A love letter to Baltimore
Note: Over the past few years I’ve frequently heard off-handed comments questioning the safety of Baltimore, often along the lines of “why would you go to school in a place like Baltimore?” I’m not romanticizing Baltimore’s problems, nor am I implying that these allegations are unfounded — it’s true that issues like crime and poverty pervade Baltimore and we must take action to eradicate them. Instead, I hope to counter the idea that a living breathing city like Baltimore can be reduced to the two-dimensional descriptions we absorb in our media and data. And if you are financially able, I urge you to support local Baltimore businesses in your everyday shopping: buylocalbaltimore.org.
I’m not sure exactly when you became home for me. I wish I could point to a specific point in time and say — that’s it. Instead, it happened more like one of those humid Maryland summer days when you just knew the rain was waiting to come down from the clouds… no, bargaining impatiently with the clouds to get to their destination, the ground, was more like it: In one moment, the sun would be out, bearing its heat over everything below. The next moment, pouring rain, making its way through the city streets like blood coursing through our veins. And that was my love for you: a love that unleashed itself in torrents from my heart and etched itself into the streets I walked, the food I ate, the people I met.
The calm before the storm. Before I knew you, I brought with me many jam-packed suitcases and the vaguest notion of the dangers of living in Baltimore. My parents and I hadn’t done too much research into the safety of living in the city — ironically, if we had, neither of us probably would have been that worried. But we hadn’t, so that apprehension colored my first few weeks with a certain fear of straying too far from the Hopkins Homewood campus. I remember making a wrong turn from the Recreation Center during one of the early orientation days, then worrying I had made a grave mistake and would be robbed.
Slowly, though, that perception began to shift. First, walking home from our computer science building one night, holding the door open for a visitor passing by. “It engenders gratitude, doesn’t it?” He said this to me, but he really was speaking to You as he marveled at the drooping leaves swaying in the wind, the vast expanse of our sky touching the faint outline of our cityscape.
And he was absolutely right.
Up until that point there were very few times in my life that I experienced a connection to the ground rooted underneath my feet. I’ve always been on the move: sometimes quite literally, like when my parents sent me across the world so my grandparents could take care of me; other times, it’s a reverie — embracing all the notions of what could be and what should be and what would be. Like a cloud, I’m not one to stay attached.
But this cloud wasn’t leaving and the storm was brewing. Why is the term “perfect storm” used with such negative connotation? If anything, everything leading up to the storm was marvelous. Cheering on toilet races down the streets of Hampden. Stopping in an ice cream shop commended for one of America’s best bathrooms, honorable mention. A class field trip to one of our world’s oldest food markets only thirty minutes away. Watching the trash wheel with a social media personality clean up the Inner Harbor.
The people too — you brought them into my life and they are unforgettable. As part of a Science Olympiad exercise, we gave students trash bags, paper clips and yarn and told them to make parachutes. They used the yarn and paper clips to sew pieces of the trash bags together. Just brilliant. I remember thinking in no alternate universe would I have come up with a solution like that. At the hospital, I listened to the stories of patients looking for jobs. The logo on my uniform said “Health Leads” but actually the patients were the leads and I was just playing a supporting role. People turning their lives around. People supporting families. People striving to be more.
I savor these memories because they are unequivocally Baltimore. Here is a place that overcomes hardships with creativity, resiliency, and love. Even from my childhood home, hundreds of miles away, I still root for the people behind those stories and think of all the stories that go unheard. For me, these were the people and places that led up to the perfect storm.
And after my four years, I knew I loved you and that you loved me back.
