A Summer Night in Pittsburgh

I’ve got an old college friend I only see every two or three years.  I like him a lot, and I actually feel like both of us talk pretty openly when we’re together.  There’s an immediate bond that the years and long silences haven’t eroded.  But we would never call or text each other just to check in, and we only ever get together if it’s convenient.  Probably we could have been much closer, but at this point I’m not sure our friendship would bear the weight of too much time together.  Now he looks me up when he’s in the Pittsburgh area, which is rarely, and I look him up when I’m in the Asheville area, which is occasionally.  Still, it’s always good to see him.  He has a keen memory, and he holds pieces of my story that I have lost.  He was my last college friend to get married—just five years ago at the age of fifty!  He rolled into town back in June with his wife and four-year-old son, and they stayed at this really great old mansion-hotel place on the Northside.  It’s called The Inn on the Mexican War Streets.

I love a nice deep porch with furniture and curtains—a porch that’s set up to function like an open-air room.  And this place has one heck of a porch.  My friend was here on a Sunday night and almost all the nearby restaurants were closed except a strange little bar that serves sandwiches and calls itself Leo. A Public House.  (I don’t know what the period in the bar’s name is about, and I don’t know if the A functions as an indefinite article or as an initial…) The public house was kind of seedy and kind of fun with a youngish urban clientele of the less fashionable variety, very much a genuine Pittsburgh hangout.  While I can’t recommend it for its fare, I can definitely vouch for its charming sort of devil-may-care atmosphere on the first floor of another old mansion.  We walked back to The Inn on the Mexican War Streets by way of the very Brooklynesque Beech Avenue, my favorite street in the city.

My friend’s wife had to take their son to bed, then he and I walked a bit around the city, which was cool and pleasant in the gathering dusk.  This friend and I used to hang out with each other whenever our closer friends were out on dates or whatever.  We would explore abandoned houses in the winter at night, or climb through the window onto the roof of the dorms, or go to the local community college and put No Smoking signs in the smoking lounges (this was the late 80s), and turn all the chairs to face the wrong direction in the classrooms.  After graduation we both went on to make a life for ourselves overseas, which is what adventurous 20-something’s were doing back in the 90s.  Now?  Now we get together for a few hours and talk about fatherhood, and marriage, and our philosophies of life, and our journeys thus far.  I should really make an effort to see him more often…and to spend more summer Sunday evenings walking around Pittsburgh.