I follow the Sabres religiously, but Buffalo doesn’t have professional baseball or basketball, so it has been easy to relocate my hometown feelings for the A’s and Warriors. And wouldn’t you know it, the Oakland Athletics were originally the Philadelphia Athletics. And the Golden State Warriors were originally the Philadelphia Warriors. The two teams I follow in Oakland both originated in Philadelphia. Talk about your hometown cross-breeding.
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April 27th, 2007 at 1:35 pm
nice piece…thoroughly enjoyable.
April 30th, 2007 at 12:39 pm
And don’t forget the phrase which W.C. Fields wanted as his epitaph: “On the whole, I would rather be in Philadelphia.” (Philadelphia was his home town.)
October 14th, 2008 at 10:09 am
[...] I have previously blogged that Philadelphia is my “second home,” which I still believe, further bolstered by the fact that the Sixers were originally the Syracuse [...]