Lost Yinzer: Old

John Grochalski

I’m getting old.  It’s not as though I just realized it.  I’m stating a fact here.  I’m getting old.  Next week I’ll be thirty-seven.  Thirty-fucking-seven!  In the grand scheme of things, no, I’m not that old.  I’m pretty young in terms of life expectancy, and based on the so-called modern marvels of science, I keep getting younger every year, sweet eternal rest moving further and further away from me each time they increase the life expectancy.  It’s not that I want to die either.  Here, too, I am stating a fact.  I’m getting old.  I’m going to die.  And so are you.

You see, recently I was back home in Pittsburgh, and my wife and I had the opportunity to wander around some of our old stomping grounds.  We went to Oakland, Squirrel Hill, and Shadyside.  Now,  I don’t want to draw attention to the mass gentrification going on in some of those places (Shadyside not so much, Squirrel Hill a bit, and Oakland overrun with bullshit chain establishments), but to talk about some of the spots that we visited that are still there.  Plus, I already lamented the loss of my Oakland in a Lost Yinzer piece back in early 2008, before the economy crashed, and Dunkin’ Donuts moved to Forbes Avenue (Great Christ, what I wouldn’t give for a Schwartz’s Cheddar Dill bagel dipped in a cup of hot coffee right now….if you know what I mean, please re-read the first paragraph of this piece).

Let’s focus on Oakland.  We went to Oakland for one specific thing.  My wife and I went to Oakland for Sree’s Indian food.  If you don’t know where Sree’s red food cart is located, it’s on Margaret Morrison Street by CMU’s intramural fields and tennis courts.  I still haven’t made my peace with the way Oakland has segregated its food vendors, and I hate that verdant piece of shit Pitt put in between the Carnegie Library and Hillman Library.  Gyros out of circular little kiosks?  Does anyone feel like an asshole ordering food from these places, or does the merry-go-round make it all right?

Getting to visit Pittsburgh maybe once or twice a year, I needed a break from the suburban offerings out where my parents live.  There’s only so much outpost Primanti Bros. that a man can eat.  Plus the better parts of my time in Pittsburgh were spent in the city.  Plus it’s just not the same eating a Primanti sandwich in the ’burbs.  So Sree’s was a must.  After stuffing our faces on the vegan lunch at Sree’s (broccoli and potato, cauliflower, and chick pea and potato…and no, I’m not a fucking vegan or a vegetarian for that matter….I just know what’s good), my wife took a walk down memory lane.  Or rather we took a “trip” down memory lane, the two of us stumbling not once, but twice, coming over the Schenley Bridge, on our way to the Carnegie Library.  Landmark or not, someone needs to fix that thing….the bridge.  The library is fine.

I worked in the Carnegie Library, mostly, from 1994-2003 (if 1994 sounds old to you, read the first paragraph and understand what’s coming to you one day), and it still amazes me the remodeling job that they did on the place.  It looks completely different than when this geezer worked there.  And I like it, for the most part.  A lot of libraries that have remodeled look cold and impersonal, yet the Carnegie still has that money charm about it; the kind one can only get from amassing their fortune on the backs of steel workers.  But at least old Uncle Andy gave back, and for his soft touch/guilty conscience we have the beautiful Carnegie Library, in the heart of Oakland, to waste our time away in on a cold afternoon, or a hot summer day.  But I guess because I spent so much time there, working, making friends, and navigating my young life, seeing the place in such an altered form does sadden me a little.  It dampers the memories a bit.  But, fuck it.  I’m not Proust after all.

My wife and I, being alums, went over to Pitt’s campus.  First stop was the Cathedral of Learning.  Shit, I haven’t been in that building since 2000 or 2001.  It still smelled the same.  It smelt like college, and I was immediately taken back to the early 1990s, Bill Clinton, Nirvana and Pearl Jam, Cross Colors, Real Men Wear Black T-shirts, Neil O’Donnell, and when I roamed Oakland as if it were my own kingdom.  We lingered in the Cathedral for a bit, checking out the open International Rooms and watching our future leaders play with their digital devices like junkies.  I got nostalgic for when Kris Collins and I wandered those halls, debating nothing in particular, stalking some coed that I liked but was too chicken shit to talk to, or determining whether or not to blow off another poetry writing workshop.  It was also cool to see that white kids still like to grow dreadlocks in college, and play Frisbee or hacky sack.  Some things never change.

Next it was the William Pitt Student Union.  I got the same vibe walking into the Union as I did going into the Cathedral.  This smells familiar, this feels familiar, but in someway this is out of my reach.  My wife and I went down into the food court area.  Being a commuter to Pitt, I practically lived in that part of the Union, wasting my hours in between classes reading, pining over women, and pretending that I was Jack Kerouac (yeah, I wore flannel in the 90s but it wasn’t because of Seattle).  Again came the memories of me and Kris Collins hanging out.  I’m old enough to remember the union without the mall-like food court.  My wife and I wandered around watching the students, as we talked about our individual memories of the place.  My wife, being an out-of-state resident, spent more time over at the dorms, and her memories of the Union weren’t as heartwarming as mine.  I’m not quite sure she understood my feelings for it.  Of course, getting older, I’m nostalgic about everything now, so maybe she’s just tired of my old man lunacy.

The last thing we did was take a tour of Forbes Avenue.  Now I’ve covered this ground before, but I think it needs to be covered again so as to let the young folks know what they’re missing being such slaves to the corporate ideal.  Forbes Avenue in Oakland is a shell of its former glory.  My wife was just as sad to see what that celebrated stretch of Oakland has become as well as I have.  It was sort of a walking tour of what once was.  Neither of us could get over what had become of our beloved Beehive.  American Apparel and a T-Mobile store?  Really?  Thank Christ my folks had the good sense to buy me a copy of that Rick Sebak documentary on Oakland, just in case I ever really become nostalgic. After becoming more and more disgusted at the corporate sheen that had taken over our old playground, we headed back over toward campus.  We went to Posvar Hall, or the building us old fogies like to call, Forbes Quad.  We wandered around the place for a bit, as we had the other stops, catching glimpses of our past, our youth, where we could get them.

So I’m old.  And you’re old.  Or you’re getting old.  And one day we’ll be gone.  They’ll be other aging people wandering Forbes Avenue, wondering what in the hell happened to their old American Apparel store (doesn’t sound right does it).  And in truth, my favorite trip down memory lane was going by my wife’s old apartment on McKee Place.  I told her something on that walk that I’d never told her before, how when I came to pick her up for our first Valentine’s date together in 1998 (we’d been together four months by then), I stood outside her McKee Place apartment, looking up at her second floor bedroom window, watching as she stood in front of her mirror putting make-up on, before I rang the doorbell and she let me in.  I was young and in desperate love back then.  I still am, only feelings mature in the way we mature and grow older as well.  And if I’m getting older, and I’m starting to lose things here and there, or getting nostalgic in ways that I never had before, I’m at least happy to be getting older with someone like my wife, someone whom I can share the old times and the new times with, with as much joy, sadness, anger, verve, and wonder.

And if this all sounds sentimental to you, I got a story about a bar whore who fucked all of her boyfriend’s friends in one night, that I’m happy to share just as well.

John Grochalski is the author of The Noose Doesn’t Get Any Looser After You Punch Out and Glass City.  He currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.