Pittsburgh

Dear Daphne,

I grew up staring with pop-eyed adoration at a photograph hanging in my parents’ bathroom. You can tell when a photograph is old, because the colors change. Sometimes they fade, or turn brown or yellow, and shudder with a rippley sort of warp, like they’ve been stored in a hot house. This photograph was blue. Two indigo rivers converged at the point of an azure park, where a turquoise fountain spat frothy water like the skin on top of a pitcher of Berry Blue Kool-Aid. Rigid, navy buildings stood like sentinels around the grassy park. To my Texas-kid imagination, it was the mythical “big city” of my birth. Pittsburgh. I always knew I’d eventually go back.

My dad and I made the twenty-six hour drive from Houston to Pittsburgh in two days, listening to a mix tape my friend Scott made for the trip. I lost it sometime after arriving at college, and I can’t remember all the songs, but I’ll never forget listening to American Pie over and over again, hitting pause once in a while so Dad could explain the meaning behind the lyrics. He told me about the plane crash that killed Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and The Big Bopper that snow-stormy February night in 1959, and how, when everyone found out the next morning, that day became known as “the day the music died.” I never hear that song without thinking about that road trip with my dad, and when they played it at my wedding reception, I stood arm in arm with him, swaying with the music, both of us singing at the top of our voices.

I felt so alone when my dad left me at Carnegie Mellon. So many nights, I just wanted to go home. I kept telling myself that if I could make it to Christmas Break, finish my first semester, I didn’t have to go back. Sure, the leaves went Technicolor around October, and that was cool, walking to class, kicking up a flurry of crimson, copper, caramel. But my roommates were prettier than me, more sophisticated, more self-assured, just . . . more. I was their geeky pet virgin, trying too hard, always trying. Never quite succeeding at what they achieved so effortlessly. I dashed off a missive about college life, about being a lonely girl a long way from home, and e-mailed it to some friends. They e-mailed it to some friends, who e-mailed it to some friends, and soon I started to get e-mails from other lonely college kids, all over the world. I started to feel a little less isolated, stabbing away at my keyboard late at night, talking to a Johns Hopkins student, Dan, from Pittsburgh. Perhaps I’ll tell you about him when you’re older. He gave me my first (and as of today, my only) Terrible Towel and taught me how to love Pittsburgh.

Dan took me to the top of Mt. Washington, and showed me the view of the skyline through the eyes of a homesick young man who wanted nothing more than to live in the city he loved. He took me to the South Side, where we drank Iron City in a bar called McCann’s, even though we were just eighteen. We ate a basketful of greasy fries from the O, gorged ourselves on candy from a shop in Market Square. He taught me about Pittsburghese, and about Myron Cope, and about the Steelers. And about One for the Thumb.

The Steelers broke my heart for the first time in Super Bowl XXX. I sat in cross-legged, lip-chewing anticipation in a TV room in Mudge House, alone, clutching my Terrible Towel in sweating fists. We were halfway through the third quarter, trailing 13-7 when Larry Brown intercepted a Neil O’Donnell pass that wasn’t even close to the nearest Steelers receiver, and everything went downhill from there. The Steelers lost, 27-17. We didn’t get another shot at a ring until 2006.

It was worth the wait, because that year, we won. It had been a disappointing season, to say the least. We finished the regular season with an 11-5 record, and I didn’t think we had a snowball’s chance in hell of making it through our first playoff game. Every time we won and advanced to the next round, I walked around all the next day dumbfounded, like someone had hit me in the head with a shovel and I was just getting around to wondering why it hurt. On Super Bowl Sunday, your dad and I watched the first half of the game at home, not expecting much. But by halftime, when it looked like we might actually pull this off, we decided to relocate to the South Side. We drank and screamed our way through the second half, and when the clock wound down, we launched ourselves out the front door of the Hkan and ran howling into East Carson Street. Along with half the city. Snow had begun to fall about halfway through the fourth quarter, and thousands of Steelers fans, drunk on Yuengling and long-sought vindication, slipped and slid their way down the asphalt, waving Terrible Towels in a cacophony of black and gold exuberance.

Then, two years later, we did it again. And four months after that, the Penguins beat Detroit on their ice to end the NHL playoffs. When you get older and people ask you when you were born, we hope you’ll tell them with lots of Pittsburgh pride, “I was born in 2009, the year Pittsburgh won the Super Bowl AND the Stanley Cup.” We especially encourage you to say this to people from Arizona and Detroit. Or really, to anyone who will listen.

The way I see it, Pittsburgh gave me everything I have today. Would I be me if I’d been conceived on another day, in another city? Or would I have been some other girl (or boy?!?) with slightly different features or a different color hair? If my parents hadn’t had that old photograph of Pittsburgh hanging on the bathroom wall, I probably wouldn’t have even thought about Carnegie Mellon when it was time to choose a college. And without Carnegie Mellon, I would never have found the Kappa Delta Rho house (a whole other set of stories that I’ll leave to your father), or met some of the best friends I’ve ever had. Most importantly, I never would have met your Dad. And without him, there can’t really be a you, can there? Without Pittsburgh, none of us would be here. So love your city as much we do, for giving us our life together.

Love,
Mom